Your Art is a Tool and Beauty is an Emergency
Maggie Smith on creating during upheaval, how not to kill pleasure, and the emergency of a sunrise.
When an idea arrives, says poet and memoirist Maggie Smith, “I feel its small tapping. But I feel it in the mind, which is everywhere.” Maggie’s spirit and generosity also range everywhere, as I discovered in our warm and ambling conversation. Maggie is the author of eight books and the wonderful Substack
. Her newest book, Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, distills her best advice for writers of all stripes. It’s a terrific resource for any creativity nerd—it helped me think through some gnarly questions in my own work! Here we chat about the emergency that is beauty, the necessity of pleasure, and creating a hospitable environment for our own spirits.Jess: Maggie, I have a list of themes for us to cover! Art in Dark Times, Beauty, Process, the Midwest, Being an Artist, and Mystery.
Maggie: Yes, please—I could go to a happy hour any day of the week and talk about all those things and would be so happy.
Let's start with art's role right now. I was having this conversation with the writer and creative coach Shelly Oria. She said that in the first 48 hours after the election, her clients were in shock, a fugue state. But after that, people were reporting this sense of creative urgency. Their work suddenly felt really alive and important to them. Of course, this was before the inauguration, and everything that’s happened since. What about you—what's going on creatively with you right now?
You know, I work from home. This is what I do every day: my kids go to school and I write. But I'm not writing eight hours a day. I'm doing emails and putting laundry in the dryer and walking the dog and having coffee with someone who wants to pick my brain. I mean, I love a pastry. If I really want to write, I go to a cabin in the woods and I've been doing that for 21 years, the same place. And if I go there for three days, I can write an insane amount of material. It's like turning on a faucet.
Somehow in the past month, I've been tapping into that kind of energy in my house. I wrote a poem sitting in a camp chair in an elementary school gym, while my son had soccer footwork drills for an hour, while listening to the new Bad Bunny record in my AirPods. Not exactly conditions for making art. And this poem just came out fully formed.
When you're pregnant, you have that nesting impulse—suddenly you are painting every room, preparing for this new life to come into your house. I wonder if there's something analogous going on with the chaos people are feeling. We want to set the table for something different, prepare for something different.
You're creating a nest for your own spirit, your own consciousness.
Yes. This country feels inhospitable right now. How can we, in communities, and in our own spaces as artists, create hospitality for ourselves and for the creative work to come through?
This is such a nurturing image! The analogy that comes to mind for me is an immune response. When your body is being attacked, everything heats up-- you get a fever and all of this activity because you're preparing for a battle.
Or water boiling, right? There's a sense of urgency—that's the core.
Yes, exactly. I've been rereading Czeslaw Milosz, one of my favorite poets, who really wrestled with the question "What is poetry for?" His wonderful poem "Dedication" asks, "What is poetry that does not save nations or people?" It begins, "You who I could not save, listen to me."
I just got goosebumps.
What do you see as the function of art in a time like this? Just a small question, Maggie.
I'm not an ACLU lawyer. I'm not a social worker. I am not bandaging wounds. A poem is not a tourniquet. A poem is not HIV medication. What can paralyze us in these moments is feeling like what we do doesn't matter because it can't save-- "You who I could not save." But I think it can. It's not a tool in the way that we think of tools. And yet poems do transform us. You come across a piece of writing or or a song, and even if it just gets you through the next three hours, that's not nothing.
All times are harrowing. And so all art is being produced in harrowing times.
You know, all times are difficult. If it wasn't difficult for me, it was very difficult for someone else. The difficulty is at all or most of our doors right now, but all times are harrowing. And so all art is being produced in harrowing times. I'm thinking about Brecht: "In the dark times, will there be singing? Yes, there will be singing about the dark times."
I saw Adrienne Rich speak on September 12th, 2001—I'm writing an essay about this right now. It was a packed auditorium. A thousand people showed up to hear her. She read "An Atlas of a Difficult World" from beginning to end. People were just in shock. There was no tool for us. And the only person we wanted to hear from was a poet.
So perhaps a poem is a kind of tool, not in the way that a hammer or a tourniquet is a tool. But when situations arrive for which there is no tool, poetry is there. The tool that stands in when there is no tool.
I think poetry does the job of saying the unsayable. Songs can do this too, but it's not a fair fight because songs have melody—this other thing that strums our whole bodies and lifts us up. Poetry has to exist just on the page and be that powerful without instrumentation.
When we encounter a poem that is powerful, we are not the same when we leave it. The next time you take a walk, you are seeing the world through the lens of that poem. You are experiencing your relationship through that poem, reading the news through that poem, parenting your child through that poem.
I agree with you—we mainline music directly into our limbic system, while a poem has to create its own melody, out of language. It's like the difference between playing a piano and playing a violin. When you play a piano, the tone exists already, but when you play violin, you have to create the tone yourself.
I love this metaphor!
You talk about the work existing a little bit "outside" of us—we don't possess it, but we're co-creators with it. We have to somehow create the nest you were describing, an environment so it feels welcome.
The image for me is always a stand of trees and an open field. You see a few deer coming out into the open and they're very timid. Because once they leave the shelter of forest, they're vulnerable.
My relationship to my poems is standing in the open field, holding out my open palm, trying to coax these creatures out of the trees and not spook them back in. And how do we spook art away from us? With ego. Thinking we know what we're doing-- wrapping our white-knuckled fists around a thing and trying to get it to do what we think it wants to do, rather than instead of staying open and letting it come through us.
I saw the great Lucille Clifton speak 20 years ago. She said you can't chase after a poem because, "It is the nature of what is being pursued to run away." Isn't that wonderful?
I wonder if this is connected to the fact that sometimes our best ideas come when we're doing something other than writing, like walking?
I’m no neuroscientist, but my very unscientific hunch is that when part of your brain is occupied with something menial, other parts kick into gear. Maybe it’s a bit like “When the cat’s away, the mice will play"? Part of your thinking is otherwise occupied, and play happens in the space that opens up. This is certainly true for me, because I also have a lot of my best and clearest ideas when washing dishes, showering, folding laundry, running on the treadmill.
It's interesting—these ideas arrive mysteriously, and yet we expect artists to be able to fully explicate their work. How much of your poetry is mysterious even to you?
Most of it. I typically work longhand in a notebook or on a legal pad, and I just sort of let as much come through as possible. Usually it's some phrase or image, and then that associatively leads me to something else. I'm letting the poem drag me down this rabbit hole. Without knowing where I am being taken, I am almost always led someplace fruitful and unexpected. The craft is when you have that big mess and then you have to be selective: "Okay, of all of this, which looks insane, what's the heart? What is worth pursuing?"
I said, “Tell your teacher the poem means the poem.”
When you get to the end of this process, are there still parts of the poem you don't fully understand?
Sure. So many young people want to know what poems mean-- that's what they're asked to write essays on, right? If you ask me what a poem of mine means, I would have no idea how to tell you. I can tell you what its concerns are, or what the speaker is grappling with. But I couldn't give you a synopsis.
My daughter came home from school and was like, "We had to say what these poems mean." I said, "Tell your teacher the poem means the poem." Our job is not to extract some sort of fortune cookie slip from it. You've killed the thing once you've done that.
It's funny—we would never ask someone, "What does a Beethoven sonata mean?"
It actually kills the pleasure of reading poetry. So many people were taught poetry was a riddle they had to solve, and they were not smart enough to know what the writer was trying to say.
The reality is the poet probably couldn't tell you that answer that's supposed to be on that test. What if we approached poetry from the perspective of: What do you notice? How does it make you feel? What does it make you want to go do? Some poems make you want to take a walk. Some make you want to call a friend.
Maybe this is why music is so much more universal than poetry, because no one feels like they're not smart enough for a song. It's not some kind of enigmatic koan that you have to decode, or something you could fail at. But people are told they could fail at a poem!
Yes. You could just fail poetry in general.
I wonder, Maggie, if part of the challenge is that poetry has become more of a written experience for so many people. That's how people encounter it in school. Of course, it began as music.
Imagine being a student in a room where there is a live poetry reading or a slam or poetry being played in conjunction with music. Maybe you're asked to jot down some notes while you listen. "How did it make you feel? What words or phrases jumped out to you?" That's a hospitable experience.
Yes. And speaking of kids, I'm so moved by you talking to your kids about "beauty emergencies." When I read that, I thought, "Of course! Why couldn't an emergency could be a good thing?" So I looked up the etymology. "Emergency" comes from "e" and "mergere," which means "to come out of sinking." To rescue something from sinking.
That's very cool.
How did you start to think that beauty could be an emergency?
If you call something an emergency, people come running. If you just say, "Sunrise!" nobody's going to hop out of bed or throw down their toothbrush. I had to find a word that meant, "Come quickly. I'm not messing around." And I love now thinking about it as a kind of rising up-- there's a buoyancy to that, which is what we need. Now my kids will yell, "Beauty emergency!" It's the pink sunrise coming up behind the house, or it's the neighborhood albino squirrel, or a cloud in a specific shape. It's not going to last. You really do have to run to see it.
I'm really interested in your thoughts on the relationship between being an artist and being a mother. This feels urgent to me because my husband and I are hoping to adopt a baby. What do you think people don't talk about enough, in terms of how one affects the other?
We talk a lot about how logistically challenging it is to parent and create—and, yes, that’s true. Having infants or small children at home when you’re trying to make any kind of art is a tricky thing. It’s hard to have the sustained concentration and uninterrupted time you need to do a deep dive.
What I wish we talked more about, as a way of encouraging new or prospective parents, is how inspiring parenting can be, too. What I may have lost in time I have more than made up for in inspiration. Seeing my children see the world—and seeing it through their lens—has given me many, many poems.
Thank you. I also want to thank you because your book helped me personally. I'm continuing my poetry journey after years in journalism and nonfiction, and your book really helped me with some poetry craft elements. For example, I always find titles kind of annoying. I'm like, "I already did the hard work of writing the poem, now I have to come up with a title, too?"
Oh, I hear you. I love that you're back to poetry. When I had my daughter, I just couldn't cut through the fog to write poems. But the thing is, they're always there. These tools are portable.
Your perspective that titles could be merely competent or could elevate the poem was so helpful! I realized if the poem is fairly linear and easy to follow, I can dial down the specificity in the title. If the poem is a little bit mysterious, maybe I dial up the title's specificity.
I love that you could sort of be granular and really grounded in one, and then give yourself the freedom to be have a little bit more mystery in the other.
Your teacher Stanley Plumly taught you that "the poem begins in the middle and ends in the middle, only later." How does this apply to your work?
I think this applies to everyone’s work! A fairy tale that opens “Once upon a time” opens in the middle of that amorphous timeframe. There is no way to capture a true beginning, and when is anything really over? Any piece of writing is like a segment of film cut from a long strip.
My mind is in conversation with their mind.
I love that. I also appreciated what you said about poetic diction—word choice— being elevated just a little above everyday speech. What about the case when diction is very "everyday," but the syntax is elevated? I'm thinking of someone like Louise Glück, who uses very basic language, but the arrangement of words elevates the poem from normal speech. She's one of my favorite poets, but her poems are a little having ice dropped down the back of your shirt.
Yes, there's a coolness and a kind of remove, even though the vocabulary might not be a ton of ten-cent words.
I feel most attached to poems where I can sense a human being behind them. It can be cool, it can be erudite, it can be messy, it can be chaotic. There are different human energies that can come through, and sometimes more than one in a single poem. I actually really love when writers toggle in and out of different registers, when I get slang in a poem, or dialect. That's how most of us talk-- we don't stay in a single register when we're speaking to other people. I feel most attached to work when there is a human spirit operating behind the language. It makes me feel I'm in conversation with someone else. My mind is in conversation with their mind.
One magical thing about great poetry is it is so of a specific consciousness. A Louise Glück poem is a very specific embodied consciousness, versus, say, a Milosz poem. I think that's why poetry will be the last thing that AI gets to.
From my cold dead hands!
It's so specific and human—and also so vulnerable! I struggle with what Brené Brown says about vulnerability: that it's something we share with people who have earned the right to see that part of us. I'm troubled by this because it's just not true for artists—we don't get to vet anyone before being very vulnerable.
It's one thing to write—that's vulnerable enough. It's a totally different level of vulnerability to share what you've made. When I first started writing poems in high school, I used to put them in a manila folder in my locker. I would give the combination to a few trusted friends. Then I would get the folder and see their little notes-- "I like this part" or "That totally happened to me."
At 15 or 16, that was a big deal. Even in my twenties, I could barely order a pizza. I didn't want to talk to strangers on the phone. It has taken me a long time to get to the point where I can just write something and send it out into the world thinking, "How people receive the thing I've made is none of my business." Some people will love it, some people will hate it. Some people won't know it exists. Some people will be very "meh" about it.
You have to cultivate the ability to be mostly totally unaffected by what other people think.
By the positives too! Putting too much stock into praise makes you complacent. Putting too much stock into criticism will make you stop. Just getting back to work and listening to that inner voice where the work comes from, I think, is the key.
The End of Bias: A Beginning, my book about how real people and communities become measurably less biased, is now out in paperback.
What a fantastic and insightful conversation. Thanks for sharing it with us!
I loved chatting with you, Jess! Thanks so much.