Is Polarization a Language Problem? | Tracy K. Smith | TEDxNewEngland

0:02 [music]

0:13 I am worried about our national vocabulary.

0:20 I'm worried about our way of speaking and thinking,

0:26 which often begins with an idealized us,

0:31 and then moves swiftly to define and discredit a rigidly conceived them.

0:40 Language has gone from being a bridge

0:44 to being a barricade separating us from one another.

0:48 Words that exacerbate the differences between us have been tasked

0:53 with sorting us into camps and activating our knee-jerk outrage and mistrust.

1:01 To a certain extent,

1:03 this is even true of the ways we sometimes describe ourselves.

1:09 Are you easygoing or difficult?

1:13 Scattered or controlling?

1:18 And if you settle for short hands like these, how

1:22 many of your actual needs and capacities are you denying,

1:28 downplaying, or joking away?

1:32 How about the people in your midst?

1:35 Are they hardworking or needy?

1:39 Resourceful or shady?

1:43 And what do labels like these encourage us to think, say, do, and refuse to do?

1:55 But if our habits in language have helped acclimate

2:00 us to a national vocabulary of fear and division,

2:06 and by extension, a climate of toxic and sometimes lethal disregard,

2:14 perhaps it stands to reason that changing our way of hearing

2:19 and using language can help play a role in transcending our current state.

2:26 So, this is where I stand before you and say that poetry,

2:34 an art form some of you may have been

2:36 encouraged to mistrust or to write off as overly niche,

2:42 is actually a very practical tool

2:45 for overcoming an increasing threat to our future,

2:50 the weapon of vague, inaccurate, and misleading language.

2:57 Feeling and responding to the effects of a poem, any poem,

3:03 is one way of pushing back against forms

3:07 of oversimplification and erasure that reduce us to types,

3:14 numbers, obstacles, and targets.

3:19 I don't say this because I think there's only one way of reading a poem,

3:24 nor because I believe that poems can or should feed us our values and opinions,

3:32 but rather because poetry rewards our desire for honesty,

3:38 and it authorizes us to insist upon

3:41 language adequate to our actual depth and complexity.

3:48 This is a theory that emerges from my experience

3:51 as Poet Laureate of the United States.

3:55 During that time, I was determined to push back

3:59 against the narrative of America as a divided nation,

4:05 the narrative that says people in the rural heartland

4:08 have nothing in common with those in urban centers,

4:13 and that differences in race, class, religion,

4:18 and citizenship status have carved us into a puzzle

4:23 that will never be pieced back together.

4:27 I also wanted to test out my own hope that Americans of all

4:31 backgrounds might have something quietly urgent

4:36 and humanizing to offer one another,

4:39 if only we could turn down the volume on all the many

4:43 sources seeking to sell us on the notion of an unmendable divide,

4:50 to hook us on a product, which is strife.

4:56 In the laureateship, I visited small towns from Alaska to Louisiana.

5:02 And in each of these places,

5:04 I would find myself gathering with a roomful of strangers

5:08 to read poems aloud together and talk about what we noticed,

5:14 remembered, wondered, and felt.

5:18 Simply and quietly, we found our way to a counter narrative

5:24 of careful listening and mutual us of the things that we share,

5:32 while also highlighting the differences between us,

5:36 advocating implicitly for the validity of our differing perspectives.

5:42 This is why it makes perfect sense to me that we can change

5:45 our relationship to language and to reality itself by spending time with poems.

5:55 Poetry counteracts the effects of everyday language,

6:00 which often placates us with the notion that nothing much is happening,

6:06 or else shocks us into passivity by blowing things out of proportion.

6:12 Poems pull you into your body,

6:16 allowing you to see, hear, and feel things for yourself.

6:22 They bridge the distance between me and my worry,

6:26 my overwhelm, or my joy, and you,

6:31 way over there, in what may seem at first to be a totally different reality.

6:38 Poems even bridge the kinds of distances

6:41 that we don't often tend to acknowledge,

6:44 like the distance between who we are and who we think we are,

6:50 or between how we feel and how we might one day come or allow ourselves to feel.

7:01 This is a poem by the late American poet Jack Gilbert,

7:06 which forges a unique vocabulary for the experience of grief.

7:16 Michiko dead.

7:20 He manages like somebody carrying a box that is too heavy.

7:28 First, with his arms underneath.

7:32 When their strength gives out, he moves his hands forward,

7:37 hooking them on the corners, pulling the weight against his chest.

7:44 He moves his thumbs slightly when the fingers begin to tire,

7:50 and it makes different muscles take over.

7:54 Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder until the blood drains

8:01 out of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box, and the arm goes numb.

8:09 But now the man can hold underneath again,

8:14 so that he can go on without ever putting the box down.

8:24 The man in Gilbert's poem, a widower, isn't weeping or wailing.

8:31 He's not in shock or denial.

8:34 Even if he is, those terms are too familiar and automatic,

8:40 too depleted of fresh life force to get

8:43 to the heart of this man's unique experience of loss.

8:48 The poem's central metaphor, which likens one thing,

8:53 grief, to another, schlepping a heavy box,

8:57 reminds us that in the heights and the depths of extreme emotion,

9:03 the words normally tasked with describing these feelings don't cut it.

9:08 And so the poem sidesteps our usual vocabulary for loss,

9:13 resorting instead to images that activate our bodily

9:17 senses and our sense of experiential memory,

9:22 drawing us into what feels like active participation

9:26 in the feelings and the determination the poem describes.

9:31 Michiko dead puts another person's burden in your hands.

9:36 A different poem might give you access

9:39 to someone else's questions or regrets or bliss.

9:44 Poems shake us out of the fixed terms with which

9:50 we have essentially been trained to defend ourselves against one another.

9:56 They assure us that, no matter who you and I believe ourselves to be,

10:02 I can go so far as to corroborate a piece of your story,

10:07 and you can do the same for me.

10:10 The language of poetry isn't so much a particular

10:13 vocabulary as it is a behavior in language and thought.

10:19 An insistence that, in order to observe and reflect,

10:25 we must call upon our own reserves of memory,

10:30 sensory awareness, and imagination,

10:33 and a belief that nothing is pat, nothing is fixed,

10:39 things change and feelings drift into oncoming lanes,

10:44 which is why, in other poems on the very same topic,

10:47 the poet Jack Gilbert goes on to describe grief in very different ways.

10:53 Because we need a wide and living field of language,

10:57 as opposed to a narrow, fixed one,

11:00 in order to describe and understand ourselves and others,

11:06 let alone to name or make imaginable our hopes for the future.

11:14 So, I opened by talking about a facet of our shared political reality.

11:20 And why am I not still talking about politics?

11:25 Why is poetry, of all things, relevant to the topic of polarization?

11:33 Another version of this question,

11:35 which poets are often asked, is does poetry matter?

11:45 But, why not ask does imagination matter?

11:50 How about patience?

11:53 Courage?

11:55 Vulnerability?

11:57 Hope?

11:58 And awe?

12:01 Do we value these traits?

12:03 Do we prize a world in which they exist?

12:09 Poetry matters so much that I have come

12:13 to imagine that the question itself, does poetry matter,

12:18 must actually be a ploy intended to swindle us out

12:23 of the innate human capacities from which this age-old art form emerges.

12:31 Because, to care about poetry is

12:35 to listen in earnest to another person's testimony,

12:42 and to attend to a host of faculties that equip you

12:47 to consider yourself alongside and in light of equally worthy others.

12:57 I believe we have a responsibility not just to our own inner circle,

13:03 but to the world of strangers with whom we share this planet.

13:08 Like it or not, the things that I do

13:11 or refuse to do eventually ripple out to you, and the reverse is also true.

13:20 And so, I would like to invite you to imagine that the solution to our crisis

13:27 of division has much to do with challenging

13:32 ourselves to listen better to one another,

13:37 and to insist upon an exchange of terms worthy of our genuine complexity.

13:45 Listening together and listening to one another means that, inevitably,

13:51 things will strike me differently than they strike you, and that's okay.

13:56 In fact, that is the point.

13:59 Poetry is a tool for becoming better and better

14:05 at approaching ourselves and others in the fullness of our humanity.

14:11 Every line and image that speaks to you in a poem,

14:16 every detail that startles you into a fuller degree of attention,

14:21 reinvigorates your relationship not just to language,

14:26 but to the world of people, animals, and the environment.

14:31 Images and metaphors, these seemingly tiny literary operations,

14:38 are actually fodder for a radical empathy and a more

14:42 courageous commitment to the wider cultures that we participate in.

14:50 I'd like to close with one of my own poems, written as a way of bearing witness

14:55 to this current moment of division and strive.

15:00 More than an expression of what I feel,

15:04 the poem is an attempt to imagine the world and my place in it differently.

15:17 An old story.

15:22 We were made to understand it would be terrible.

15:31 Every small want, every niggling urge,

15:37 every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind,

15:45 livid, bland, and ravaged like a rageful dream.

15:53 The worst in us having taken over and broken the rest utterly down.

16:06 A long age past, when at last we knew how little would survive us,

16:18 how little we had mended or built that was not now gone.

16:27 Something large and old awoke,

16:33 and then our singing brought on a different manner of weather.

16:40 Then, animals, long believed gone, crept down from trees.

16:47 We took new stock of one another.

16:54 We wept to be reminded of such color.

17:05 Close your eyes.

17:08 How do you see the world?

17:12 How do you feel within it?

17:16 Don't just answer those questions the way you always do.

17:21 Choose different nouns and verbs, ones that seem to put you down on the ground

17:29 in a place you know or one you need to know.

17:35 Linger there, paying better attention than is usually required of you.

17:46 Now you're thinking like a poem.

17:50 Open your eyes, but keep going down that path.

17:56 Gradually, you may find that you've moved beyond a view of the world

18:02 as it is and toward a vision of the world as it might one day,

18:10 with courage and love, become.

18:17 Thank you.

18:20 [applause]