Before we get to the show today, I want to tell you about a journalist and podcaster I deeply

respect and enjoy Dan Harris. He hosts the podcast 10% happier, which is a program with a guiding

philosophy that happiness is a skill you can learn and Dan's personal odyssey to pursuing

transformation for himself and others came by way of a panic attack on national television.

He talks to scientists and meditation teachers and the occasional celebrity on subjects like

productivity, anxiety, enlightenment, psychedelics, and relationships. Listen to 10% happier with

Dan Harris wherever you listen to podcasts. Support for on being with Christa Tippett comes from

the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual

solutions to society's toughest problems. Learn more at Fetzer.org.

There's an evocative phrase that recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing. The phrase is

in the marrow of our bones. This to me is an example of how words can carry almost encrypted wisdom.

In this case, the truth that memory and emotion lodge in us physically and words and phrases

have carried this insight forward in time long before we had the science to understand it.

And I've been following Clint Smith for a few years first through his wonderful book How the

Word Is Past. I thought I would speak with him about the physicality of his approach in that book

to know and grapple with and beyond the American history of slavery. But as I delved into the fullness

of his work, I found that he also, and I would say first and foremost, is a poet and that he's had

many life chapters that have been kind of real world laboratories for him to investigate the

entanglement between language and the intelligence of the body and the related entanglement between

history and place. Laboratories like a high school classroom, teaching in prison to people

facing life without parole and pilgrimage to historical monuments. In a revelatory way through

all of this, I find Clint Smith eliminating why poetry helps us get into our bodies and the

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