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- [00:01]
Sponsor Voice
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- [01:00]
Kevin Young
Hello, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker Magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to choose a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss. Then they read one of their poems that's been published in the magazine. My guest today is the writer Amy Woolard, whose debut poetry collection, Neck of the woods won the 2018 Alice James Award from Alice James Books. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio center, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, she's also a civil rights attorney and the Chief Program Officer for the ACLU of Virginia. Amy, welcome.
- [01:44]
Amy Woolard
Thank you so much, Kevin. I really appreciate the invitation to be here.
- [01:48]
Kevin Young
Thanks so much for being here. Now, the poem you've decided to read today is Via Negativa by Charles Wright. Tell us, what was it about this particular poem that caught your eye?
- [01:59]
Amy Woolard
What caught my eye is that it's written by Charles Wright, who is someone I call affectionately my poetry dad. He was one of my first poetry teachers as a very young undergraduate here in Charlottesville when I was at the University of Virginia. I like to think he raised me as a poet and raised me through his poetry as well. He has a good breadth of poems in the New Yorker archive, and this one stood out to me as a very classic Charles Wright poem. It's set here in Virginia, which many of my poems are as well. It has that great wandering drawl of his lines and that spirituality that he taps into that ghost world. He taps into in the music that he creates in those lines.
- [02:54]
Kevin Young
Well, why don't we listen to the poem? This is Amy Woolard reading Via Negativa.
- [02:59]
Amy Woolard
By Charles Wright Via Negativa if a man wants to be sure of his road, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark. St. John of the Cross in southwest Virginia, just this side of Abingdon, the mountains begin to shoulder up. The dogwoods go red and leaf darkened and leftover roadside wildflowers neon among the greens. Early October an Appalachia dyes her hair. What is it about the southern mountains that vacuums me out, that seems to hold me on an invisible flame until I rise up and veer weightless and unrepentant? The Great Valley pours into Tennessee, the ridges like epaulettes to the north, landscape in pinks and greens off to the south. How pretty to think that gods abound and everything stays forgotten, that words are dust and everyone's lip that uttered them is dust. Our line of discomfort inalterable sunstruck from notness into notness. Our prayers like raiment, like char scraps rising without us into an everlasting which goes on without us, blue into blue into blue, our prayers like wet wrung pieces of glass, surf spun unedged and indestructible and shining. Our lives a scratch on the sky, painless beyond recall. I never remember going out at night, full moon stalking the yard in California the way I do here. First frost starting to sort its crystals out. Moon shadows tepid and underslung on the lawn. I don't remember, although I should, the emptiness that cold brings and stillness brings. I never remember remembering the odd way evergreens have in night light of looming and floating, the way the spirit leaving your mouth looms too and floats in front of you like breath leading the way as it disappears into the darkness. Long journey, short road, the saying goes, meaning our lives, meaning the afterlife of our nights and days during our sleepwalk through them. The verbal hunger, the narrowness between the Thing itself and the naming of the thing, coils like a tapeworm inside us and waits to be filled. Our lives continue on course and reject all meaning, each of us needing his martyrdom, each of us needing that hard love. We sink to our knees like Sunday we rise and we sink again. There is no pardon for this bottomless water heart's glass. Each year the autumn comes that was not supposed to be back in the garden, without language each year, dead leaves like words falling about our shoulders. Each year same words, same flash and gold. Guys, so be it. The angel of the serpent that never arrives never arrives. The gates stay shut under a shine and a timelessness on Locust Avenue. The falls Fire collapses across the lawn, the trees bear up their ruin, and everything nudges our lives toward the coming ash.
- [06:49]
Kevin Young
That was Via Negativa by Charles Wright, which was published in the October 15, 2001 issue of the New Yorker. What a beautiful reading and what a lovely poem. And I love what you said about. I think he called it the drawl of his. And I know you mean not just the sound of the speech, but really that kind of way that the poem feels like it's meandering, but it's so focused. And I think you see that in his form, which, if I'm right, is these 10 line stanzas that also sort of drop down and meander. I think he even uses that word. And there's something about that that is really beautiful and I've always admired too. And it shows itself in phrases like, so be it, you know, something that people say but you don't always say in a poem. And I wonder if we can start with not the form, though. I think the form is so beautiful. But with that language, how is he able this poem and another's to kind of have that mix of raiment and char scraps and everlasting. And then that amazing line, the angel of the serpent that never arrives, you know, all caps, all capitalized and then never arrives, you know?
- [08:02]
Amy Woolard
Yeah.
- [08:02]
Kevin Young
So tell me about that language. The high and the low and the east and the west, north and the south of it.
- [08:07]
Amy Woolard
Right. I think it's just what I love so much about his voice. No one can write in this voice but Charles Wright. It is that mix of Pickwick Dam, Tennessee and Italy and reading Chinese literature and California and Montana and all of these things, I think, that make him who he is. And I always feel like some of these poems are. It's almost like old fashioned letter writing, you know, the way my grandmother would handwrite letters to me and describe her azaleas out front, but also have these very, you know, informal sort of spoken sentences in what she shares with me. It feels very southern to me.
- [08:51]
Kevin Young
Well, and also this idea of the verbal hunger, the narrowness between the thing itself and the naming of the thing. And someone else might stop there, but then he goes on to say, coil's like a tapeworm inside us. Okay. Amazing. And waits to be filled. Wait.
- [09:09]
Amy Woolard
Huh?
- [09:09]
Kevin Young
You know, like it keeps going and keeps coiling and uncoiling. And that kind of tapeworm, that verbal hunger is also at work, I think.
- [09:18]
Amy Woolard
Absolutely. I mean, he keeps reaching after the unreachable. And I think that speaks to the title that speaks to his, you know, I kind of hate the word project, but project, if you will, this trilogy of landscape and language and the idea of God that he says pushes his poems forward and the intertwining of them. And those lines that drop down, I love. He calls them lowriders, which is hysterical to me because I have the sense that Charles Wright doesn't know, you know, the sort of pop culture reference of low Rider. He says something like, they hold up the weight of the line that needs to continue on, you know, so they act almost like branches or, you know, load bearing beams for each of the lines that he writes. And I think they just help propel that reaching forward. The repetition, the. The. And. And. And, you know, that's throughout this.
- [10:25]
Kevin Young
Well, and I think, you know, visually it breaks up what could be these blocks of 10, you know, it visually does something as well that I think is sonic. And, you know, my feeling about poems is the visual is the sonic in a poem, especially if not more in a free verse poem or a metered poem. Do you think about the meter in these poems, which I think is so subtle that we might not. And I wonder how you approach that part of the kind of form he's working in.
- [10:56]
Amy Woolard
I do all the time. And I think about just how careful a poet he is inside of what looks on the page like just spoken text just coming out of him. But it's so considered and certainly shows up in the music of it. I have kind of a funny story. When I was his student, he assigned our workshop to write 50 lines of iambic pentameter as part of the workshop. And it's so hard. It was so hard for me. I was a really young, kind of terrible, feral student in college. And I just didn't do it. And I didn't do it. And it was the last class before I was going to graduate college and he gave me an incomplete. And I went to see him and he said, I did this because you're gonna write these lines and you're not gonna graduate and get your diploma until you do. And I found.
- [11:56]
Kevin Young
I love it. I think all undergrads should be assigned 50 lines of pentameter or not graduate.
- [12:02]
Amy Woolard
Yeah. I thank him for it, though, because I was so concerned with the perfection of the lines. And that's not what he was trying to teach.
- [12:10]
Kevin Young
Right.
- [12:11]
Amy Woolard
But I hear this country music in his poems. I hear that very careful music in the syllables that he so carefully chooses in these lines too well.
- [12:27]
Kevin Young
And this is 50 lines, it so happens. So I assume you wrote something exactly like this.
- [12:34]
Amy Woolard
He understood the assignment, apparently.
- [12:36]
Kevin Young
Yeah, well, what I love too are the shifts in the poem. And they happen so often and so quickly. And a little bit in what you were saying, he calls the low rider, which is a kind of drop down line, sometimes halfway across the page for those of us who are following along at home. I wonder about those shifts where he says things like in the beginning of the poem, he is really a setup. And I think if it was in a workshop, someone would, you know, I don't know if you need that beginning, but there's something about that switch between this description that dogwoods go red and leaf darkened and leftover roadside wildflowers neon among the greens. I mean, you hear those D sounds, the F sounds, the N sounds, all this kind of lushness that he's describing. And then it's dash early October and Appalachia dyes her hair. Suddenly we're in this wonder, but also a feeling of ritual that I think is different than description, you know. And I think that ritual is all around this poem. You know, there's a. Where he says, how pretty to think that God's abound. And I keep waiting for him to kind of say something different about that, like. But actually, you know, I would have a. And thus or. But instead he just. That's actually the point, right, Is that it is kind of pretty to do that. And he's going to tell you the parts of that. From notness into notness, our prayers like raiment, like char scraps, rising without us into an everlasting which goes on without us. And the going on keeps going, you know. And I think there's something powerful about that, the kind of suppositions that he's fine with actually leaving. A supposition.
- [14:26]
Amy Woolard
Yeah, he sort of rests inside that. That rapture. It's almost as if he's writing the poem as you're reading it. And I think that's a really deft thing he does regularly where it's as if he's observing as you're reading his poems and you're hearing it as it's going through his own senses. He writes very careful poems, but they really feel impromptu in a lot of ways, where things are just coming at him and he's meeting them where they are.
- [14:56]
Kevin Young
Well, I think what's interesting is, and I want to talk with you about the title in a second, but he also frames it in theology, in St. John of the Cross, you know, like there's big things lurking behind these mountains, you know, And I think there's something about that, that he isn't afraid to do that. Sometimes we're in a kind of age of understatement. Maybe in some ways, maybe not, but maybe we are. You know, like, for me, it's like I start to have a Charles Wright poem. Thought about it. Are we in an age? Oh, anyway, so that's a different podcast, but I think thinking about how do we wrestle with these big ideas, which by naming it there, he's helping us know that this is bigger than him. It's bigger than poetry, perhaps it goes bigger than our time. It's a kind of eternal set of questions. And how do you take the title as part of that? What do you. You know, I had to kind of think and look around at what Via Negativa means. But how do you understand the idea?
- [16:01]
Amy Woolard
I understand it through Charles as a means of, you know, one. One cannot speak of the unspeakable, one cannot speak of the. Of the divine. He has it, a way of treating landscape almost as a kind of medium, a spiritual medium to the unknowable. And I think that is what we see him chasing after. And he'll say, quite frankly, you know, I've written one poem in my life. I've just written it a thousand times, right? And I think, you know, to your point, in a workshop, that might be a critique, but I think for Charles, it feels like a journey. You know, that's the long journey, short road in the poem itself, where he keeps seeking this idea of the unspeakable and that kind of that liminal place that landscape is so adept at joining for us. And certainly one thing I love about this poem is it talks about places I know very well. Locust Avenue is right down the street from me right now. That's where this old house was. I know these mountains just this side of Abingdon. And it is a really. Whether you're, you know, religious, I guess, or not, it's a very spiritual place. And it makes us feel like we're on a giant rock hurtling through space. You know, it takes us out of this very practical capitalist world that we're in, even for a moment, and lets us sit in that kind of that ghost space between here and what we can't know.
- [17:46]
Kevin Young
This is beautifully said. I almost don't want to go beyond what you've just said because it's so perfect. But I do want to understand two things that he does that I don't think everyone can do, which is have these declarations. There is no pardon for this bottleness, water, heart's glass and these almost kind of fractured juxtapositions that I think is how he sees the poem being built. It is a series of moments, observations, some of them fractured, but ones that, like you're saying I wrote run poem my whole life, he would say, adds up to more than the parts. How do you see that working in the poem? Or is it that how it works?
- [18:35]
Amy Woolard
I mean, I think for me it also feels almost like a kind of humor from him too, when he says, you know, how pretty to think that God's abound. It's so. It's sort of classic of him. And I think some of that is. It feels to me like he is in the space of openness, of wanting to seek the unseeable, the unspeakable, and then also in this place of doubt, you know, where this can't happen. We try and we try and we try. And I think he finds a kind of almost like a gallows humor in that. And I think that's where we find these lines like there is no pardon for this, or we sink to our knees like Sunday. This humor in the idea that we keep trying, knowing we're not going to find the divine, we're not going to be able to know it, other than knowing what it isn't.
- [19:34]
Kevin Young
Yeah, well, that I think is where we should end, because that's said so well. And for me, I think knowing how place plays for him and how it plays for you and your work and the poem we're going to hear from you, I think is so beautiful. Let's turn to that poem now. In our March 18, 2024 issue, the new Yorker published your poem Late Shift, which you'll read for us momentarily. Did you want to say anything about the poem before we hear it?
- [20:06]
Amy Woolard
I think probably what I would just say is that it's situated in kind of an under production manuscript that is called wage that really speaks to. You know, I spent about 12 years or so full time working in restaurants, working in precarious industries and doing that here in Charlottesville. And it's such a meaningful time and place for me and there's so much I want to say about it. The collection is a bit of a love letter to Charlottesville and to the people I worked with in those spaces. And I will say one of the best things that came from the poem appearing in the magazine is that I had restaurant employees reach out to me, email me and thank me for it and see themselves in it. And that is the best accolade I could think of.
- [21:11]
Kevin Young
Well, here's Amy Woolard reading her poem.
- [21:14]
Amy Woolard
Late Shift, Late Shift. Those days I could only love someone who was ashamed of their teeth the way the dogs will always sleep in the spots they know I'll need to step the things we do so not to lose each other so as to lose something every day Church key, bar rag the obscene puckered red of maraschino the wrecked line cook in the walk in his chilled kiss how it tastes like a future eviction Thieves in the temple of our bodies Years later I will still feel most at home When I eat standing up When I settle up in cash When I barter for your attention Fingernail of heat lightning tapping the tabled sky A broken pint glass in the ice bin Every shift Sinead sings this is the last day of our acquaintance There are nights I give up on the world but not my body. How in the Brueghel if you didn't know the title you might not look for Icarus at all A paper lantern giving its wish back to ground long after we've left Push a fork into a fish and what you get is a meal Push a knife into a knuckle and what you get is to be changed like Icarus what I want is to start over but not do it all again like Icarus I wanted the light to love me back how in my lungs still nests the fur of every animal I ever kept Years later the gods will have me cough up a snow leopard I thought the main selling point of breathing was we didn't have to be reminded to do it. I never wanted children but I always liked the one about Athena pouring full grown from Zeus forehead How did we survive before Advil, love Before the armor of us glinting in the closed kitchen dark the way a creaky floorboard's one job is to wait. Service means the spoon appears before you know you need it the water looks to refill itself the napkin calls a truce when something is soft we believe we deserve to touch it and so we do when something is sharp we long to perfect it Nothing belongs to us until last call One more and then no more. The lights go on and it's time to cough up what's owed Build a cathedral in the dead of night and then give it a shift meal A smoking section, a cover charge, a swinging door a till to reckon those days we didn't have a prayer separated our love from each other like cupping a yoke between the cracked half shells Back until it's Perfect. Forgive ourselves, give ourselves the tenderest title and call it a day. How could we ever. How could we not, baby? Draw the spoked sun in the corner of our afternoon sky. Wake us in its slow cooked gaze. Hi, I'm Susan Glaser. I'm Jane Mayer. And I'm Evan Osnos.
- [24:51]
Kevin Young
And we host the Washington Roundtable from the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast.
- [24:56]
Amy Woolard
Me. This is the water cooler. This is a wonderful chance to sit down with two of the smartest colleagues in the country and, you know, just kind of compare notes. Now that's so true because first of all, we are actually friends in real life. But I can't wait till Fridays to hear what you guys think. Everybody sees the headlines, but you guys fill in the gaps.
- [25:18]
Kevin Young
I also think, though, occasionally we get somebody to come on and I'm always smarter for it.
- [25:22]
Amy Woolard
If you get a great historian who.
- [25:24]
Kevin Young
Can tell you about a presidential election.
- [25:25]
Amy Woolard
50, 60 years ago, often it can.
- [25:27]
Kevin Young
Help you understand about what's happening today.
- [25:30]
Amy Woolard
So if you're looking for weekly insights into what's going on inside the Beltway, please join us every Friday on the Washington Roundtable, part of the New Yorkers Political Scene podcast.
- [25:45]
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- [25:55]
Amy Woolard
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- [26:00]
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- [26:05]
Amy Woolard
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- [26:08]
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- [26:15]
Kevin Young
That was Late Shift by Amy Woolard. How great to hear it in your voice. But it is so lively and sonic on the page already. And I remember reading it and thinking, you know, it just moves so assuredly between these shifts. And I think there's something really lovely about that. And it has that similar to right quality of the high and the low and the Sinead O'Connor and the, you know, a broken pint glass in the ice bin. I mean the danger lurks behind every line. The knives and then the sort of broken hearts that feel like they're somewhere as part of all of this. And to get to that baby at the end I think is really great. I wonder about this idea of place in the poem and how build a cathedral in the dead of night and then give it a shift meal, a smoking section, a cover charge, a swinging door, a till to reckon. Is there something prayerful about this late shift, this work?
- [27:23]
Amy Woolard
I think for me there certainly was. There's a bit of a chosen family feel to working in these spaces. There is a kind of reverence in the work itself that I really appreciate. And so much of it goes unseen. And it did to me in working in those spaces. Kind of feel like going to a church each night, figuring out that ritual of, you know, setting up spaces and working the shift and all of the repetition that follows with that. It felt like a holy space to me in a way that also was very low brow and dangerous and temporary. Felt as though we were all building something together and believed something together, though we were really at risk in doing that as well.
- [28:32]
Kevin Young
Right. Well, what I didn't ask you about the Charles Wright poem. I'll ask you about yours, which is, is there a. An implied we in this poem? There's a lot of I, there's a you, but is there this kind of we lurking behind it, you think?
- [28:46]
Amy Woolard
I think there's a we. But I think part of what I struggle with in writing about this time and this landscape is, you know, there's this kind of like Henry IV duality that I experienced where I was in the tavern and now I'm not, I'm in the court. And I always felt as though I sort of had one foot in both places. And so there's a we. But I feel like I also have a sense that while I belonged there, only half of me kind of belonged there.
- [29:24]
Kevin Young
Well, how did we survive before Advil? I mean, how does one make it? What I like is there is a kind of poem that I see sometimes that tries to do, let's call them leaps, you know, says a thing, says a different thing. Charles Wright does it very differently. And I think place grounds it, but I see it more as a kind of almost, you know, switching channels effect kind of. And I don't feel that here. Like, I feel like you do do these leaps, like after the Advil line, you say, before the armor of us glinting in the closed kitchen dark. But right before, I never wanted children. But I always liked the one about Athena pouring full grown from Zeus's forehead. And then it's Advil and it's sort of the pain of Zeus birthing Athena from his head is also Advil. I guess what I'm saying is it works more like jazz than I see some of these other things work. And I wondered what kind of music besides O'Connor like, influenced you here? I mean, poetic as well as music in the world.
- [30:34]
Amy Woolard
Sure, yeah. I'm really influenced by old school rap, actually. So, Rakim, if you can call Nas old school, sort of medium school, maybe. But there is kind of a patter and a musicality and a persistence to their flow that I really admire. And so I think some of it is that jazz is really generous. I will take that from Charles. I think what I learned is this idea of the image narrative, right? Like setting up images against each other and kind of seeing what happens. I think the music of that, for me, in his lines, I feel like I adopted from him a bit, or I certainly learned it from reading him of just that his. And. And. And sometimes I feel like my lines keep getting longer and longer and longer because I just want to put so much in them.
- [31:39]
Kevin Young
Well, I felt like what is guiding us isn't that sense of place, though there is a sense of place here, but also a sense of time. And I wonder about other shifts. Would they feel different, you know, is this how you're writing about these? Or is this, you know, unique in its form for you, these long line couplets?
- [32:01]
Amy Woolard
I've been writing in couplets for a while, and it started in my first collection where, in part, I was writing about someone who was very close to me, like a sister to me, who died by suicide. And I think the couplets became kind of a way of holding onto her a bit and really thinking about that sense of when you lose someone like that who's that close to you, you also lose half of your sentences sometimes. You lose the inside jokes. You lose the predicate to your subject on some occasions. And so I think the couplets are really still an homage to her. And also just the duality of being in this world and being able to exist outside of it at the same time.
- [33:01]
Kevin Young
When I think of couplets as this, I'm always attracted to them, too, because they imply a kind of pairing, of course, and they go back in my mind to kind of heroic couplets and this idea of heroism that's kind of lurking behind it. And there's something in this poem that is a little bit heroic. You even have gods and the gods, but you also have, I think, the humanity of these places and also the kind of uncanny of it. Push a fork into a fish and what you get is a meal. Push a knife into a knuckle and what you get is to be changed, like Icarus. What I want, you know, there's a sense of myth at work and that kind of pairing of. I would call it the ordinary and the extraordinary, which I think good poems do, always, is made kind of manifest in that form for me.
- [33:54]
Amy Woolard
Yeah, And I just. I really like the leanness of them too.
- [33:59]
Kevin Young
Yeah.
- [34:00]
Amy Woolard
You know, I keep.
- [34:01]
Kevin Young
They are knifelike.
- [34:02]
Amy Woolard
They are. And I keep going back to what I've been taught just because I've been so fortunate to have great teachers. But I think a foundational piece of what I was taught is to be deliberate in writing a line, that a line should hold up on its own no matter what. And I kind of think that about the pairs as well. If we think of they have to as walls, be units. Right. A kind of room or a kind of lean to, in a way, with couplets that, like Charles says, they need to hold up and not break under the weight of themselves. But I want to try to make that branch as long as I can before it breaks under that weight.
- [34:50]
Kevin Young
Well, it applies, like I said, pairing this and this and maybe that kind of. And that you're talking about. I wonder too, about if you think they speed it up or slow it down.
- [35:03]
Amy Woolard
That's so interesting. I definitely think about pace quite a bit. I will say, as probably we should. I read things out loud after I get a draft down to see where I'm tripping up and to see where my breath can't quite hold as it moves through the poem. And so I think for me, like with Charles, I want a kind of drawl in my lines. I want a kind of. Not the slowdown, but a kind of unfolding. So for me, they don't feel fast, but they do feel like a bit of a tumble, a bit of an unraveling.
- [35:45]
Kevin Young
Well said. Well, I wanted to ask you about Wage, which you mentioned. I'm super superstitious, so I never say the title of a manuscript. My friends will be like, what is it called? It's like, I can't tell. It's coming out next week, but I cannot speak of it. So I'm really amazed at your ability to know. And it seems exactly right. But I'm curious about sort of how you approach as a whole, just sort of quickly. How are you thinking about it? I know another of the poems appeared in the magazine. How do we kind of think about these things and how do they come together? Are you a map it out kind of person or you're like, I know I gotta get a late shift poem and maybe there's an early shift too. How do you think about it?
- [36:33]
Amy Woolard
Yeah, that's a. That's a great question. I really sort of come from a period of writing where you just wrote poems until you felt like you had enough to put in a collection. And I know that's a bit different for some people now that there's plotting out and kind of a full capture outlining. I don't feel like I'm doing that, but I do feel some structure coming into play. There is a brunch shift poem. There are a handful of shiftless poems because I needed to talk about the day off and the way that time plays into this kind of precarious work. Late Shift is a piece of that. But the flip side is that you don't have mornings. Sometimes your sun is the afternoon sun.
- [37:28]
Kevin Young
Always right when you get that into this poem.
- [37:31]
Amy Woolard
Exactly.
- [37:31]
Kevin Young
Here.
- [37:32]
Amy Woolard
Exactly. And so I've thought about the different aspects that I think I want to cover and lift up and really celebrate about that time. I do, like I said, feel like it's a bit of an homage to that group of folks that I'm so tightly bound with. And I want to honor all the aspects of that time, but also show the precarity of it. And so it requires talking about some of the difficulties, the fact that not everybody makes it out of that business.
- [38:08]
Kevin Young
Sure.
- [38:08]
Amy Woolard
We lose a lot of. I've lost people quite early in that work because it is such a physical job that's so interwoven with substance use sometimes and long shifts and night work and not a lot of pay. And so I don't know when I'll have the whole, but I know I have about half of it. I think. We're never promised another book. And so you're right, I'm superstitious as well. And I think.
- [38:42]
Kevin Young
But you're doing the opposite, which is you speak it into existence.
- [38:45]
Amy Woolard
I try to manifest it. Yeah. Part of it was just Wage felt like the title. Like, once I had it, it felt certain. And then part of it, I confess, is taking ownership of that. No, I love that for myself. I love that.
- [39:03]
Kevin Young
Well, I love talking with you about this. I look forward to the full book whenever that is. And, you know, thank you so much for talking with us today.
- [39:12]
Amy Woolard
Thank you so much, Kevin. It's been a real pleasure.
- [39:16]
Kevin Young
Late Shift by Amy Woolard, as well as Charles Wright's Via Negativa, can be found on new yorker.com Charles Wright's most recent book of poems is Oblivion Banjo. Amy Woolard's latest collection is Neck of the Woods.
- [39:32]
Amy Woolard
You may subscribe to this podcast, the fiction podcast, the Writer's Voice podcast, and the Politics and More podcast by Searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app, you can hear more poetry read by the authority on newyorker.com and on the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is the Corner by Christian Scott Attunde Adjua courtesy of Stretch.
- [39:59]
Sponsor Voice
Music and Rope a Dope.
- [40:01]
Amy Woolard
The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Jill Duboff of newyorker.com with help from Hannah Eisenman. Hi, I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of the New Yorker. Each week on the Writer's Voice podcast, New Yorker Fiction writers their newly published stories from the magazine. You can hear from authors like Colson.
- [40:22]
Kevin Young
Whitehead Turner nudged Elwood, who had a look of horror on his face. They saw it. Griff wasn't going down. He was going to go for it. No matter what happened after.
- [40:36]
Amy Woolard
Or Joy Williams, her father, was silent. Slowly he passed his hand over his hair. This usually meant that he was traveling to a place immune to her presence, a place that indeed contradicted her presence. She might as well go to lunch, listen to news stories or dive into our archive of great fiction. You can find the work of your favorite fiction writers and discover new ones. Listen and follow the Writer's Voice wherever you get your podcasts from PRX.