The New Yorker: Poetry

Rachel Eliza Griffiths joins Kevin Young to discuss "Rain Light" by W.S. Merwin, and her own poem "Heart of Darkness." Griffiths is a poet and artist who has received fellowships from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Cave Canem Foundation, and Yaddo, among others. Her latest book is "Lighting the Shadow."

Craig Morgan Teicher joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Forrest Gander’s poem “Son” and his own poem, also titled “Son.” Teicher is a poet and critic whose collection "The Trembling Answers" received the 2018 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.  His latest book is "We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress."

Deborah Landau joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Anne Sexton's poem "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman" and her own poem "Solitaire." Landau's poetry collections include “The Uses of the Body” and “The Last Usable Hour,” both Lannan Literary Selections; the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry, she directs the creative writing program at New York University.

Kaveh Akbar joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Ellen Bryant Voigt’s poem "Groundhog" and his own poem "What Use is Knowing Anything If No One Is Around". Akbar is the author of the poetry collection “Calling a Wolf a Wolf,” as well as the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2018 Levis Reading Prize.

Nick Flynn joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Zoë Hitzig’s poem “Objectivity as Blanket" and his own poem “The King of Fire.” Flynn's latest poetry collection is “My Feelings"; he will publish two new books, "Stay" and "I Will Destroy You," in 2019. Flynn has received the Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, as well as awards and fellowships from PEN, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Library of Congress.

Catherine Barnett joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Wislawa Szymborska's poem "Maybe All This" (translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Barańczak) and her own poem "Son in August." Barnett is the author of the poetry collections "Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced," "The Game of Boxes," and "Human Hours," out in September.

Nicole Sealey joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Ellen Bass' poem "Indigo" and her own poem “A Violence." Sealey is the executive director at the Cave Canem Foundation and the author of the poetry collection "Ordinary Beast."

Tiana Clark joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Natasha Trethewey's poem "Repentance," and her own poem, "Nashville." Tiana Clark is the author of the chapbook "Equilibrium," which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Prize. Her first full-length book of poems, "I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood," winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, will be published in September. Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her collection "Native Guard," and was the United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. Her most recent book is "Thrall."

Ada Limón and Natalie Diaz join Kevin Young to discuss their collaborative poetry project, “Envelopes of Air,” a series of eight poems written in correspondence between the two poets, currently featured on newyorker.com. Below, Limón and Diaz reflect on the project’s origins, context, and process.

“The original context for the poems was quite simple really: to write poem-letters to each other. We wanted to collaborate somehow and I was originally scared Natalie was going to ask me to draw or something. But instead, we began these poem-letters. Natalie and I both travel a lot, with my home base being in Lexington, Kentucky, most of the time, and hers in Tempe, Arizona. We soon realized that the poems were giving us a new, intimate way of thinking on the page—a reader that knows you, a reader with some shared history, a poet reader, a woman reader, a brown-woman reader. In terms of symbolism, both green and red play important roles in the work (the red of the desert and the green of the Bluegrass and spring). You can see those colors moving through the poems, winding around the words. Also, when we talk about Kimmerer and sweetgrass, it’s in reference to the book “Braiding Sweetgrass." (That has proven to be important to both of us.) I have planted sweetgrass in my raised beds. (It’s come back and is thriving this year!)

Also, I might add, that we both talk about our inner selves—our own anxiety, insomnia, health concerns—things we might not always share in other poems, because we are truly writing to one another, someone we trust, someone that we can recognize ourselves in, mirror and be seen. She has become an essential person for me to write to, for me to listen to. Of course, there’s more and I could go on, but I also don't want to say too much. I think the main thing is: these are real letters, and real poems, at the same time.”

-Ada Limón

“What is interesting about the poems as well is that we never had any context outside of the poems. They were their own space, a third space, maybe, of Ada’s and my friendship. We met sometimes in person, crossing paths at events, and we never discussed the poem-letters. They were that intimate time and space for us, of a poem, of a letter, of a room that was a new room for us to inhabit, individually, as we moved toward or away from ourselves and one another, and together, as we became a new space for each other to fill with words.

These poems are in some ways very different than anything I’ve ever written—I’ve written about dark and bright emotionalities before, but this is a new, more vulnerable, more open field of myself that I found through my correspondence with Ada. We borrow one another’s phrases and language at times, we incorporate friends and lovers, we thread through what we are reading and what is happening in our lives and our worlds, like any letter would. Ada is one of the most important audiences I have written for, because I love her, she is my friend, and I also admire her as a poet and thinker and person. In some ways, I have risked more of myself in these poems than in other poems I have written. She has become one of the beloveds I write toward, as are my family, my friends, my lovers, my peoples and communities.”

-Natalie Diaz