Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast · Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall

Fear Less (with Special Guest Tracy K. Smith)

November 17, 2025·1 hr 19 min·5 clips

Smith reads a new poem that begins, “Trees are heirs of silence,” and turns her children into “tall saplings.”

The room starts loose and loud. James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith bring on Tracy K. Smith after a saucy first-timer warning, and the interview slowly finds its hush. The brag list earns its space: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator, librettist, former United States Poet Laureate, with Ordinary Light and To Free the Captives hovering nearby. Then the talk turns inward. Smith connects poems to the stubborn work of keeping imagination alive when systems try to narrow what people value. Revolution begins inside, she says. It does not need spectacle. It starts with wanting life, feeling worth, and moving toward others through love, beauty, and attention. The point lands because nobody sands it smooth. The conversation keeps sliding from craft into survival, which is where this show likes poetry best: on the tongue, in the nerves, nowhere near a glass case. Joy Harjo enters with force. A revision in She Has Some Horses removes an explicit account of sexual violence but leaves prayer in place, and the change makes the hosts and guest hear the poem differently. The loss is complicated. Smith grieves what disappeared because the earlier version had helped her read, teach, and survive the poem's brutal knowledge. Then she turns the thought over again. Maybe the missing violence still leans on the poem, present through absence, asking what it means for horses, friends, or enemies to come near a bed and pray. Nobody cleans that up for comfort. The charge sits in the gap between what a poem once said, what it now withholds, and what a reader needs from both. By the end, the episode gets bookish again. Fearless sends them toward Middlemarch and Proust, while the hosts get half-giddy about sentences, recommendations, and the old claim that art helps keep people alive.

As heard by us

A thoughtful interview about Fear Less, revision, and how poems keep imagination awake.

Tracy K. Smith appears on Breaking Form in a careful conversation that uses Fear Less to think through fear, beauty, imagination, and the decision to keep moving toward life.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a poetry interview that moves from one revised line to fear, beauty, and queer life.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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