April Bernard Reads John Ashbery

Summary

The New Yorker: Poetry

Episode: April Bernard Reads John Ashbery (January 28, 2026)

Host: Kevin Young (Poetry Editor, The New Yorker)
Guest: April Bernard (Poet, Novelist, Professor at Skidmore College)

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Overview

This episode features poet April Bernard reading and discussing John Ashbery’s “A Worldly Country,” followed by a reading of her own poem “Beagle or Something.” The conversation, led by Kevin Young, explores the layered complexities of Ashbery’s work, the pleasure and challenge of difficult poetry, the play between seriousness and humor in both poets’ work, and the function of music and play in poetic creation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to April Bernard and Ashbery ([01:01]-[01:45])

• April Bernard: Acclaimed poet, novelist, Professor of English and Creative Writing at Skidmore College. Author of multiple poetry collections.
• Podcast Format: Each episode, a poet picks a New Yorker archive poem and discusses it before reading one of their own.

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2. Reading and Interpretation: "A Worldly Country" by John Ashbery ([02:34]-[04:34])

• April Bernard reads “A Worldly Country” by John Ashbery in full ([02:34]).
• Ashbery’s Unique Quality: Bernard admires Ashbery’s poems for being “so hard to understand,” yet feeling intuitively clear within their world. She notes his simultaneous “funniness and deep seriousness”—a space she calls “his best place” ([01:55]).
• Points out the rarity and playfulness of Ashbery’s use of rhymed couplets in this poem.

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3. Exploring Ashbery’s Methods and Themes

The Power of Being Lost ([04:34]-[06:09])

• Kevin Young highlights how Ashbery’s poems blend strangeness with musicality and move from catalogues of "not this" imagery to moments of groundedness.
• The poem is “about how chaos in the outer world comes into the inner world,” and reads “almost like a prayer at the end” ([05:14]-[05:52]; April Bernard).

Disordering Narratives and Catalogues ([06:09]-[08:20])

• Ashbery’s cataloguing (“not the smoothness…”) relates to methods in "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror," keeping the reader both off-balance and engaged ([07:02]).
• Bernard compares his style to abstract expressionist and pop artists: “He’ll just throw everything with the kitchen sink into the poem, whether it’s Tweety Bird or novels or this kind of thing on the radio…” ([07:24])

"He’s also painting like an Abstract Expressionist painting or like a Jasper Johns or like a Rauschenberg, he’s creating these visuals that you have to stare at for a while to make sense of..."
— April Bernard [07:39]

Collage and the Pleasure of Difficulty ([08:20]-[10:07])

• The collage aspect of Ashbery’s poetry is crucial: “Many different wholes matched together... I love that kind of collage aspect.”
• Bernard sees “the pleasure of difficulty” as central: difficult poetry creates “a prickle of attention on your brain,” making comprehension a uniquely pleasurable task.

“The difficulty becomes part of the pleasure... diving makes things comprehensible in a different way. And Ashbery’s very much like that.”
— April Bernard [09:02]

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Moments of Clarity, Humor, and Rhyme ([10:07]-[13:12])

• Young notes the poem’s internal "rock in the river"—moments where readers can briefly grasp clarity; Bernard agrees these are often jokes or recognizably “normal” cultural references ([10:56]).
• Discussion of Ashbery’s rhymed couplets: Bernard points out their almost parodic use, juxtaposing organization with chaos.

“It’s almost as if the rhymed couplet gives the poem a leg to stand on, even if the things being said are slightly chaotic.”
— April Bernard [12:11]

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4. Ashbery’s Poetics and Literary Context ([13:12]-[17:20])

• Young and Bernard consider the poem’s closing as double-edged: “like a prayer, which is reaching out and not solving the problem” ([14:09]).
• Allusions made to Emily Dickinson’s hymn-like influence and to Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster.”
• Bernard recounts meeting Ashbery and humorously arguing with him about Dickinson ([15:02]).
• Examines the poet’s “fight with the form,” paralleling Dickinson’s adaptation of inherited structures and Ashbery’s re-interpretation of the couplet ([16:23]-[16:51]).

“It is the poet’s instinct to fight the form, the very form that they love.”
— April Bernard [16:51]

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5. Worldliness, Privacy, and the Ashbery Circle ([17:20]-[22:34])

• The double meaning of "worldly" (wisdom vs. temptation) is considered; Bernard sees the poem’s tension as existential rather than simply moral.
• She likens Ashbery’s poetry to overhearing a “small circle of friends,” with the broader public as listeners at the edge:

“I feel as a reader sometimes like I’m a kid and I’m listening to the grownups talking in the next room...I catch the drift...I hear the mood, but I’m not entirely sure what on earth they’re talking about.”
— April Bernard [19:20]

• Discussion on teaching Ashbery: Bernard starts with more accessible poems (“The Instruction Manual,” “Self Portrait…”) before inviting students deeper, likening the process to gazing at a challenging painting until it “coheres” ([21:30]).

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6. April Bernard Reads "Beagle or Something" ([25:34]-[27:15])

• Bernard introduces the poem as originating from a “very hard” time living in New Haven, CT ([25:20]).
• Full reading by Bernard ([25:39]-[27:15]).
• Poem details an emotionally raw moment in her car, the intersection of music, nature, grief, and the longing for transcendence.

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7. Bernard's Poetic Method: Beauty, Pain, and the Soul ([27:15]-[34:34])

• Young notes the poem’s movement between alienation and vulnerable transcendence.
• Bernard reflects on the intensity of encountering "staggeringly beautiful" moments while in pain, and the poem’s attempt “to make the beauty bring me out of the pain” ([28:48], [29:14]).
• She discusses the “Romantic project” of expressing emotion in a contemporary idiom, referencing Shelley and Romanticism’s influence.

“The whole book...was like a tightrope act. And I’m not sure I didn’t fall off.”
— April Bernard [32:12]

• Emphasizes striving for the “soul” rather than just feelings: “Trying to latch on to something that’s bigger than just feelings...nevertheless in the self. And that, I suppose I still believe, can keep us stronger than our mere feelings…” ([33:47])

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8. Artistic Invention and the Play of Creation ([36:18]-[39:39])

• Bernard’s fictional composer “Annelisa Beagle” is entirely invented, with the poem’s title and musical reference part of her poetic play.
• She describes sections of her book as “liner notes” from made-up composers, emphasizing playfulness alongside seriousness.

“There’s a huge part of my poetry that’s just about play...When you think in language, as you well know as a poet, when you think in language, you also play in language. And so that’s— it’s like my sandbox.”
— April Bernard [38:17]

• They discuss the importance and difficulty of fostering playfulness in students, culminating in Bernard’s students singing childhood songs in class—“wore them down…to being able to play” ([40:13]).

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9. Music, Lyric Tradition, and Bernard’s Latest Book ([41:07]-[44:06])

• The lyric tradition’s roots in music: “If it doesn’t work for me on the ear, it isn’t gonna work at all” ([41:07]).
• Bernard’s latest book The World Behind the World explores a spiritual realm “where there is justice,” with frequent poems on music and spiritual searching.
• Notable: her poem “Closest is Music” includes the line, “We Find God there.”

“[Hopkins] is creating musical measures...if you saw a Rauschenberg in a museum, you might have to look at it for a long time until it starts to cohere for you and make sense. So I talk about that and the music of it, of course, too, that a lot of it is like listening to music.”
— April Bernard [43:40]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “But when you’re in the middle of his poem, it makes perfect sense, even if you couldn’t possibly paraphrase it to anyone else.” — April Bernard on John Ashbery ([01:55])
• “Diving makes things comprehensible in a different way. And Ashbery’s very much like that.” ([09:02])
• “You’re completely lost. And then he...puts a little...rock in the middle of the river that you can step on. You know, it’s like, oh, here’s my stepping stone.” — Bernard on moments of clarity in Ashbery ([10:56])
• “It is the poet’s instinct to fight the form, the very form that they love.” ([16:51])
• “I feel as a reader sometimes like I’m a kid...listening to the grownups talking in the next room...I hear the mood, but I’m not entirely sure what on earth they’re talking about.” ([19:20])
• “The whole book was like a tightrope act. And I’m not sure I didn’t fall off.” ([32:12])
• “When you think in language...you also play in language. So that’s— it’s like my sandbox.” ([38:17])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:01] — Episode introduction & guest bio
• [01:45] — Why “A Worldly Country” was chosen
• [02:34] — April Bernard reads “A Worldly Country”
• [04:34] — Discussion begins: Music, difficulty, form
• [10:56] — Establishing moments of clarity in Ashbery
• [15:02] — Anecdote: Meeting Ashbery, Dickinson, poetic quarrels
• [19:20] — On Ashbery’s audience and poetic intimacy
• [21:30] — Teaching Ashbery, patience and comprehension
• [25:34] — Bernard reads “Beagle or Something”
• [27:15] — Bernard dissects her poem: pain, beauty, Romanticism
• [36:18] — Bernard discusses inventing composers and poetic play
• [40:13] — Teaching play and vulnerability in poetry
• [41:07] — Lyric tradition, music, and Bernard’s new collection
• [43:40] — Linking Hopkins, music, and poetic measures

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Conclusion

This warm, incisive episode captures the elusive pleasures of poetry’s most enigmatic forms, the musical and mysterious qualities of both Ashbery’s and Bernard’s verse, and the profound joy at the heart of poetic play. Listeners are guided through a poetic “worldly country” in which pain, beauty, searching, and laughter intertwine, all while learning how poets both wrestle with and revel in the forms they inherit and invent.

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Poems discussed:

• “A Worldly Country” by John Ashbery (full text)
• “Beagle or Something” by April Bernard (full text)

Books referenced:

• Blackbird Bye Bye (April Bernard)
• The World behind the World (April Bernard)
• Commotion of the Birds (John Ashbery)
• Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works (John Ashbery)

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For more: visit newyorker.com

Transcript

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[Kevin Young]

Hi, 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 select a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss. Then they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine today. My guest is April Bernard. She's the author of two novels and six poetry collections, including Blackbird Bye Bye, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the World behind the World, which was published in 2023. She's a professor of English and creative writing at Skidmore College In Saratoga Springs, N.Y. april, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

[April Bernard]

Nice to be here.

[Kevin Young]

So the first poem you've chosen to read is A Worldly country by John Ashbery. What was it about this poem that caught your attention when you were looking through the archives?

[April Bernard]

Well, I love Ashbury anyway. I love the way that he's so hard to understand. But when you're in the middle of his poem, it makes perfect sense, even if you couldn't possibly paraphrase it to anyone else. It's a particular gift he has, and this one attracted my attention because it's both funny and deeply serious, which is where I think is his best place is when he's being funny and serious at the same time. And it's in couplets, rhymed couplets, which he doesn't do a lot. So that's fun.

[Kevin Young]

Absolutely. Why don't we listen to the poem? Here's April Bernard reading A Worldly country by John Ashbery.

[April Bernard]

A worldly country. Not the smoothness, not the insane docks on the square, the scent of manure in the municipal parterre, not the fabrics, the sullen mockery of Tweety Bird, not the fresh troops that need freshening up. If it occurred in real time, it was okay. And if it was time in a novel, that was okay too. From palace and Hovel, the great parade, flooded avenue and byway and turnip fields became just another highway. Leftover bonbons were thrown to the chickens and geese who squawked like the very dickens. There was no peace in the bathroom, none in the china closet or the banks where no one came to make a deposit. In short, all hell broke loose that wide afternoon. By evening all was calm again. A crescent moon hung in the sky like a parrot on its perch. Departing guests smiled and called, see you in church for night. As usual, knew what it was doing, providing sleep to offset the great ungluing that tomorrow again would surely bring. As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing puzzled me. What had happened and why? One minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness and the next peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness. So often it happens that the time we turn around in soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in. And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea, we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.

[Kevin Young]

That Was a Worldly country by John Ashbery, which was originally published in the November 7, 2005 issue of the New Yorker. Thank you so much for that reading. I loved hearing it aloud and it has a really different music, I think, and you can hear it as you were reading, kind of change and it almost starts with the strangeness you were talking about that Ashberry I think can bring us. But it also then I don't know for me about when it says, in short, all hell broke loose that wide afternoon. From then on it almost feels like it just zeroes in and becomes, as you said, serious. But it's also honed in on something else. What do you think?

[April Bernard]

I think he's. I don't know, but I think he is talking about worldly matters. I mean it is called a worldly country. I think he is talking about. If he's not talking about 9 11, he's talking about the aftermath of 9 11, I'm guessing. And I think it seems so germane to me at this moment because it's all about how the chaos in the outer world comes into the inner world. And that's kind of communication between the craziness out there and any internal effort to make sense of it. And to me, that's part of what this poem ends up being about. And it ends up sounding at the end almost like a prayer.

[Kevin Young]

Sure.

[April Bernard]

Like a prayer for assistance with this divided self that is both in the outer world and in the inner world. And how it's just so pertinent. It's my everyday life, and I'm sure many of us are living through this particular time.

[Kevin Young]

Well, and it starts with this catalog. Not the smoothness, which is almost like an ease, right? Not the insane docks on the square, the scent of manure and the municipal parterre. And you get that rhyme and the sort of wonderfulness. Then we get Tweety Bird and a novel and time in a novel, which I love that. Real time versus time in a novel, which. We know what he means, but as you said, close up, you totally get it. But if you step back, perhaps you might not totally connect it. But there's something about that, to me, about the fictions and order, that the poem starts with disorder. It starts with this kind of catalog of non things, non occurrences. And then also the novel is a way to try to organize that. And it's just okay in a way. And okay is like this state in between good and bad.

[April Bernard]

Right. It's also the way that Ashbery does a lot of this, not this, not this, not this in his poems. And they tend to be in his more sort of serious and almost vatic kind of poems, like the entirety of Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which is constantly telling you what you're not looking at and then what you are looking at. And it's almost like his professorial voice. And I love that. And I also love how he's so. Of the time that he came up in, which was the time of the visual artist he was involved with in both Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, where he'll just throw everything with the kitchen sink into the poem, whether it's Tweety Bird or novels or this kind of thing on the radio. And he loves, like, you know, from his friends like o' Hara and Schuyler, but he's also painting like an Abstract Expressionist painting or like a Jasper Johns or like a Rauschenberg, he's creating, which here, a little bit later, he's creating these visuals that you have to stare at for a while to make sense of. So he's not going to make the kind of narrative sense that you want from a poem, you have to sort of live with it for a while. And I love that about his poems.

[Kevin Young]

Well, and that kind of lyric association, I think, is really important to him. And I meant association in the kind of, you know, make these juxtapositions between images. But you've also pointed out his associations with these other artists, including his fellow. What we call now the New York School of Poets. I love that you're bringing that perspective because there's also this element of collage in the work. It feels like many different holes. W H O L E S match together, even mashed together. And I love that kind of collage aspect of it. How do you think it affects how we come into this worldly country?

[April Bernard]

Well, in this poem in particular, I think it asks us to be patient with it up to a certain point. And one of the most interesting things about difficult poetry, which I think this counts as. Is that the difficulty becomes part of the pleasure. And it's like it tickles a certain part of our brains to have to spend more time and to maybe have to backtrack and say, oh, what was that? Oh, what was that? And to keep going back and have that little friction. Be a kind of prickle of attention on your brain that makes you stick with the poem and get something special out of it. I keep talking about. About the pleasure of difficulty, which I think is very real. And, I mean, it's there with another one of my absolute favorite poets, which is Wallace Stevens. I mean, Wallace Stevens, when James Merrill said once in an interview that he's never understood a word of Wallace Stevens, that made me so happy because I thought, well, I don't have to understand it in that way. I just have to dive into it. And, of course, the diving makes things comprehensible in a different way. And Ashbury's very much like that.

[Kevin Young]

Well, I also think there's something that happens in the poem. About halfway through that first stanza. You might not have it in front of you if you're listening. But a big, long stanza that takes up most of the poem. But for me, there's that kind of internal break where it says, in short, all hell broke loose that wide afternoon. And it's this sort of declarative moment. And then we have this enjambment, the kind of line that follows. By evening all was calm again. A crescent moon break hung in the sky like a parrot on its perch. And this kind of almost describes the poem or poetry in a way, like hell breaking loose. But then calmness and that kind of tension that I think the poem sorts between hell breaking loose and the prayer at the end, I think is really interesting for me, that kind of forecasts that ending.

[April Bernard]

I also think that it's one of those great moments in his poems where it's like you're completely lost. And then he. He puts a little. A rock in the middle of the river that you can step on. You know, it's like, oh, here's my stepping stone. Oh, I know what this sentence means. He also does that a lot with jokes. Even the joke when you recognize Tweety Bird or when you recognize something, you're like, oh, oh, he's giving me a place to stand. So as it all rushes by, I can then move on to the next thing. It's a beautiful poetics. It absolutely is.

[Kevin Young]

Well, and it asks a question. As I gaze at the quiet rubble, one thing puzzled me. And you have that great puzzle, rubble, internal rhyme. What had happened and why? And that's almost a poetic question about his poetics. Like, what had happened and why? That's a natural question. But then it says, one minute we were up to our necks in rebelliousness, and the next peace had subdued the ranks of hellishness. And that kind of slant rhyme, for me at least, of rebelliousness and hellishness. What an interesting contrast. But also it feels like of the moment in some way when we're pitched between these kinds of feelings for some.

[April Bernard]

Yeah. I think also he's talking about. I think that's part of the interesting kind of cadence of the poem being in couplets with these kinds of sometimes ridiculous rhymes. I mean, there's another one with Dickens and chickens, and so that it's almost as if the rhymed couplet gives the poem a leg to stand on and gives the thinking a leg to stand on, even if the things being said are slightly chaotic.

[Kevin Young]

Right.

[April Bernard]

It organizes it almost.

[Kevin Young]

Sure.

[April Bernard]

Yeah.

[Kevin Young]

I'm glad you brought up the couplets, because I started thinking about heroic couplets, this idea of almost this kind of epic notion, forward motion of the couplet. And is he mocking that? Or is that there? Or is it just more like. Here are these pairs of unusual things which imply connection, but in the poem don't have the same feeling. It's about doing, but also ungluing. It's about bringing, but also about thinging, you know, and that. How's that work for you?

[April Bernard]

Well, I mean, I guess because I think he uses both heroic couplets and what's called riding rhyme in this poem where he does a lot of enjambment. But then when he wants to land, he lands with the heroic couplet that seems to be almost like an epigraph.

[Kevin Young]

Yes.

[April Bernard]

You know, it's like this will sum it up. And of course, it never really does, even at the very end, when he's got. He stacked two heroic couplets on top of each other at the very end of the poem. So often it happens that the time we turn around in soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground in. And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea, we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free. I mean, those are like, huge. And they're very much like the end of a sonnet where you'd have the rhymed couplet, the heroic couplet that anchors and nails it down. But here he's got two of them. Why not two?

[Kevin Young]

Right. Right.

[April Bernard]

And also, it doesn't really. It ends the poem with what I think of as a prayer, which is reaching out and not solving the problem.

[Kevin Young]

Sure. Well, it feels almost hymnal, like. Or a hymn there at the end. At least for me, there's some aspect of. Almost like a. I wouldn't have said this before we started talking, but I almost. Is it Dickinson? I'm hearing too, like, this kind of. Like this kind of connection. And, you know, we haven't had this extended metaphor. You know, instead we've had the parrot on its perch and see you in church, you know, these kind of almost pieties. Right. But then suddenly, I almost believe that when it says, soon becomes the shoal our pathetic skiff will run aground. And these things that we turn around in the time we're in also wrecks us in some way, at least if we believe what he's saying.

[April Bernard]

I also, in the ending here, maybe because it's a poem I love, I also hear to the harbor master the Frank o' Hara poem, the waves that have kept me from reaching you, which also ends in a kind of weird prayer like fashion. And I have something funny to tell you about Emily Dickinson, which is that the first time I ever met John Ashton, which was a long time ago, was in 1980. 81. We had a fight. We had a. We had an argument. It involved alcohol, but it. It. We were fighting. We were arguing. And he was trashing Emily Dickinson. I think he was just doing it to provoke me. I am easily provoked. Or I was. I was.

[Kevin Young]

When I was them fine words. I. I got it. Like, if you start trashing Emily.

[April Bernard]

I think he just wanted to have an argument and have it be about poetry. But it was really funny. It was very funny. He was just trashing her.

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Wow.

[April Bernard]

I don't think he meant it. I actually don't think he meant it for a minute. I think it was entirely notional.

[Kevin Young]

Well, I wonder about, you know, her use of sort of the hymn as a base that she, you know, then alters beyond belief, in a way, with the dash, but also with her own kind of sense of piety, her own sense of moral clarity, but also her sense of mystery.

[April Bernard]

Isn't that also what poets are always doing? Taking the form that's the received form, and remaking it in order to have a quarrel with it? You know, a quarrel with the parent. The parent form. I mean, people talk a lot about that with the sonnet, especially with wonderful writers like Langston Hughes and sort of remaking the sonnet. But people have been remaking the sonnet since it came down the pike.

[Kevin Young]

Yeah, I love that about the sonnet.

[April Bernard]

It is the poet's instinct to fight the form, the very form that they love.

[Kevin Young]

Right.

[April Bernard]

And I think that that's part of what Dickinson is doing. Cause she's, of course, she's trying to. She's made a new religion where poetry, or possibly the poet and possibly herself are God.

[Kevin Young]

Right.

[April Bernard]

And so that doesn't work real well with Calvinism. So she's having a fight with the religion she grows up in.

[Kevin Young]

Do you think Ashbury's having a fight with the worldly country, as he puts it?

[April Bernard]

Yes.

[Kevin Young]

I mean, what does worldly mean here? To me, there's that kind of double meaning of worldly being wise and maybe street smart or some aspect of obtained wisdom, but then also that kind of. Speaking of Calvinist, the notion the world is actually your tempter, it is something that is gonna make. Make you violate your moral clarity or sense. How is that. Is it a tension like that in that title?

[April Bernard]

I think there is, but I think it's also. It's a privacy thing. I think more than that he disapproves of the world. It's really like a kind of. I mean, not to be too psychoanalytic about it, but it's a little bit like the sort of introvert being forced to pay attention to the external world. And I sense that in a lot of his poems, I mean, he wants to be at peace. He's looking. He is always, always in his poems, he's looking for peace. And he can't find it if the outside world is chaotic and disgraceful. And I think that that's what this poem is saying too.

[Kevin Young]

So do you think that peace had subdued it? As he says, one minute we're up to our next and we're peace.

[April Bernard]

I think he means external peace. There he's like everybody calmed down and fell asleep. You know, he has, you know, we.

[Kevin Young]

Can always hope that's really calm.

[April Bernard]

You know, we can really hope that people will calm down and fall asleep.

[Kevin Young]

I see.

[April Bernard]

But I think that's the tension in the poem is between this wish for peace and the fact that the world is a mess. The world is too much with us. Yes, I love that in the Wordsworth way, you know.

[Kevin Young]

Well, and this poem came out in 2005 and I wonder about his style changing. I mean, I loved his early work and you know, some trees and seeing how it developed. Do you feel like this later work has a different feel or do you feel he's very consistent?

[April Bernard]

I don't think he's that consistent, but I think that because, well, his. I don't think he's talking to himself. I think he's always talking to his friends. It's a small circle. I feel like it's an intimate kind of poetry, but it's not. It's not solipsistic, but it's talking to a small group of like minded people. And that never changed. But the kinds of things he wanted to talk about shifted. And I do think that the poetry becomes ever more difficult to get a grip on. This one is actually easier than a lot of his other poems which I once described to someone that it looks like it's coming off a loom and you've just sliced off a piece of cloth and then you're slicing off the next piece of cloth like it's all just a kind of. He's always generating poetry and this is just what landed on the page. But I also think he's talking. I feel as a reader sometimes like I'm a kid and I'm listening to the grownups talking in the next room. And that's what a lot of his later poems make me feel like. I can't quite. I'm sitting on the stairs while the grownups are having a party downstairs. And I can catch. I catch the drift. I hear it when they laugh. I hear it when someone's had too much to drink. I hear it when someone's angry or serious. And so I get the mood, I always get the mood, but I'm not entirely sure what on earth they're talking about. And that actually also is a pleasure. It's a form of pleasure.

[Kevin Young]

That's right. But I wonder about sort of lastly, thinking about that idea of that small circle, which I love, that way of thinking about Ashbury and that we're almost overhearing his conversation with his friends or, you know, the dinner party metaphor. But I also wonder about how you bring in people to his circle either when you're teaching or, you know, how do you introduce people to Ashbury? Is my first part of this. But the second part is, do you think that's what he wants us to do as a reader, is become part of that circle? Or is he, is it a party he wants us to join?

[April Bernard]

I think he does want us to join, but it's a little bit, it's a little bit like a tautology, like if you went ready to join, you can join. When I introduce students to Ashbery, I usually do something like the instruction manual, which is a very comprehensible early poem, and get them to see where he's laughing and doing stuff. But I have many times also taught Self Portrait, which, again, is a more accessible poem of his. And then, I mean, it's very difficult and long, but it's accessible in that it sticks with its subject matter and you can follow it all the way through. And then I sort of, if they're interested, if they've heard something that's for them, they go off into other poems of his. But I talk a lot about how if you saw a Rauschenberg in a museum, you wouldn't necessarily be able to make sense of it. You might have to sit down on a bench and look at it for a long, long time until it starts to cohere for you and make sense. So I talk about that and the music of it, of course, too, that a lot of it is like listening to music. So they need to read him out loud.

[Kevin Young]

Well, I love what you said there, and I will happily sit on a bench with you and look at some Ratchenberg sometime.

[April Bernard]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Kevin Young]

More from my conversation with April Bernard after the break.

[April Bernard]

Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our.

[New Yorker Radio Hour Host]

Country has ever known.

[April Bernard]

DAVID I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll.

[New Yorker Radio Hour Host]

Try to make sense of what's happening.

[April Bernard]

Alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy.

[New Yorker Radio Hour Host]

Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and so many more.

[April Bernard]

That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[New Yorker Radio Hour Host]

Wherever you listen to podcasts.

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[Kevin Young]

April welcome back.

[April Bernard]

Glad to be here now.

[Kevin Young]

In our April 30, 2007 issue, the new Yorker published your poem Beagle or Something, which you'll read for us in a moment. Is there anything you want to say about the poem before we hear it?

[April Bernard]

Ooh, it comes from a specific time when I was living in New Haven, Connecticut, and life was very hard. That's what I'll say.

[Kevin Young]

Well, here's April Bernard reading her poem Beagle or Something.

[April Bernard]

Beagle or Something. The composer's name was Beagle or Something, One of those Brits who make the world wistful with corrals and canticles and this piece, a tone poem or what have you, chimes and strings, a swirl dangerous for one whose eyelids and sockets have been rashing from tears. The music occupied the car where I had parked and then sat staring at a tree, a smallish maple fire gold and half undone by the wind shaking in itself shocking blue morning sky behind, and also the trucks and telephone wires and Dogs and children late to school along Orange Street. But it was the tree that caused an uproar. It was the tree that shook and shed, or it as a shaken soul. I remembered I was supposed to have one for convenience. I placed it in my chest, the heart being away, and now it seems the soul has lodged there, shaking golden orange, half spent but clanging, truer than Beagle music Or my forehead pressed hard on the steering wheel in petition for release.

[Kevin Young]

That was Beagle or something by April. Bernard. I love this poem. And I really loved how you read it. You know, just comparing these two poems. There is that kind of surface quality where you have a big, long stanza and then a kind of isn't that funny Prayer almost at the end, as it were. So I'm sure you were thinking about it that. But I was so struck hearing it about the beginning, too, has this quality that we're in the midst of it and you really enact this feeling of. I don't know, the opposite of euphoria, you know, in that beginning. And dangerous for one whose eyelids and sockets have been rashing from tears. I mean, that's such a powerful way of describing, in this kind of alienation that the speaker, the self, feels in this moment as one, even it's not even I. And then the I comes in that I think is really beautiful, but also this tree, you know, And I started thinking, hearing it, this idea, you know, of the objective correlative the modernist had of you find something out in the world that represents your feelings, but the poem both does that and knows it shouldn't, or something. How did you come to that? Is that how you see it now?

[April Bernard]

That's how I live, I think it's just such a literal description of what happened. But also, you know, that doubleness when you see something and you hear something at the same time, you know. So you're hearing and seeing something that is staggeringly beautiful.

[Kevin Young]

Yes.

[April Bernard]

And that in itself is almost more painful than you can take in. The beauty of it being painful because of how tough life feels in the moment.

[Kevin Young]

Sure.

[April Bernard]

And that you're not in a place to take that beauty into yourself and let it live. But also the uselessness of it.

[Kevin Young]

Well, that's what's great about beauty, is it's useless. But also you're like, why isn't this beauty.

[April Bernard]

Why is it working? Why doesn't it work? But also contradicting myself in the moment by writing the poem about it and trying to make it do that work. I'm so conscious of that doubleness like I'm trying to make the beauty bring me out of the pain. I don't know that the beauty can bring me out of the pain. I don't know that it even worked for the people who used to always do that business in the Romantics. This whole book that it comes from is a project about Romanticism. And I don't know that it ever worked for anybody. But we keep trying to do it. And I know that. I knew that I was describing a feeling that was extremely common, not uncommon at all, but something that many, many, many people have felt. One of the things that struck me during the pandemic years later was that it became a kind of trope for people to talk about sitting alone in a parking lot and weeping. And I thought, well, you know. Yes, that's one of the things cars provide us. Cars provide us with, you know, the crying room. And that was that sort of thing about the forehead on the steering wheel, which is, you know, my way of trying to make it extreme. I mean, it was also real, but extremely visceral.

[Kevin Young]

Yeah.

[April Bernard]

So I don't know if that answers your question. I might have gone off in a different direction.

[Kevin Young]

It answers. It answers many questions and sort of anticipates some of the questions. I had one about this idea of Romanticism that names this book that the poem comes from. But were you thinking about the Romantics in this sort of modern way? This tree, of course, has that kind of Romantic quality of nature, but it's surrounded by these other things. The radio, the children late to school, the trucks and telephone wires and dogs who get their own line. How did you think through that?

[April Bernard]

Well, I think that what I was trying to do. I mean, the whole book as a project, I realized I was writing these extremely painful poems. And I got mad because I wanted to be able. I wanted to find a way, in a contemporary idiom, to say, I fall upon the thorns of life. I bleed. You know, just like Shelley. And that's just a ludicrous thing to say. I fall upon the thorns of life. I bleed. It doesn't mean that you can't say it. Shelley got away with it, but I didn't think I could. But I wanted to try to experiment with that register of acknowledging pain, but also the register of performing it, but not somehow hamming it up too much.

[Kevin Young]

Right.

[April Bernard]

So it's like the whole thing was like a. For me, the whole book was like a tightrope act. And I'm not sure I didn't fall off.

[Kevin Young]

Sometimes I think I did well, falling off as part. I mean, I feel like there's such risk in the poem, you know, some of it is form. You break on a word. That usually isn't the stanza break champion, for convenience, you know, is the stanza break also. There's something about that that is mimicking or transmitting even this idea of the shaken soul. The soul is so shaken that for convenience, I placed it in my chest. The heart being away. And I love how it then almost sort of zooms out and then zooms back in. Or maybe it zooms way in. This idea of the heart being away. It's not even my heart, it's the heart. It's sort of all of our hearts. There's something beautiful in that that I just want to commend you for. And now it seems the soul has lodged there shaking. That's so beautiful. And you were talking about the external beauty, but the beauty of that imagery, this idea of the soul being something you could pull into yourself and something you're supposed to have, which is kind of the tension. You're talking about wanting to feel better but not, you know, wanting to recognize the power of, you know, beauty to transform, but not being able to. And at the same time, it does that at the end.

[April Bernard]

Yeah. Thank you. I, I, yeah, that is what I'm talking about. And I'm also talking about something. The reason it turns into the discussion of soul as opposed to heart is because I'm trying to latch on to something that's bigger than just feelings. I mean, that really is, it's like to try to find, I don't know, philosophically or spiritually, the thing that's bigger than the self, that is nevertheless in the self. And that, I suppose I still believe can keep us stronger than our mere feelings. And it has to do with, it has to do with a kind. I hate to use the word faith because it's also cheesy, but it's a kind of, it's a version of my version of faith.

[Kevin Young]

So well said. I think also this form is made up of these two sentences, you know, these two long qualities. Was that something you were aware of too, or that's just getting at the feeling. I love a one sentence poem, you know, or a long unraveling. And it feels like the kind of music we have. Eyelids and sockets have been rashing from tears. And then for me, it starts to change and zoom into the eye after that. Who, as we talked about, sort of is both adrift and also trying to not be. I'm curious about that.

[April Bernard]

I don't know. I think most of it's instinctive, but I've noticed that I do that a lot. Long sentences, but it speeds it up. For me, it was about speeding it up. Interesting. I suppose on a. One could say that the first sentence with the beagle and the. It's like a kind of throat clearing. Except that for me it isn't. It's also really important that the moment of listening to the music and not knowing who wrote it, not being able to rely on the comfort of culture, vulture knowledge, but just like I don't know who wrote that's really beautiful and really painful. That sense of not being able to count. The whole poem is about not being able to count on the intellect and not being able to count on the feelings and then going for something else, which is about the spirit.

[Kevin Young]

Yeah, I love that. And the title. I love that title. It's so odd and interesting and. Exactly right. Because it encapsulates the very feeling. You're talking about Beagle or something. Will our readers be googling the composer Beagle? Will they be looking in vain or will they be discovering a new.

[April Bernard]

Absolutely in vain? But I made up a composer for other things in this book named Annelisa Beagle, a British composer. And there's stuff later in the book that is supposed to be liner notes from Annelisa Beagle's the Ice God. She wrote an opera called the Ice God.

[Kevin Young]

That's an amazing opera.

[April Bernard]

It's amazing. And there's two other long poems from the Ice God in. In the book. Yeah. No, I once. Once I'd made her up, I wanted.

[Kevin Young]

To give her something.

[April Bernard]

And I have a couple of other. There's the whole section of totally goofy. I was writing poems that were sort of like liner notes.

[Kevin Young]

Sure.

[April Bernard]

From another language. I was doing them as if they were translated from the German at first. And so I have. But also from the Italian, I have Claude Dufarges, the Cossack Bride. I have. See, I have Annalisa Beagle's the Ice God.

[Kevin Young]

Right.

[April Bernard]

And I think I have one more. Oh, yes. Giancarlo Cassetti's La Nima di Marina.

[Kevin Young]

Nice. And so what? Why? You know, I think some people don't always know how much poets revel in making up such things. I mean, I love that. I love liner notes, I love albums, I love obscurity, but also invention, you know, and this kind of. Does it help with the mystery you're trying to craft, or is it part of just sustaining this idea of, you know, we're all creating here. And here's a creation of a creation of a creation.

[April Bernard]

Well, I would say that it has to do with play. I mean, all the other stuff we've been talking about is tremendously serious and even self serious, for which I apologize. But there's a huge part of my poetry that's just about play, and it's just about having a good time and it's about keeping the sparks of life connecting. And, you know, I love opera and I love serious music, and I love silly music and I love silly poems. And, you know, I just. When you think in language, as you well know as a poet, when you think in language, you also play in language. And so that's. It's like my sandbox.

[Kevin Young]

I love that. That's so well said. And, you know, we started off talking about pleasure and the pleasure of, as you put it, difficult poems. But I think it's also a pleasure that eases one's own difficulties, you know?

[April Bernard]

Absolutely.

[Kevin Young]

And that kind of quality of enjoyment of play. Joy sens, you know, like the kind. Sorry, I was just back from Paris. I don't know. But, you know, I think that there's something about. Something about this idea of play as deeply serious that. Do you think we've lost some of that sense in language or in the world?

[April Bernard]

Oh, God, yes. I mean, as you know, I teach and I teach college students, and I try to get them to play, and it's often an uphill battle.

[Kevin Young]

And why do you think that is? Do you think we've just discouraged it? Do you think. It's just. I feel like sometimes people don't want to feel embarrassed.

[April Bernard]

That's it. I mean, it's a lot of public embarrassment and shame. But I will tell you, in the class that I was teaching last term, which was a Shakespeare's Poetics class, which was so much fun to teach.

[Kevin Young]

Oh, that sounds good.

[April Bernard]

We read several plays, but we also. I like to trace the development of his iambic pentameter from his early work to his late work, which gets wild. It gets wild later, it gets totally wild. But the whole last class, we just sang to one another, literally. I got a whole class of college students to just relax and sing to one another wonderful things they remembered from childhood. Nursery rhymes, things we just sang. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. And I felt like, okay, I wore them down.

[Kevin Young]

You won them over as well.

[April Bernard]

But also wore them down to being able to play.

[Kevin Young]

Yeah, yeah. Wore down the kind of guards.

[April Bernard]

The guards, yeah. Allowed them to be vulnerable. Yeah.

[Kevin Young]

I do think that, you know, for me, the height of poetry is this idea of singing, you know, and obviously, this. The lyric tradition comes from that music to accompany the lyre.

[April Bernard]

Yeah. There's just no separating them in my mind. I mean, that's. Which is why, if it doesn't work for me on the ear, it isn't gonna work at all.

[Kevin Young]

Agreed, Agree.

[April Bernard]

But most all great poetry works on.

[Kevin Young]

The ear one, you know, by giving yourself this composer and starting with this music, as you say, by someone who. One of those Brits who makes the world wistful with chorales and canticles. And this piece, a tone poem or what have you, which sounds to me also a description of the poetic project you're kind of engaged in, in some way trying to find your way to wistfulness or through these different aspects of tone and what have you.

[April Bernard]

Yeah. But also, I think there's a little bit of snark in that description, which has to do with. With one's resistance to something that feels too emotionally easy and then actually realizing that it's incredibly deep and that it's not gonna be easy. It's gonna push you all the way to the ground.

[Kevin Young]

Love that. Well, can you tell us about your latest book, the World behind the World?

[April Bernard]

Sure. That title came out of my having used the phrase in two different poems, and I thought, oh, what am I talking about? And I think there is a world behind the world. I have an idea about a sort of a spiritual realm where there is justice and that we are sort of in this mirror world where things have gone wrong. And so there's a kind of. For me, there's a constant effort to recognize and identify and look for the world behind the world. You know, it's another one of those religious sort of enterprises, spiritual enterprise. But the book as a whole, I think, is filled with a kind of miscellany of kinds of poems. I mean, there's. But there's a lot of poems about music in that book. There's a poem called Closest is Music, and the next line is, We Find God there. And there's also a poem about learning to sing in the choir when I was a kid in church. And then it's about Hopkins. It's about Gerard Manley Hopkins and how you can sing Gerard Manley Hopkins. And I teach students to sing Pied Beauty to the tune of Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

[New Yorker Poetry Podcast Announcer]

Wow.

[April Bernard]

Which you can do, which I don't think anybody's ever pointed out, but that's what sprung rhythm really is. What he's really doing is he's creating musical measures. And somebody had told me that I really should write that up for an academic journal, and I said, I don't want to write it up for an academic journal. I want to put it in a poem. So I put it in a poem.

[Kevin Young]

I love that. I'm so glad of all you've been putting into your poems and into this poem and to this conversation. It's lovely talking with you today.

[April Bernard]

It's great talking with you. It's been fun.

[Kevin Young]

Beagle or Something by April Bernard as well as John Ashbery's A Worldly country, can be found on newyorker.com John Ashbery's last book of poems was Commotion of the Birds, a posthumous collection, Parallel Movement of the Hands. Five Unfinished Longer Works, was published in 2021. April Bernard's latest collection is the World behind the World.

[New Yorker Poetry Podcast Announcer]

To listen to new poetry from the New Yorker as well as narrated fiction, reporting, criticism and more, download the New Yorker app. For more New Yorker literary audio, try the New Yorker Fiction Podcast or the Writer's Voice, which presents new fiction read by the author. You can find those and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. Let us know what you think of this podcast by rating and reviewing it in your podcast app, and please follow the show so that you don't miss new episodes. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is Produced by John LeMay with help from Hannah Eisenman. The theme music is the Corner by Chief Zion Attunde Ajua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Rope a Dope. Thanks for listening.

[New Yorker Radio Hour Host]

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