Title: 100 Years of 100 Things: New Yorker Poetry [theme intro music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things with thing number 75, 3/4 of the way home. 100 years of poetry in the New Yorker as we acknowledge for the second time in this series that the New Yorker too, is celebrating its centennial. For a century, the New Yorker has published poetry that captures both the personal and the political, shaping literary history in the process. From Langston Hughes to Sylvia Plath, Derek Walcott to Tracy K. Smith, the magazine's archives reflect shifting literary movements, evolving cultural conversations, and the enduring power of a well-placed poem.

Sometimes a poem distills something vast into just a few lines, like the Louise Glück writing, "Look up into the light of the lantern, don't you see the calm of darkness is the horror of heaven." That was the 1980s, or Langston Hughes, who reimagines grief in the poem Wake, "Tell all my mourners to mourn in red cause ain't no sense in my being dead." Langston Hughes in the '40s.

As Kevin Young writes in the introduction to the new anthology, A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, "There is a way that poetry must include the unexpected, the necessary, the prescient." That legacy and the work of shaping it is what we're going to talk about right now. Kevin Young, poet, New Yorker poetry editor, and the editor of A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, just out, joins us now. Kevin, always great to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Kevin Young: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: This new anthology, A Century of Poetry at the New Yorker, is a sweeping look at the magazine's poetic legacy. What was it like to take on the task of curating 100 years of poetry?

Kevin Young: It was a pleasure. I read the New Yorker as a teenager and had the previous anthology that was published in 1969 as a teenager too, and I still have my copy underlined, and it was really a broad introduction to poetry, and that's really what I was hoping for in editing it. There's over 500 poets and over 800 poems in the book. Reading through 100 years was daunting at times, but it was really a pleasure to see the shifting sands of poetry and its influence, the ways that it appears in the magazine, that really, I think, show how poetry can be both timely and timeless. There's something about having it in that weekly magazine that it shows up in your box or online, and you get to see and encounter poems and Discover. That sense of discovery is a lot of what I wanted in editing it.

Brian Lehrer: Going back as far as we can go back, are there some earliest poems or poets that struck you as you were going through the archive?

Kevin Young: You read the Langston Hughes poem that I really love, that little short ditty that thinks about mourning and laughs a little bit at it. And someone like Dorothy Parker, who's really sly and terrific. And I really wanted to capture that range of the cleverness of the '20s poems. And then the ways that in the '50s and '60s, you see poets really deepen in the magazine. Someone like Elizabeth Bishop or Sylvia Plath or W.S. Merwin, who nearly holds the record for the most appearances in the magazine.

I think something like over 200 really show what I end up calling refrigerator poems, the kind of poems that people used to cut out of the magazine and maybe still do and put on their fridge or carry in their wallet. People will show me those at a reading or something and say, "I have this poem. I carry it around." Now they carry it in either their soul and their hearts and memories or they like it online. Either way, they're passing around these poems that are really special.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, as you note, poetry can respond to its moment in time in ways that are immediate, or it can take a longer view, absorbing history, reshaping language, shifting perspectives. I wonder if there are poems, and this is such a general question, but attack it any way you want, from the New Yorker's archives that stand out to you as we look at 100-year arc as having marked a turning point, whether in literature or in the wider culture. Maybe just pick an example or two of that.

Kevin Young: Sure. I mean, I think there's many poems, you know, Merwin was writing sort of protest poems in the '60s. There's a poem by William Stafford that I think is really beautiful and it was written in the '70s. While it isn't commenting on one specific moment in time, there's others that do that. I thought it was a really beautiful sentiment on this slightly cold day.

Brian Lehrer: You're going to read that?

Kevin Young: Yes. It's called Ask Me by William Stafford.

Ask me

Some time when the river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made. Ask me whether

what I have done is my life. Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt: ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait. We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.

Brian Lehrer: That's beautiful. I never heard that before. That's really timeless, isn't it? That could have been written anytime in human history.

Kevin Young: Sure. Ask me what mistakes I've made. I love how Stafford's able to ask us to think about our lives and shares that kind of meditation. It's a time when things are really busy and chaotic, feeling sometimes, and poetry can ask us to slow down as much as it can ask us to sit together and think.

Brian Lehrer: Ask me what mistakes I've made. It's an ode to humility, which is very much in short supply these days, I would say. I'll point out that the book isn't just a chronological archive, folks. It has a structure that gives us a different way to think about the New Yorker's poetic legacy. You want to explain to folks how you decided to organize it and what you hope that structure reveals.

Kevin Young: I didn't want to just go front to back from the '20s till now. I really want to think about the themes that emerge when you look at the magazine over time, but also the themes that emerge in just poetry. One of the things that's special about the New Yorker is it's been weekly for 100 years and been able to chart the changes, the ups and downs in poetry. I really frame that in terms of a day. It alternates between decades, the '20s and '30s, for instance. But then it starts with Morning Bell and poems about morning as in the time of day, and then it has a lunch break section.

One of my favorites is after work drink and things about last train home and these aspects of evening as we continue through the anthology and ends with dawning. That shape of the day, the way that poetry speaks to hours of our lives in the broadest sense, I think was really important. It also allowed poems across the decades to speak to each other. It wasn't just Dorothy Parker talking to someone from the '20s, it's also her talking to others or a poem from the more recent times, being able to talk to Elizabeth Bishop from the '50s. It really allowed a range and a range of what I hope is discovery, which is, I think, something the magazine provides.

Brian Lehrer: I love, frankly, how you took that kind of epochal timeline of 100 years, which is what the magazine is celebrating, and you put that little, very personal timeline on it, which is the timeline of the 24 hours in a day. You write in your introduction to the anthology, "Having personally gone through a full database of all 13,500 poems published over the past 100 years, I can safely say that with a few exceptions, the New Yorker didn't publish any poet who wasn't white for nearly the first 75 years of its history. Can you talk about what it meant to confront that reality while putting this collection together?

Kevin Young: It's interesting because I had the '69 edition and loved it and enjoyed it and loved getting to know James Dickey's Falling or W.S. Merwin's poems. It's how I discovered them, or Cummings. But it was a bit of a shock to see that even that anthology in '69 didn't include any Langston Hughes. It speaks to the changing tides, I think, and Hughes wasn't thought of, he had just died a couple of years before, as significant a poet, I think, and now, we would rush to include him.

There were other poets in the '70s, someone like Audre Lorde or Michael S. Harper, who appeared just once. That was a bit of a surprise and also a bit of a shame because imagine, the New Yorker can't publish everyone, but if they had continued to publish, say, Harper, it would have, I think, really enriched that archive. I want to be able to show the range of it, the ways that it does cover a broad swath of poetry, but also the places where, you know, it didn't go as deep as it could have.

Brian Lehrer: Also along those lines, I see Derek Walcott's first poem in the New Yorker was published in 1972, well into his career. He later won the Nobel Prize, but he often spoke about feeling caught between cultures, between the Caribbean and the literary establishment. How do you think the New Yorker, or you could talk about Walcott, in particular, but beyond that, if you want, how the New Yorker has historically navigated questions of literary gatekeeping versus global voices.

Kevin Young: The New Yorker has always published in translation, at least in recent memory. I think that's one of its big strengths. Obviously, Walcott was writing in English, but what I love about looking back, is the ways that some of the poets I admire, not just Walcott, but someone like Seamus Heaney or Louise Glück, who went on to win the Nobel, they supported somewhat early. Seamus, certainly, and that quality of identifying people, and sometimes a little late, certainly, by the '70s, Walcott was a known quantity. But being able to publish someone's first poem is something that I've had the pleasure of doing as the poetry editor. It's really amazing to see the way people respond to it.

I think that sense of discovery, but also that sense of depth, the fact that an incident can happen, like Notre Dame burning, for instance, and we can write a poem about it in the next week or two, or we had a poem about the Palisades fires just a week after that and it really reflects how poets are trying to write about the now and trying to be both timely and timeless.

Being able to run them in the magazine is really special. Being able to include them in the anthology shows the ways that they hold up or they speak to their moment but also have other echoes. I most recently saw this during COVID and the pandemic. And the ways that poets really responded to that pandemic and wrote poems about George Floyd. A poet like Terence Hayes' George Floyd poem, I think, was really significant and just a week or so after his murder. I think that kind of timely and timelessness is really the balance that the anthology seeks.

Brian Lehrer: I think you have another one that you're going to read for us, yes?

Kevin Young: Yes, let's hear Ada Limón, who's always terrific, our poet laureate, who has the last poem in the book called The End of Poetry. It's a poem that came out just as I was mentioning during pandemic.

Ada Limón, The End of Poetry:

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower

and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot,

enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy

and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and 'tis

of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god

not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds,

enough of the will to go on and not go on or how

a certain light does a certain thing, enough

of the kneeling and the rising and the looking

inward and the looking up, enough of the gun,

the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost

letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and

the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough

of the mother and the child and the father and the child

and enough of the pointing to the world, weary

and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border,

enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough

I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,

enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high

water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,

I am asking you to touch me.

Brian Lehrer: Nice and what a good pick for the end of the anthology. I'm just curious as we wrap this up, Kevin, as we look ahead, as we like to do at the end of these 100 Years of 100 Things segment and speculate a little bit about the future. I don't know if you have any sense of this already as poetry editor of the New Yorker, but it occurs to me that poetry could, because of its brevity, become more relevant or more relevant again because of people's attention spans these days.

If people aren't reading 300-page novels, maybe as much as they did in the past, maybe poetry which can make its statement in relatively short amounts of time and space, takes on a new relevance and gets shared more. I don't know if it's happening. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Kevin Young: I think it's happened and it's happening. I certainly saw it during pandemic. I think people were really reaching out through poetry and they were returning to things that they wanted to discover. You saw the same after 9/11, and there's a really strong section or series of poems in the magazine and, in fact, starts with one, Try to Praise the Mutilated World, which appeared a week after on the back page of the New Yorker. That poem just, I think, did so much for people in terms of comfort in a time that was hard to understand.

I think poetry does that not just because of brevity, but because it has that quality of echoing many thoughts at once. You know, it is layered and, not only does it have the brevity you're mentioning, which I think is absolutely true, but it also has that layer quality. You can return to it. It's like a favorite song. You hear something else every time you listen. If we listen with our whole body, I think poetry really can echo with us and stays with us. I think of lines of poems from eons ago and they still stay with me. I think it has that same quality now.

Brian Lehrer: That, folks, is our 100 Years of 100 Things segment number 75, 100 years of poetry in the New Yorker as we are delighted to help the New Yorker celebrate their centennial, which is also now. Kevin Young, New Yorker poetry Editor, is also the editor now of a century of poetry in the New Yorker. Thanks so much.

Kevin Young: Thank you.

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