“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” asked the Proust Questionnaire. “Living in fear,” answered David Bowie.

The most menacing word of the three is the smallest, for fear really is something we live inside, not with — a cage, a tomb, a small dark room that comes to eclipse the world as the hand quivers outside the pocket in which the key is kept. The best key I know to the prison of fear is curiosity, and the most generous form of curiosity I know is poetry.

An inquiry, an invocation, an invitation, poetry opens a side door to consciousness, bypassing our habitual barricades of thought and feeling, allowing us to enter into the unknowns of what it is like to be someone other than ourselves, into the desolate haunts of our own interior that words have not yet reached. Poetry is a kind of prayer: for presence, for understanding, for seeing the world more closely in order to cherish it more deeply. To name, to understand, to dignify and hold — these are the gifts of poetry, and these too are the antidotes to just about every form of fear.

In Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (public library), poet extraordinaire and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith offers what is essentially a field guide to loving life more, anchored in the recognition that “the opposite of love is not hatred or rancor but fear” and in a passionate insistence on “how important is it — how critical — to understand there is and has always been, for each of us, a wilderness within.”

She writes:

Vulnerability, uncertainty, and even desperation are not only signs of life, but tools for moving forward toward courage, hope, and purpose.

[…]

It is curiosity, not foreknowledge, that leads a reader (and a poet, and a poem) beyond the limits of habitual understanding — questions, rather than answers, being the building blocks of insight. Questions, which spring from the unconscious mind’s ability to remember, intuit, and speculate (Was he desperate? Alone? Did he do it out of grief?), are capable of bridging distances of time, place, allegiance, belief, and any other supposed border used to separate people from one another. Moreover, to form a question is an active creative stance, a way of announcing: I’m paying attention! I’m ready to observe, remember, intuit! Curiosity is, at heart, courage; readiness not for a fixed or foretold outcome, but rather a type of uncharted encounter — an adventure.

Poetry’s essential “de-emphasizing of answers and certainty” invites “a productive form of introspection,” the recompense of which is the wonderful capacity for self-surprise that keeps us from ossifying into a template of ourselves:

We surprise ourselves. We defy pat summary. Poetry is an art form through which we might better recognize and appreciate the circumstances under which you and I remain — even to ourselves — a kind of mystery… Occasional barriers to certainty and resolution in a poem and in a life are an invitation to exercise different faculties of discernment and perception.

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In life, when mystery, doubt, and quiet fear rear up, our habit is to seek the assurance of answers, strategies, expert advice. We hedge our bets, make contingency plans, cleave to platitudes. We do what it takes to stay materially and emotionally afloat. But poetry is a different kind of enterprise, one engaged with the deep reserves of wisdom, memory, and emotional wherewithal every one of us possesses. And so rather than neatening up a state of quandary or denying inevitability, a poem might seek to operate from within these very circumstances.

These very circumstances are also what that most often incite fear. In making them something to be “pondered, grappled with, marveled at,” poetry offers a mighty antidote to that internal flinch at the unknown. A generation after Audre Lorde insisted that poetry affords us a kind of intimacy with ourselves by which “those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us,” Smith writes:

Fear stuns, blurs out our options, convinces us it is better to fall silent and still, to consent, to go along and trust that eventually everything will feel normal again. Fear, running its course long enough, convinces us that the moral disequilibrium in which we find ourselves is normalcy. Fear dissuades us from believing our bodies, our hearts, our deepest memories. Fear is an isolating, alienating technology. At its most dangerous, fear keeps us from facing or even fully contemplating what, for our own survival, we must endeavor to change.

But a poem can mitigate fear by facilitating a form of dialogue with it. A poem might ask its author, What wakes you up in the middle of the night? What do you cower from? And when the poet answers, the poem will likely brighten, inviting: Sit down here in this chair where you are perfectly safe. Now, let’s approach it together.

Fear, Smith observes, often stems from the “fissure widening between us and ourselves,” the remedy for which is attention, is awareness, is an active curiosity about what dwells in that gaping abyss — a curiosity that begins with finding the words to name what we feel, to hold what we don’t want to feel. She writes:

Our relationship to language has great bearing upon our capacity to be wide awake and at home both in the imperfect world and in the dimensions of our full selves. Our ability to ask and grapple with difficult questions. Our willingness to accept uncertainty, to withstand discomfort. The curiosity with which we approach another person’s perspective. These things fortify us to recognize and celebrate the complex feelings to which we and others are susceptible. And while engaging with poetry isn’t the only way to strengthen our powers of listening and responding, asking and offering, poems are remarkable in their ability to augment our stamina for such tasks. Beyond literature, beyond works of art, poems are acts of attention. Can we attend more rigorously, more compassionately to ourselves and others?

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To create new patterns of language, as poems and poets exist to do, is to alter or correct course on our story of reality. To move from a state of fear to one of understanding, or from the sense that you are small and bound by the circumstances in your life to an acknowledgement that you are large and your purpose eternal — that kind of transformation begins in language, in talking and listening to yourself, to others, to a voice on a page. Language is the engine for our sense of the possible, and poetry fosters a productive impatience with the notion that things as they are cannot or must not be made to change.

In the remainder of Fear Less, Smith offers a guided tour of some of her favorite poems — among them treasures by Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Hayden, Robert Frost, Mark Doty, and Joy Harjo — and a glimpse of her own process to explore the mastery of craftsmanship behind the mystery of poetry’s singular power. Couple it with Audre Lorde on poetry as an instrument of change and feeling as an antidote to fear, then revisit this luminous animation of Smith’s masterpiece “My God, It’s Full of Stars.”