Loading summary
Transcript80 lines
- [00:00]
A
This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at o d o o.com that's o d o o.com.
- [00:33]
B
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 a magazine. The poems we're featuring in this episode also appear in the anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025. The Available for purchase from the New Yorker store wherever you buy books. My guest today is Tracey Brimhall. She's the author of five poetry collections, including Our lady of the Ruins, which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service. She's the Poet Laureate of Kansas and the 2025 Poet in Residence at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Tracey, welcome. Thanks so much for joining.
- [01:27]
A
Thanks, Kevin.
- [01:28]
B
So the first poem you've chosen to read is Refrigerator 1957 by Thomas Lux. What is it about this particular poem that struck you, looking through the anthology?
- [01:37]
A
Well, in the opening to the anthology, you talk about refrigerator poems as this idea of the poems that people keep in their wallets or might actually put on their refrigerator if they receive a print copy of the magazine. And I was thinking about that idea of like, what are my sort of totemic poems or the poems that I used to wallpaper my New York apartment with. And this was both literally titled Refrigerator and was an early poem that I loved. I don't wallpaper my home anymore, but I do. I call it meditating in cursive. I still hand copy beloved poems into a book, and I find that it is a way to sort of tend the coals and keep my relationship to poetry warm, even when I might not be writing or even when other things are going on. It's just a great way to stay connected to language. And the last poem that I hand copied was actually another New Yorker poem. It was Maya Popa's the World Was All Before Them that just came out recently.
- [02:51]
B
Yeah.
- [02:51]
A
And so that's just. I really like those poems that we find ways to keep being in relationship with. When I was recently in New York City, I was staying at Padre Gotuma's, another poet's apartment, and he has poems on his shower door. That's glass. So in the shower. I could read these poems while showering.
- [03:12]
B
Wow.
- [03:13]
A
And I loved that too, as this. Another version of the refrigerator is the. The shower poem. Yeah, exactly.
- [03:21]
B
Newly coined.
- [03:21]
A
Yeah. Yes. Of like. Yeah. What are those? Opening the refrigerator door. And the poem you read. Pausing in the shower while the shampoo is doing its work and reading a poem. Hand copying the poem that you want to get to know a little bit better. And I, you know, some of these poems have, you know, been wallpaper for me where I've memorized them or taught them, but I feel like hand copying. It's. I don't know if we can say this metaphor on the air, but I felt like I'd been hitting on these poems for years. And they finally invited me upstairs, and I was like, oh, my gosh, that line break that word choice. And it just. I feel like you get more intimate when you, like, really make. Remake the poem letter by letter.
- [04:05]
B
Well, let's hear the poem. Here's Tracy Brimhall Reading Refrigerator, 1957, by Thomas Lux.
- [04:13]
A
Refrigerator, 1957. More like a vault. You pull the handle out. And on the shelves, not a lot. And what there is a boiled potato in a bag, a chicken carcass under foil, looking dispirited, drained, mugged. This is not a place to go in hope or hunger, but just to the right of the middle of the middle door, shelf on fire. A lit from within. Red heart red, sexual red, wet neon red, shining red in their liquid, exotic, aloof, slumming in such company. A jar of maraschino cherries, 3/4 full. Fiery globes like strippers at a church social. Maraschino cherries. Maraschino, the only foreign word I knew. Not once did I see these cherries employed. Not in a drink, nor on top of a glob of ice cream or just pop one in your mouth. Not one once the same jar there through an entire childhood of dull dinners, bald meat, pocked peas, and see above boiled potatoes. Maybe they came over from the old country family heirlooms or were status symbols bought with a piece of the first paycheck from a sweatshop which beat the pig farmer in Bohemia, Handed down from my grandparents to my parents to someday mine. Then my child's they were beautiful. And if I never ate one, it was because I knew it might be missed or because I knew it would not be replaced. And because you do not eat that which rips your heart with joy.
- [05:59]
B
That was Refrigerator, 1957, by Thomas Lux, which was originally published in the July 28, 1997, issue of the New Yorker. So I just love that poem. That's one of my favorite poems. And I heard Tom read it a few times, luckily, and you did it such honor by reading it Now. I love all the verbs in this poem. You know, mugged, slumming and such company. There's all these moments of something unusual, but also something kind of wise and also wisecracking in the poem. You know, he's able, I think, to get at that wisdom. And I think he kind of insists, both in this poem and others of his poems, that you need almost that kind of sense of. Maraschino's the only foreign word I knew. But also, I'm gonna tell you how it was in this. How's he put it? Just to the right of the middle of the middle door, shelf on fire, lit from within. Red heart red, sexual red, wet neon red, shining red. All these reds, you know, and you can just see it. So visually, how do you think he constructs this poem so that we're right there with him? Which is what I feel when I hear it.
- [07:11]
A
Well, I like you also, in the introduction I'm just gonna quote you back to. You talked about those refrigerator poems and your core belief that good poems make the everyday extraordinary and turn the extraordinary into a daily occurrence. And I think this fridge feels like my fridge growing up. So I think his ability to it can make it present for people who didn't live with this fridge. But I also feel like there were those items that just never left the fridge that were just there on that exact shelf in that exact spot the whole time. But I also like how despite this being daily and there being something dull, that there's also that energy, like all of those reds. And that kind of breaks a rule. I was told about poetry about not repeating the same word. And it feels like he's revising himself in real time, trying to get the. And I love that. And, oh, I love that little simile of, like, strippers at a church social, which I just. I think is so fun. But I also. I love. I think Tom is really good at being pretty funny or wry, and I struggle to be funny in a poem. But I think Tom's also really generous in his poems. And I feel like I tend to try and revise towards generosity because I think I'm relatively chaotic as a person. And so I tend to try and revise towards clarity and think about the reader as somebody that I love and want to include. Because I think sometimes I can be doing weird, you know, back handsprings in a poem with a split landing and really proud of myself for that and forgetting that I want to show somebody something and have them admire these cherries along with me, to connect with me.
- [09:04]
B
Is it admiring, though? It's almost like it's an escape. It's like the closet that goes to Narnia. He opens the fridge and there's this wardrobe that takes him into this other universe. It implied something beyond 1957 for this person seeing into the fridge, who I think is, if not Tom, then very close to him. And I also think there's this kind of the exotic, as he says. And what's exotic in your, you know, Kansas fridge or your. Wherever you are fridge is often quite different. You know, I grew up with foods that I assumed everyone had, like canned preserved figs. That's what we ate, like, on toast or anything. And I thought everyone had that in their fridge, you know. And then I had sort of the opposite of the maraschino cherries, though. There were maraschino cherries, for sure.
- [09:54]
A
Yeah. I didn't know what a fig looked like. I just knew it tasted like a fig Newton. And I ate my first fig in New York. And I was like, oh, yeah.
- [10:03]
B
Like, what are these qualities? Cause there's something about the 50s in this poem, too, I think. I mean, I think there's something about the date, you know, and it's true. Those big old fridges, which I experienced and sounds like you did, too, were vault, like, you know. And I love that he just starts us in the vault. He doesn't, like, say, you know, when I was remembering back and thinking it's like more like a vault. And, of course, there's this sense of death and almost resurrection in the poem that I think is really haunting, but also part of that joy that he's talking about.
- [10:33]
A
Yeah. And I think you feel the childhood of it without some sort of coyness or some sort of trick, you know, like you can feel the childlike voice even without it. It's not trying to use some sort of simplistic vocabulary, but I think it comes down to the. The awe in a way that I feel like an adult doesn't quite awe at these things. And the questions that are asked Feels like it comes from a place of curiosity. Whereas an adult, I don't think, looks at a fridge this way. But yeah, there's something, you know, where you get the sense of a young person in it without a coy little trick to the poem or. Which always ruins it for me when people are too self conscious of the youth of the perspective.
- [11:16]
B
Well, and the best of these, you know, and I'm thinking here of things like Araby or something, you know, by James Joyce. The story where you know more than the narrator knows, right. That you know that he's going to be disappointed. Maybe always. But also in this particular moment of in that story, you know, wanting to go to the Araby and see this festival and this girl he loves. And neither happen or he gets there too late. And here there's a kind of sense of both too late and also like it happening at the same time. Like it's. There's something about it that he's enacting that feeling of awe for us. And some of it's that revising that you're pointing out, which I love the way you put that. But there's also this kind of moments, like not once did I see these cherries employed, which is another great verb. I would say something less good. And then he says, not in a drink, nor on top of a glob of that. Top of a glob. There's that kind of. You can almost feel it being plopped out or scooped. And then it says, or just pop one in your mouth. Not once. And this idea. Or just pop one in your mouth. There's not a person there, but there is. There's this action that is forbidden in this weird way. And that sort of tension. You know, some of it we could say is the 50s, some of it's that family stuff or being young or those things you don't, as he says, touch. And then he, as you say, is kind of generous and turns that into something very unexpected at the end. How do you take the ending?
- [12:45]
A
I always liked the ending because it does surprise me because I would sneak food, especially the special adult food. I was like, they're not gonna miss one. But I love the idea of its sacredness. And I think, you know, I do think about like what was utterly sacred to me, what was untouchable to me, because I think when left unsupervised, as I was as an 80s child, I was constantly looking for what the secrets were in the adult world and wanting that. But I also love that it's a food Poem in which we never taste it. And I think there's something profoundly interesting in that. And I like the list of multiple answers. Because I think often, especially in an interpersonal conflict in my life, the rule is we have to provide three reasons why, if we're in conflict. Because it helps us understand our own fears, our own reasons, our own knowing. And I think it's interesting because I knew it. I knew. And so these are knowings, but there's multiple knowings, right?
- [13:52]
B
It was. Because I love that.
- [13:54]
A
Yeah. So. So I think all of that's just really interesting to me. And where I think, what is that Stendhal quote? A novel is a mirror walking down the road. But a poem is just a mirror crossing the street, I guess. But the ways in which I can identify or see myself and ways in which I don't. And I enjoy that sort of tension of the ways in which, despite being of a different generation and having a slightly different fridge, I can be connected to somebody who, at the time of reading the poem, was a stranger to me and also the same as me. And that's a paradoxical tension that I think is important about so much of literature, is finding those ways in which you see and understand. And also those ways in which I am too selfish of a person. I want to eat that which rips my heart with joy. I want my mouth on it. I'm going to pop a cherry in my mouth. But I love that for him it was sacred, and he would not do that. And I think I've just got too much greed in me, I guess.
- [14:57]
B
Well, but I think by the end, as you point out, he makes it sacred. And I often have to help, especially say my students understand that there's not like a given sacred or something. At least now you have to make it that way. And I think I'm so interested in. And we've talked about it already, how he makes this thing sacred. And some of it's by lending us in on that awe, making us part of that process, that revision, which, of course means seeing again. And there's a kind of sense of vision in the biggest sense in this poem. And I love that. But there's also that sense of history that comes in a way out of nowhere where he says, maybe they came over from the old country family heirlooms and this kind of funny supposition. But it also is talking about the pig farm in Bohemia and his sort of inheritance. What do you make of that turn in the poem? How does that work for you?
- [15:53]
A
I think that's some of the. What we were talking about, like sort of a child's perspective. Like, that is a question. I mean, I guess I could see asking it as an adult. I think, though, I feel curiosity dulls a bit with age. It doesn't have to, but I think that's part of being a poet is how we tune our attention and tune our curiosity, curiosity towards things. But that feels like a question of a child. And so I really love that idea of thinking about how this might have this glowing lit from within item, because I, you know, like those things that are in our households that we wonder about, like it's provenance, or is this what will come to me? I think I, you know, as a child, remembers some of those feelings. But I think we're also learning a little bit about who young Tom or our young speaker was through that question. But it feels like innocent and expansive at the same time. Sure, but I think that's much of imagination's work is something occasionally innocent and expansive.
- [17:04]
B
Well, now telescopes for us a long history into six, eight lines. And that's not easy to do. And it doesn't rely on a kind of shorthand, I feel, which I sometimes see people reach toward. It's hard when you're writing a poem, not to just sort of fill in the blank or use a kind of shortcut. And instead there's a kind of another story here, like a short immigration story that is at the backdrop of at least this experience of the 50s and the Speaker's sense of self and Americanness and belonging. And, you know, these strippers at the church social stick out, but they're also somehow his inheritance. And, you know, there's a humor to that. Of course, we can't be too serious about this idea that he would pass them down many generations. And there's that sense there of, you know, the can and you don't know why you have it, but you're gonna keep that deviled ham or whatever it is till the end of time. But there's something also about it that speaks about the future, I guess, to me when it says to my parents to be someday mine, then my child's. They were beautiful. And they're kind of these reminders of both history, but also this kind of bright, kind of literally bright, bright red future.
- [18:25]
A
And it's interesting. I think food is such an interesting cultural inheritance.
- [18:29]
B
Yes.
- [18:30]
A
And yet these maraschino cherries don't seem particular to, you know, Tom's cultural inheritance. It's more of, like the 1950s cultural inheritance. Where everybody ate a lot of things in Jell O form. But I think too about, like, the way it's more of a cultural contraction. So, like, it's not from, you know, the pig farm in Bohemia. It is from, you know, the grocery store in the US but food we so much associate with. And sometimes I think too about, like, in immigration stories, how sometimes all that remains of a culture is like a side dish that shows up rather than a feature. Or my mom would go to specialty food stores to get things that she remembered from her childhood in Brazil, but she didn't serve those things to us. We still ate meatloaf. Interesting. And so, you know, like thinking about food's connection to culture and history, but how, you know, our fridge and our American culture within that fridge is occasionally. Yeah, that cultural contraction and how we learn to fit in at those church socials and those, you know, everybody brings their casserole with tater tots on top in the Midwest.
- [19:42]
B
They absolutely.
- [19:43]
A
Yeah, they sure do.
- [19:44]
B
Specialty. And, you know, I think what's interesting is this idea of comfort food, of course, which, you know, might be redundant, almost like food should have some level of comfort, but there's this quality, I think, of those cherries being that and not that. And then the other things in the fridge, we haven't spoken of those. But this is not a place to go in hope or hunger, you know, like dispirited, drained, mugged, you know, And I love this moment. And this is the kind of thing that I think tomorrow does so well. See, above, boiled potatoes, he has this way he's self aware throughout the poem. That helps, you know, it's a poem which brings me to sort of one of my last questions, which is, do you think this is a poem about poetry? And if so, what is poetry? Is it artist poetic in that way? And if so, are the cherries poetry?
- [20:45]
A
Well, while I let the back of my brain work on that, I also just want to give a shout out for the adjectives in the poem. Cause bald meat. Oh, my God, I'm so jealous I didn't write that pocked peas. I was like, oh, man, I've eaten those overcooked peas.
- [20:57]
B
Yes, me too.
- [20:57]
A
Oh, my gosh.
- [20:58]
B
Probably from a can.
- [20:59]
A
Yeah. Yes. And so I think so much of the word choice is just gorgeous and wonderful, perfect, and teaches us something through these small choices. Because I think the way two words push up against each other is some of the friction that makes the heat and these little sparks that go off throughout, even while it seems immediately accessible and Words that we know, the way they're put together just lights up my brain. I mean, I've heard the theory that all poems are essentially an ars poetica, and I think so. I get asked a lot, especially in my role as a state laureate, to like define poetry, and I just steal the one that goes around social media all the time where like a second or third grader defined it as a poem is an egg with a horse inside it. Because I still think that anything that is something small with something large inside it is a poem. Which is why I think poems ultimately are also experiences. And there's that, oh gosh, I think it's a toy derekot quote that says the poem is always there. You just have to hold out the net to receive it. And language becomes that net around that ineffable thing within your day, within your life, that you just sort of build a net around to try and see the unseeable and say the unsayable. And so I think I hope I'm experiencing a dozen poems a day, and occasionally I'm smart enough to notice that's what I'm experiencing. Because I do think ultimately I'm always working with students too, to stop trying to get to a poem's meaning and get to the poem's experience.
- [22:38]
B
Right.
- [22:39]
A
Because I think that's how they're meant to be engaged with.
- [22:43]
B
That's right.
- [22:44]
A
We don't want an ex vivo. We don't want like a corpse that we're dissecting. We want an in vivo thing. We want to be. It still needs to stay alive while we're experiencing it. And I think, like, just like any intimacy with the person, there's ways in which you can deeply see and know and understand meaning, and also ways in which it will resist you. And thank goodness it does that even with a generous poem, we might not fully unpack all of its knowing and all of its secrets. Because I think that mystery is a big piece of why I enjoy poetry is because so much of the world can be googled and Alexa or Siri or somebody can tell me the answer. And I just like to be inside that sort of negative capability thing. You know, where John Keats wrote his brother about, like, you don't work a poem out. A poem is like a lake. You don't jump into the lake to solve the lake or immediately swim to the other shore. You go to luxuriate in the waters and the sun. And I think that's what I like about a little bit of the resistance of a poem to My knowing is that I just want to be inside its waters.
- [23:54]
B
So. Well said. So the answer to my question is no, it ain't an olive. I mean, maybe you gave such a beautiful answer to that, which is kind of a like, you know, said we ask that of all poems. I have another question, though, that brings to mind, which is about mystery. Because I feel like for a long time we've really been thinking about, I think, false opposites, accessibility, say, or something like that. And I really literally have been thinking about mystery all the time now. Because I think we've, as a collective, we have done a pretty good job of helping people understand that poetry is some of the things you're talking about. But I think we've also. And that it's not like, horrible or something you can never perceive or it's filled with tricks. You know, I was taught almost like a poem won't, you know, if you could crack it open. You're doing good a little like what William Stafford said, like boiling a watch to see how it works, you know, like that's what you don't want to do with a poem. But at the same time, I'm so happy to hear you acknowledge mystery because I think it isn't the opposite of understanding. I think it's actually part of how we understand poems is that they operate with some mystery. Or maybe another word is music that we can hear and we experience, but we don't have to know every single note of. To enjoy. And I think that's really important. It doesn't mean that the more you know about music, the less you enjoy it. In fact, I think it's the opposite. But there is a pleasure to just having it wash over you and to laughing and enjoying it. And this is the kind of poem to me that. That, as you said, there isn't anything that can't be apprehended. But there's surprise all the time.
- [25:35]
A
I'm so grateful all the time for poems and revisiting poems. And they're short enough that 10 minutes in your morning you can go back to people that you've read dozens of times before and see what else it has to reveal to you. Because even in all the arrogance of my 20s, I still could see that poets of other generations knew things that I didn't know yet. But I was listening to the stories, even if I didn't know fully how to appreciate what they were teaching me. And I think some of what this poem teaches me, you know, in my 20s, I don't think I fully got it, but revisiting it in my 40s, I feel like I'm seeing something different. My friend calls writing a poem a tithe against loneliness. And I think that I am so grateful for people being willing to share these parts of their lives with me, with strangers, you know, to whisper in the dark and trust that somebody's awake inside the Girl Scout cabin, also listening to them whisper their secrets to the dark. And so I like the wisdom in it. That again, feels like 20 years ago I got it, but today I got it differently. And I really like that you can keep turning some of these beauties over and there's many ways of knowing. But I think also most of the art I enjoy, I don't know what key I'm singing in when I sing along in the car, I don't know when I go to a lot of museums, the history of the art that I'm looking at. But I'm willing to surrender into the experience of it and let my curiosity be a piece of that experience rather than pull up an app on my phone and learn about that period of art history, which also is fine. But I think we need more practices that help us ask new questions and help us sit in our own unknowing rather than constantly needing Ciri's or Alexa's answer to that thing.
- [27:32]
B
More from my conversation with Tracy Brimhall after the break.
- [27:39]
A
If you're a reader or even an aspirational reader, I hope you'll join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here.
- [27:51]
B
And because we're culture critics, we just love to go back to the text.
- [27:55]
A
Yes. So if books are for you, Critics at Large just might be for you as well. Join us on Critics at Large from the New Yorker every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [28:10]
B
Tracy, welcome back.
- [28:12]
A
Thanks, Kevin.
- [28:13]
B
Now, in our January 1, 2018 issue, the new Yorker published your poem, Love Poem without a Drop of Hyperbole in It, which you'll read for us in a minute. Is there anything we need to know before hearing?
- [28:26]
A
Might be interesting to know that initially the poem had an epigraph by Oscar Wilde that said, without hyperbole there can be no love.
- [28:35]
B
Excellent. Here's Tracy Brimhall reading her poem, Love Poem without a Drop of Hyperbole in It.
- [28:44]
A
Love Poem without a Drop of Hyperbole in it. I love you like ladybugs love windowsills, love you like sperm whales love squid. There's no depth I wouldn't follow you through. I love you like the pawns in chess love aristocratic horses I'll throw myself in front of a bishop or a queen for you Even a sentient castle. My love is crazy like that. I like that sweet little hothouse mouth you have. I like to kiss you with tongue, with gusto, with socks still on. I love you like a vulture loves the careless deer at the roadside. I want to get all up in you. I love you like Isis loved Osiris but her devotion came up a few inches short. I'd train my breath and learned to read sonar until I retrieved every lost blood vessel of you. I swear this love is ungodly not an ounce of suffering in it like salmon and its upstream itch I'll dodge grizzlies for you like hawks in skyscraper rooftops I'll keep coming back maddened, a little hopeless, Embarrassingly in love and that's why I'm on the couch kissing pictures on my phone instead of calling you in from the kitchen where you are undoubtedly making dinner too spicy. But when you hold the spoon to my lips and ask if it's ready, I'll say it is always but never there is never enough.
- [30:15]
B
That was Love poem without a Drop of Hyperbole in it by Tracy Brimhall. So this idea of hyperbole, I mean the poem has changed so differently by the title, which I love this title because at one point Am like, this isn't hyperbole. I'm like, it's full of hyperbole. Was that some of what you wanted with the title and the Once Upon a Time epigraph?
- [30:39]
A
Yeah. So I think this is the first love poem I've written. It took me four books of zip lining sadness to get to a love poem. And the first time I felt like. I like to think I'm kind of funny in real life, but I feel like this is the first time I felt like I was cracking a joke in a poem. But it was that quote by Oscar Wilde that was kind of a key into something because I think for so long I trafficked in my own traumas and heartbreaks and sadnesses because it feels like vulnerability to other people. But raised in a household that was very trauma forward and whoever has the biggest crisis gets the attention and a sort of competitive suffering Olympics.
- [31:24]
B
Wow.
- [31:24]
A
I felt very comfortable leading with tragedy, with trauma, with something deeply personal in a sad way. And for me, the most vulnerable thing in the world was to be like, oh my God, I like you. Do you like me? Too. Like, that feels more vulnerable to me and has more potential embarrassment or humiliation or whatever in it than, you know, look at this terrible thing that happened to me. But approaching it through hyperbole, through exaggeration and the exaggerations that love makes you feel and that still feel so true to you with your oxytocin drip on, like, that was sort of a way in of, like, if you exaggerate and play, the sort of humor of it and exaggeration of it will help me get away with the vulnerability that I'm risking in saying, I like you so much. But, yeah, for years, like, when people would ask me to share a poem that I loved, I always picked love poems. I loved to read them, I love to copy them, I love to share them. But I didn't write them because they were much harder for me than, you know, look at this meanie who broke my heart, or look at this bad thing that happened in childhood.
- [32:35]
B
Right.
- [32:36]
A
And so this was, despite it, not on the surface, looking risky. It was risky for me in those ways. And I am really proud that there is the Isis and Osiris few inches short. I felt deeply proud that I could sneak a phallic joke into the New Yorker. And I was like, did they know? Did they see it? Did they read it?
- [32:59]
B
Well, I love this. You managed to get both myth and the everyday. And we were kind of talking about that with the Tom Lux. Like, was that something you were well aware of? Or is that just, you know, how the emotions came out? Or do you think the best love poems sort of always do that?
- [33:14]
A
I think most of our love is experienced in the everyday. And so I think it's important that the everyday, you know, making out with your socks on, like, should show up in a poem.
- [33:25]
B
Yeah.
- [33:26]
A
And I think that, you know, that's where most of the magic is. But I think when I was younger, I was more drawn to the intense and the extreme and certainly sought out more intensity and extremity. And realizing that the magic of life is in how I spend each day has been one of the lessons that poetry has helped affirm for me. Because a lot of magic of love, I mean, it's not tax season and folding laundry. You don't think. And yet any long love story is going to have, you know, taxes and laundry in it. It's gonna have wearing each other's T shirts as long as they fit. It's gonna have those, like, small, daily things in it. And it'll have the adventures and the intensity, but it will also have the everyday, the social media tests of how does that person peel an orange for you? Or do they. Does that person pay attention to the bird when you ask them to look at the bird.
- [34:27]
B
Tests?
- [34:28]
A
These are real tests that are popular on social media.
- [34:30]
B
Yeah, I don't know. I'd rather have. I'll dodge grizzlies for you like hawks and skyscraper rooftops. I'll keep coming back mad and a little hopeless, embarrassingly in love. And it's those three, last three perhaps, that I think you do so well, you know, and so much more accurate, as you say, this sort of domesticity, the pleasure of the everyday, it really champions that. But also maddened, a little hopeless, embarrassing. You know, it's not afraid to risk those parts of, you know, affection that aren't always, if not reciprocated, then a little hopeless, then a little bit like embarrassing, as you say.
- [35:10]
A
Cause I think one of the great risks of love is this sense that can you ever equally love and be loved in that dynamic? Is somebody always a little bit more in love and is that the better role or is that an embarrassing and humiliating role to be the one who loves a little bit more than maybe feels reciprocated?
- [35:31]
B
Have you figured that out yet? Have you answered that question for us?
- [35:35]
A
I feel in a long, good love, you take turns with somebody being maybe a little bit more in the hormone soup at a different time than you. But you take turns being the one who's like, ah, look at them. And the other person's like, I got a deadline. Because it's hard to be in hormone soup when you've got a deadline. It's true, but I think, yeah, I think it takes turns, hopefully.
- [36:00]
B
Well, I think you captured that at the end of the poem. And I think, honestly, I would love the poem if it was the first, like 2/3 or 3/4. But then it's that last bit that makes me. Just sends it over the top to me because it isn't part of that hyperbole or the lovely repetition of I love you, which we could get into because it's pretty risky to say in a poem, I love you, I love you, I love you. But at the same time it says, and that's why I'm on the couch kissing pictures on my phone instead of calling you in from the kitchen. And I love that presence and absence that's there and this self awareness that's very modern and right now kissing your phone. But it also has this kind of quality of, you know, knowing and like sharing and this idea of dinner too spicy. I love that. And this kind of extended moment of when you hold the spoon to my lips and ask if it's ready. And that's a great break. And you have great breaks throughout. But here I'll say it is always, but never there is never enough. And it's a little like we were talking in the Lux poem about enacting this process of discovery or awe. And that's what I feel like happens at the end, is there's this revelation both to us as the readers of the poem, the hearers of the poem, but also it feels like almost to the speaker. Were you thinking of that?
- [37:29]
A
Gosh, I do know I used the two forbidden words in that last line. We're not supposed to say always or never.
- [37:37]
B
I want to get your rule book because you have a better rulebook than I had. I probably. It has more rules, and also they're clearer than mine.
- [37:47]
A
So I know I used. And also they're both eternal words, ultimately, and their ongoingness. But, like, I know what it felt like to feel it more than I remember what it felt like to write it. Yes, I am lucky enough that I think love is teaching me how to enact it all the time. And I think where we ended our last conversation, too, that if love is a version of Ars poetica, if poetry and love are kin words, then I think love is what I'm bringing to poems. I think all the time, even if it isn't obvious, I think love is what I want to do best in my life. But I also think loving poetry is included in that. I think poetry lets me love it in a way that humans would be like, yo, we gotta take a day off of this. This is a lot. Yeah, but to be in service of it, too, and to. I think poetry has given me more than I've given it, even while I try to do it justice when I, you know, engage in that practice of writing. But I remember realizing there was, despite all the boundaries that are important in a loving relationship, regardless of its type, even here, you know, again, person's not even there. I'm just kissing the phone because that's annoying. Somebody's trying to make dinner, and you just want to live up on them. And you're like, this is not the koala moment. This is not what I need right now. But realizing just how much more love I'm capable of all the time is a real wonder to me. And experiencing that in a romantic way was really profound to me. Realizing just how much I could care about a Person and give to a person so willingly and joyfully was a great way to feel and still is wonderful.
- [39:44]
B
I want to ask. It leads to me to ask you about being the poet lord of Kansas. We have Kansas in common. You know, I'm sometimes a Kansas poet, certainly from the Topeka school of poetry. I'm curious how that's been. And how do you think about this sort of legacy of poetry in Kansas.
- [40:04]
A
Say, I really quite like it because I don't make myself the focus of my laureateship. I don't see it as an opportunity for me to read my poems to people. I see it as an opportunity to help people fall in love with poetry. And I teach your ode to the Midwest when I go around and talk about food poems with people. But I like being of service. I like caring about people. And I think poetry is a really, for me, satisfying way to care about people. I like that a lot of what I talk about when I go around is that sort of idea of how our attention is a form of prayer or can be. And, you know, going back to, you know, the refrigerator poem and the cherries, I've focused all of my laureateship on poems connected to food in some way. I'm gonna do the thing where I quote you back to you, but you said, I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain, and that's where food comes from. So there's this common link. So I have, because Kansas, I think it's the seventh largest food producer in the US and yet we experience pretty high food insecurity here, too. There's a disconnect between what we make and create as a state versus how the people are faring within their communities and thinking about how the arts might also provide a social good, but that connection to the sun and the dirt and the rain. If I go around and share food poems with people, there's often a link where people are transported to, you know, being with the land, if they work with the land, or they're connected to their families or their communities. The kitchen table, like, has a strong. Again, there might be a cultural history there or a community connection. I'm somebody who. I am a grief chef. I cook a lot of my mom's recipes at important times to keep her with me. And so I think food is also, yeah, what poems are made of these emotions, these ties to community, this relationship to the senses, all of those things. You know, people, again, are experiencing that all the time, but they forget that they're living their poems And I, during COVID lockdown, I was journaling my five senses because time was kind of squishy and I couldn't keep track of it very well. So every night I would, you know, I would start with taste, because that gave me a limited amount of memories to pull from. But as I wrote about taste, I would remember, like, the smell of garlic and onions hitting the butter in the pan. And then I would be thinking about, like, oh, gosh, and that, like, the papery outside of the clove, and then the inside of the clove is slippery and how do I describe that? And then everything ended up being. I was just writing about food all the time. And by the time I got my cutting board the next night, I wouldn't be thinking about my to do list or the emails or laundry needing to be switched over to the dryer. I was just deeply in the present tense. And I think that's also the goal of poetry and the goal of food is to be exactly where you are. And so that's a big piece of what I'm trying to share with people is, even if they aren't writing about it, to notice in their day, to tune their attention to those moments where the sky is just serving Kansas in a way that no other sky does. Right. It's just like those charismatic clouds, those gorgeous colors, or the food in front of you. Just like, really take in the whole flavor of it. Talk to the person across from you. Those things that help us be exactly where we are, whether it turns into line breaks and stanzas or it's just something you then share at the table with others that we in the practice of noticing and the practice of sharing that noticing with others is what's most important to me about sharing poetry in Kansas as laureate.
- [44:06]
B
Beautifully put, Tracy. Thank you so much for talking with us today.
- [44:11]
A
Yeah, thank you for having me.
- [44:14]
B
Love poem without a Drop of Hyperbole in It by Tracy Brimhall, as well as Thomas Lux's refrigerator, 1957, can be found on new yorker.com and in the anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025. Out now. Thomas Lux's last book was to the Left of Time. Tracy Brimhall's latest collection is Love Prodigal.
- [44:41]
A
To listen to new poetry from the New Yorker, as well as narrated fiction, reporting, criticism and more. To 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 Doe. Thanks for listening.
- [45:30]
B
From prx.