When Tracy K. Smith became U.S. poet laureate in 2017, she faced a country that felt fractured beyond repair. The narrative was everywhere: we were too divided, too far apart, too locked into our own corners. Smith decided to test whether that story was actually true.
She launched "American Conversations," a national project built on a simple premise: gather people in a room, read poems aloud, and listen to what they notice. No agenda. No lesson plan. Just words and attention.
For two years, Smith traveled to public libraries in Kentucky, community centers in South Carolina, detention centers, veterans homes, churches, retirement homes, and theaters across the country. She watched what happened when people slowed down enough to actually hear each other.
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Start Your News DetoxA nine-year-old girl in Kentucky asked when Smith first realized she had stories worth telling. A group of Black adults in South Carolina talked about how poetry had let them reclaim something they'd lost as students. A man in Wyoming described how a poem acts like a filter—each person pours it through their own life and catches something different on the other side.
Even in settings where words seemed to fail, poetry reached people. In a veterans home where many residents had advanced Alzheimer's and couldn't speak, Smith watched their bodies respond—moans, movements, the unmistakable signs of deep engagement. The poems got through.
What Smith discovered across these hundreds of conversations was that the "unmendable divide" narrative wasn't actually true. People didn't need to agree. They needed to be heard, and to hear others. Poetry created the space for that—not by erasing difference, but by insisting that difference doesn't erase shared humanity.
Smith talks about this in terms of a difficult idea: that your life should matter to me as much as my own life matters to me. Not just intellectually, but actually. Poetry, she found, could teach us that—if we let it. It requires slowing down. Listening generously. Showing up vulnerable. But the conversations she witnessed across America suggested that people were hungry for exactly that.
The project didn't solve America's divisions. It didn't need to. What it did was prove, again and again, in libraries and detention centers and living rooms, that the fracture wasn't as total as the loudest voices insisted. Connection was still possible. It just required someone to read a poem aloud and ask: what did you notice.
