Erika Meitner Reads Philip Levine
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everything for a fraction of the price. Sign up today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. 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 choose 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.

The poems we're featuring today also appear in the anthology A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925 to 2025, available for purchase from the New Yorker store or wherever you buy books. Today, my guest is Erika Meitner, whose books include Useful Junk and Holy Moly Carry Me, which won the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry.

She's currently a Mandel Institute Cultural Leadership Program Fellow, and she's the director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Erica, welcome. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me, Kevin. Now, the first poem you've chosen to read is What Work Is by Philip Levine. What was it about this poem that caught your eye? So there's so many things about this poem that I love.

Back when I was about 15, I bought a used copy for 25 cents of A. Poulin Jr.'s contemporary American poetry from a library sale. And in reading through the poems in that anthology, which was one of the first times I encountered living poets...

This poem stood out to me as, first of all, I didn't know poetry could be so narrative and so accessible. And so there's something about this poem. It has hidden complexities, but it's really easy to access. And it has a particular kind of working class anger that I really love about it. Phil Levine, in some ways, I feel like is, you know, I didn't know him personally, but he feels sort of like a

a poetry forbearer for me or somebody who opened up permission for me to be able to write in a more narrative way, in a more straightforward way, in an accessible way. And so this poem really speaks to me for that reason and for its anger, for its ability to hold anger in a really particular kind of way and direct it in various ways. And also its ability to hold love, overwhelming love,

The other sort of weird thing is that I work in documentary poetic modes also. And my first big documentary poetry project was a project on Detroit in about 2007 through 9, so right before and during bankruptcy. And I was sent on commission by Virginia Quarterly Review to report on the city in verse with a photographer and a radio journalist.

And I ended up sending that project to Phil Levine and he wrote back to me and I still have his note on my shelf. And I still remember he said, you write with so much energy and pluck. Pluck, that's high praise. Right? He ended up writing me a really nice note about my poems when I sent him my whole book. And, um,

That became a sort of nice little interesting correspondence. Excellent. Well, why don't we hear the poem? Here's Erica Meitner reading What Work Is by Philip Levine. What work is. We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park for work. You know what work is. If you're old enough to read this, you know what work is. Although you may not do it, forget you. This is about waiting.

Shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair. Blurring your vision. Until you think you see your own brother ahead of you. Maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers. And of course it's someone else's brother. Narrower across the shoulders than yours. But with the same sad slouch. The grin that does not hide the stubbornness.

The sad refusal to give in to rain. To the hours wasted waiting. To the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, no, we're not hiring today for any reason he wants. You love your brother. Now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother who's not beside you or behind or ahead.

Because he's home, trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders?

Opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek. You've never done something so simple, so obvious. Not because you're too young or too dumb. Not because you're jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man. No, just because you don't know what work is.

That was What Work Is by Philip Levine, which was originally published in the March 12th, 1990 issue of The New Yorker. I loved hearing you read that poem. It's so complex. You had talked about it sort of welcoming qualities, but it actually starts with a kind of kiss off, with a kind of welcoming you and then saying, you don't know what work is, forget you. I love that kind of

mix of bringing in with the we and then turning it on this you who is kind of kicked out of the poem. The rest of the poem proceeds without the you, though, of course, the you kind of continues and becomes almost an I. What do you make of that, like, kind of forget you that starts the poem off? I'm so interested in that moment.

the forget you because it kicks the reader out of the poem. Like if you re-enter the poem after that as a reader, it's because you're kind of okay with that anger of the poet saying like, this isn't for you. And you're like, okay, but I'm going to keep reading. It's so interesting when I was rereading this poem, which I hadn't read in a while, I had remembered the forget you.

But then I totally had forgotten that it's not in first person, that there is this remove of the second person. And it struck me as really integral to the poem by the time you get to the end. Sure. Because the inner narrative in here, it's about work, but it's about art making. It's about passion. It's about, you know, money, job versus vocation. Wow. I love that.

And that was something I realized by the end, that that you, Phil Levine was implicating himself in kicking that you out of the poem in some way with that ending of the poem.

With the end where he says, you've never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you're too young or too dumb, not because you're jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man. No, it almost protests too much. But then it says, just because you don't know what work is. And so you think of that you as Levine in some way. Yeah, that he's implicating himself in saying, no.

I as an artist haven't gotten to the place my brother is at right now. Interesting. Practicing German singing this Wagner like I'm not quite there yet.

or doesn't see himself yet in that version of a working artist, and also hasn't worked the night shift at Cadillac. It's kind of like both in some ways. Interesting. In this poem, at least, art is work, and work is art. Yeah. And there's no inspiration in this poem. Interesting. Well, don't you think also waiting is an art, he's saying? And if you don't know it, you've lost something. You've missed something.

And I think there isn't enough poetry that tells us, hey, you're missing out. You know, often we're like including people in our poems. And in a way, this poem is saying, actually, you can't catch up. Like you either know this or you don't know this. And this poem isn't for you if you don't know what work is, as he says in the end. Yeah. As you're speaking, there are two things that occur to me. One is that waiting, it's a skill of mimetic learning, right?

So it's something you learn to do because you do it. Like if you're ever dragged on an errand as a kid to the bank back when you had to like go to the bank in person or wait in a doctor's office. And there's so many other poems about waiting. Galway Cannell's poem, Wait.

And I'm thinking of like In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop. Like there's so many older, like sort of last generation poems about waiting because it was something you had to do with no device. You just had to like memetically learn to wait. When you had to learn oneself in those moments in some way, I think he's saying. And I love those other examples, the bishop and the canal. And there's something about Levine's

brute realism about the world, which requires also, you know, bitterness, anger, things that we don't always allow in poems maybe, but also this humor that I think gets you through. And that way it kind of isn't quite the blues you hum while you're waiting, but it has that kind of quality of tears and kisses and affection and defiance. And maybe that's what I land on in the end. There's a kind of defiance throughout the poem.

Yeah, and I think what you said about having to confront the self when you are waiting is what happens to him in this welling up of emotion that he's never going to express, but expresses in the poem. Like he's able to tell his brother he loved him indirectly by writing it into the poem. Right. But it's clear he isn't able to do that in person. Right.

Well, I guess the question is this you makes it also have you, you know, has the reader done that? When's the last time you did that? And he's suggesting almost that this is another kind of work that we have to do, that this emotional work, an overused phrase perhaps, but I think a useful one in this poem, you know, the work of trying to say how you feel, you know, and that's what's

What I admire about the poem ultimately is he's suggesting that it also comes down to love of each other somehow. Yeah, and I think giving attention to this kind of working class moment was something up until this poem I hadn't seen a whole lot of poems that talked about work in this particular way. Yeah.

One of the things I ended up doing when I was in Detroit interviewing people is I interviewed Lolita Hernandez, who is the very first woman to work on the Cadillac line in Detroit. And she was amazing. And while I was interviewing her, I was thinking of this poem in my head. But Phil Levine obviously went on to not be an auto worker. Right.

And this poem reminds me of not only of every terrible job I've ever had, but also that I should call my sister and tell her that I love her. Right. And so I think in that way, the choose your own adventure kind of you that also speaks directly to the reader becomes a kind of call to action. Yeah.

But also as the reader, I found myself getting defensive, right? You don't know what work is. So I immediately thought of every like shitty job I've ever had. Right. You started listing them in your head. Yeah. And I'm really kind of, you know, as a poet who includes things like Walmart in my work or other things that for years I kept thinking I couldn't write about, like the local strip mall thing.

because it wasn't poetic. I appreciate this poem so much, and I think this is part of the reason I gravitated towards it again for this, was because it doesn't iron out either the internal monologue, the anger, or the circumstances, which are something we would think of normally as non-poetic. I love how you put that. I also want to ask you about

The poetic and the non-poetic. Is that something you think about? Because I think in your work, which we'll turn to in a minute, you often are thinking about, you know, as you said, not just the local strip mall or something, but also thinking about current events and topics. I wonder if you give us a little insight into how you approach that.

You know, it's interesting. I'm always really drawn towards poets who let the world into their work in every possible way. And I think one of the revelations of doing this documentary poetry project I was talking about earlier in Detroit was, you know, at that time, a lot of photographers were going down to Detroit to photograph the quote unquote ruins of Detroit to the point where they started coming up with a name for it. They called it ruin porn.

And there was a lot of criticism by Detroit residents of the ways in which photographers were framing their photos to make it seem like Detroit was only a decrepit place in decline, that there was no life there. And I had this kind of poetic revelation when I went down to look at Cass Tech High School, which they were literally dissembling at that point, both brick by brick and then demolishing. And it's a very famous high school, like Diana Ross went there, like all these...

Famous musicians and cultural icons went there. And if you panned your camera over about 50 feet, you would see the new like $20 million Kastak High School directly next to the ruins of the old one. But no one widened their frame that much.

And I kept thinking about this concept of like, what do we leave out of the frame poetically? Because when I'm having a revelation or in a moment of crisis, it's not like on a scenic mountaintop. I'm like in my car in the strip mall that has the Old Navy, the Marshalls and the Bed Bath and Beyond. That's the same strip mall you've had in any place you've ever lived before.

And those things weren't in my poems. And I started putting them back in, in the same way that Phil Levine has the people waiting online for someone to mercurially decide whether or not they get work that day. More from my conversation with Erica Meitner after the break. Erica, welcome back. Thanks, Kevin.

Now, in our October 4th, 2021 issue, The New Yorker published your poem, To Gather Together, which we'll hear you read in a moment. Do you want to tell us anything about the poem first? Anything that might be helpful for our listeners? Sure. I wrote this poem in the sort of post-vaccination, but still pretty early pandemic where we were like just coming out of lockdown. It must have been 2021, right?

And we were all still trying to figure out kind of how to human again. Here's Erica Meitner reading her poem, To Gather Together. To gather together. It is not yet after the pandemic, but most of us have bared our faces in public. Most of us are a little haptic, though we remain somewhat wary of strangers merging in enclosures. And what does it mean to gather, to take up from a resting place?

We are so tired. We are uncovered and mustering strength. Never mind my mother's post-stroke slurred speech and vertigo. Her ear crystals misaligned. Her neck brace. We are survivors of the panic wars. We are reaching new conclusions intuitively from inferences about hugging. My radar is broken. I'm not sure where to put all my limbs.

When they're tangled with yours, it's not a problem. Your failing configurations of attention. My bad knees. To draw fabric into puckers. Pleated pants. Rumpled sheets. Your fingers hooked in my underpants. And we bring together all the parts of ourselves to embrace. Haul in our bodies. To harvest like clusters of ripened cherry tomatoes still warm from the sun.

Forget the kale stripped bare by bright green cabbage worms congregating on thick stems. To summon everyone back to this abundant and skeletal planet after we've jettisoned the billionaires into space, we celebrate the launch with tiny coupes of champagne.

To throw open the doors and host guests and board packed planes where everyone is cranked and cranky about proximity still. But look at the skyline, clutches of buildings reaching for billows of clouds. To assemble in a sequence for binding, somewhere past contact tracing. Gather is a transitive verb. That was To Gather Together by Erica Meitner.

Well, I love hearing you read this poem. And I remember it running in that moment you mentioned, sort of still pandemic, but also maybe a moment of can we get on a plane? Can things open up?

what's possible. And I feel like this poem really captures that moment, but also a kind of broader sense of gathering that I think maybe the poem talks about has decayed somewhat. And I love that you also use some of the we and the you that's in the Levine. How are you thinking about this we that starts the poem and then this you that for me hearing it again, it's still a surprise to have this you come that I think feels so intimate and personal.

Yeah, I think the we is an all-encompassing we. It's all of us. And I think that was something that was interesting to me during the pandemic was that everyone had a very different level of comfort in terms of contact, in terms of being in crowds, in terms of eating inside, eating outside, being masked, being not masked. And that we, I think, is...

a collective. It felt very collective to me to try to articulate what that moment is. And it's interesting being so far on the other side of the pandemic, how strange the we feels to me now, even though I was definitely writing a collective that I was included in. And then I was thinking about the you in this poem as the people in your bubble, the people that you are

very intimate with or even became too intimate with because you were trapped in the house only with them. Sure. Well, it feels like a beloved, but also a little like there's, it's broken up this we by this, these lines, which I think are so great and a little bit funny. My radar is broken. I'm not sure where to put all my limbs when they're tangled with yours. It's not a problem.

And so there's this kind of shift between the self being a little bit unmoored, the radar being broken, and then this you that it feels like is a point of connection. But then there's your failing configurations of attention, my bad knees, like there's still this hollowing out a little bit.

Yeah, bodies, man. They're complicated and fall apart. Well, of course, these are moments where they were threatened very much by pandemic, by a worldwide pandemic that we all went through, but all experience, as you point out, in different ways. How do you think about this haul in our bodies? I love that idea. There was something about...

I have a lot of trouble articulating this because it's like, you know, often we write a poem because it articulates the thing we can't articulate when we're talking about it. But there was something about, for me at least, needing to overcome a certain fear to bring your body into community with other bodies, whether it was getting on a plane at that time or going to the supermarket or other things. Sure.

And I think of that sort of like hauling in of your body as like a getting yourself together with like an internal armor to go out in a certain way. I think there's a kind of...

But also, as you've just said, getting yourself together, like the gathering together isn't just us all coming together, but also the self saying, I got to get it together. You know, there's almost getting it together in there. I love the title for that reason. It kind of has these little slippages. And I think that's,

Then what's interesting is these twos, to draw, to harvest, to summon, you know, are these possibilities? Are these orders? Are these what get us there? Or is it like a meditation on these aspects of gathering? That's a great question. I think of the twos as transitive in a particular way, not as an imperative thing.

Right. But as like things were kind of moving through, if that makes sense. Sure. And is that how you see the ending? Which I love because you return us to language, which is partially what is being threatened in the end. It's the body, it's the self, but there's also this kind of language that I feel like is trying to describe life.

as you said, this particular moment that is both unique and also feels elemental. Yeah, I think I was thinking about us moving into, through, and past this moment of fear. Like contact tracing is so interesting to me because it's a form of gathering, but a terrifying, you know, like you're trying to figure out who you came in contact with to make sure that you haven't given them anything. Right, or vice versa, I suppose. Yeah.

Yeah. And so like that, I don't know if you remember in the earlier days of the pandemic, they had an app in certain states. Yeah. And it would ding. You'd be sitting at lunch with someone outside, you know, 20 feet away. And then their thing would ding. And you're like, oh, three days ago or a week ago. Oh, no. Like, what is happening?

But yeah, that's another way. It was another way of gathering that was fraught with... It was data gathering, right? Sure. But it connected us all and was fraught with danger. I wrote this poem fairly soon after I had been... Let me back up. Sure. My mother had a stroke during the pandemic, and I wasn't able to see her until I was able to get a vaccination. Wow. And that was in the spring of...

It must have been the spring of 2021, like in April or May, I finally was able to get vaccinated and get on a plane and go to New York. And it just struck me when I'd look at the skyline, and this was back when the streets of New York were still pretty empty, that the buildings were gathered together and in proximity and crowded in a particular way.

When my mother read this poem in The New Yorker, she was really upset with me instead of being proud of me because she said, everyone's going to think I'm infirm. And that was really distressing to her. And she's recovered from the stroke, luckily. But that was a real kind of feature of my pandemic of having my mother have this stroke and then not being able to see her or care for her or go help her. Right.

And it, I think, informed this poem a lot. Yeah. You've covered so much in the poem. And even talking about it, we have the mother's stroke, which I think stands in for a lot of what you're saying. I mean, there's so much loss just outside this poem, thinking about unprecedented loss

But then there's also this quality, I think, of the pandemic, of that moment. I think people now are starting to look back. And, you know, having done the Century of Poetry and The New Yorker, I looked back on sort of recent, recent history and the ways that poets were in the moment trying to write about the moment. And this poem actually even says that. It starts with, it is not yet after the pandemic. So it's still trying in the midst to say it continuously.

Can you tell us about that moment now, looking back? Does it seem like a moment that you were trying to write about in different ways? Or was this your only poem that you felt addressed that? Are we all writing in this moment? You know, it's interesting. I don't actually have a whole lot of other pandemic poems. I have maybe one or two others.

That might have been because I was desperately trying to work full time and homeschool my children because all the schools were shut for so long by us. But I think now the pandemic poems are starting to come out and be published in book length. But actually during the pandemic, Rick Barrow published a little chapbook that then became his book, Moving the Bones. And there are these little prose poems, a big chunk of the book that start out during the pandemic, which

And all the poems start out that way. And they were the most moving poems. Rick was able to articulate something about the kind of isolation of the pandemic that I've not been able to, I think, articulate. And it's something that was very moving to me and in part moving

inspired the beginning of this poem? Well, I think it really captures something about the we and that sense of to throw open the doors and host guests and board-packed planes where everyone is cranked and cranky about proximity still. And all those sounds, the P sounds, the cranked and cranky

But look at the skyline, which you mentioned. That kind of moment of suddenly we are on this plane. It feels the soaring quality of the end. You also have this idea of assembling and gathering that I know is something you're thinking about because it titles your forthcoming book, which Milkweed is set to publish next year and is called Assembled Audience. Could you tell us a little bit about assemblage and the book as a whole?

Yeah, I became really interested in part through writing this poem about the different ways that we assemble, whether it's in prayer, in protest, just on the beach hanging out, and, you know, in grief and in mourning and in joy. And the title of my next book was actually inspired by a Terrence Simon installation of the same name, which is just a dark room and you walk in and it's recordings of people clapping.

And if you sit in it long enough, it takes on a sort of joyful quality that then moves to kind of insidiousness. And so I was thinking a lot about the ways we come together. And particularly in the poem, To Gather Together, it was just at the cusp of people. I still remember so clearly people were getting so angry with each other on airplanes in that moment.

Because they were scared, but like no one remembered how to human and how to connect. And I'm not saying we're like doing a great job of it now, maybe. Right. But there is a particular relearning. And I think anybody who's raised children through the pandemic, through different developmental phases also, has seen how that isolation has impacted them in different ways. Absolutely. Yeah.

And so either your teenagers got really weird or your little kids like shot out of the door like pinballs when they were finally able to play with their friends again. And so I think that was a really formative experience for me in figuring out what happens when we're in community with each other and then when we're not able to be in community with each other.

Well, and I think some would say we've lost, you know, you say how to human, but how to community, like how to make connection in a different way. I do think our poems are certainly changed. I'm not sure we know exactly how. And one of the things I was hoping to do with the anthology is at least frame the book through these big, fairly contemporary events from 9-11 to pandemic and the poems that

bridge that in the anthology, I hope, take us on a little bit of a journey through those contemporary things. And then, you know, the span of the book is 100 years. So you get to see that this isn't the only thing that poetry has thought about in the 100 years, of course, there's been other moments of crisis and cataclysm. And one of the things I came to understand is the ways that poetry

has to talk about now as a way of talking about forever. And I think I knew that, but to see it written up close through a hundred years was really, at least for me, a transformative experience. I love that, that it has to say that again. I love that so much. It has to talk about now in order to talk about forever. You have to be both timely and timeless, and the best poems do that.

Well, how does some of this focus on the contemporary, what life is rather than what work is? How does it make its way into your new book or your most recent work? Yeah, so my new book, a lot of the poems are about eco-apocalypse and environmental destruction. A lot of them have to do with coastal environment. Because I wrote a lot of the book actually during the pandemic,

And my children were home all the time. The only way I was able to get writing done was to go to residencies. And I was lucky enough to have a residency at a place called the Hermitage, which is on the coast of Florida, the Gulf Coast, in an endangered loggerhead turtle nesting area that's also in the bullseye of hurricanes pretty regularly. So there was beach erosion everywhere.

There was endangered species. There was red tide. There was constantly enterococcus warnings that would come through the local news media. If you went out to swim, you kind of had to check the forecast. And sometimes it could be the most beautiful place on earth. And other times it could be incredibly weird and toxic feeling or you're watching the coastline literally erode. And so a lot of that landscape wended its way into the book.

And then also I was and still am working on an ongoing documentary poetry project on sea level rise and the built environment in Miami. And so a lot of those poems made it into the book along with some pandemic work. And so in some cases I framed it in a religious framework, an eschatological framework that I'm used to from Judaism that appears in extra biblical literature because it really felt like

we were, and to some extent are living through a kind of apocalypse. Yeah. I was going to say, it sounds apocalyptic in the biggest sense, like a sense of transformation and change cataclysm, you know? Yeah. And it's interesting. I was in New York a couple of weeks ago and randomly ran into the poet Marie Howe on the street. Like I, I recognized her from behind. Our latest Pulitzer prize winning poet. I recognized her from behind her hair because it's amazing. And she was walking her dog, Jack and,

And I yelled after her, Marie, how? And we don't know each other that well, but she had just been at UW-Madison in the fall where I teach to do reading. And I started talking to her and I said, Marie, I feel like we're in the apocalypse. And she said, no, we're in a period of rebirth and renewal. And I thought this is the most prophetic interaction I'm going to have all month.

And I feel like I hope that she's correct. I hope that she's right. I feel like the Pulitzer cements the fact that she's clearly right. Yeah, she's clearly right. But I'm interested in this moment of transformation. Sure. And is that in the book or is that part of the structure? Because you have always interesting structures and ways of thinking. It feels like your books are solid moments in time, but also well thought out, orchestrated works of art. How do you...

frame this one? I'm not sure how redemptive it is. I think the redemption comes in it in the human connection. And that's where I think What Work Is spoke to me, that moment of human connection between the speaker and his brother, either real and lived or imaginary. And so I think that's where we find the redemption. Thanks, Erica, for talking with me today.

Thanks for having me, Kevin. To Gather Together by Erica Meitner, as well as Philip Levine's What Work Is, can be found on newyorker.com and in the anthology A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925 to 2025, out now. Philip Levine's last collection of poems was The Last Shift. Erica Meitner's most recent book is Useful Junk.

You may subscribe to this podcast, the Fiction Podcast, the Writer's Voice Podcast, and the Politics & More Podcast by searching for The New Yorker in your podcast app. You can hear more poetry read by the authors on newyorker.com and the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is The Corner by Chief Zion Atunde-Ajuwa, courtesy of Stretch Music and Ropa Dope.

The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Chloe Prasinos with help from Hannah Eisenman.