Jericho Brown Reads Elizabeth Alexander
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Subject to credit approval, Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com. Kevin Young: Hello. You're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker archives to read and discuss. Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine.

This year, in honor of the New Yorker centenary, all the poets we're featuring on this podcast 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. My guest today is Jericho Brown, who received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his collection, The Tradition.

He's a 2024 MacArthur Fellow and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Welcome, Jericho. Thanks for being here. Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me, Kevin. I really appreciate it. Always good to see you. So the first poem you've chosen to read is When by Elizabeth Alexander.

what drew you to this particular poem while you're looking through the archives and the anthology i think it's the first new yorker poem that i understood as a new yorker poem it's it's really the poem that introduced me to the fact that the magazine that i was reading in doctors offices and other kinds of waiting rooms was indeed the new yorker and i remember

I had only recently, when it come out, met Elizabeth Alexander and she had been so kind to me. And there used to be this entity called the Cave Canem Le Serve.

And on the listserv, everyone there was excited. All these black poets were excited that Elizabeth Alexander had this poem in The New Yorker that was a very black poem at that time. I think it was the year 2000, maybe 2001, if I have it correct. 2002, in fact. 2002. Okay, good. It would be the same year that I entered my PhD program. So it was really a time of transition, a time of beginnings, right?

In a time that I was really 100% deciding that I was going to follow this life and become a poet. And one of those little spurs that pushed me on was finding this poem in The New Yorker. Well, why don't we hear the poem? Here's Jericho Brown reading When by Elizabeth Alexander. When.

In the early 1980s, the black men were divine, spoke French, had read everything, made filet mignon with green peppercorn sauce, listened artfully to Boyfriend Troubles, operatically declaimed Boyfriend Troubles, had been to Bamako and Bahia, knew how to clear bad humors from a house, had been to Baldwin's Villa in St. Paul,

Drank espresso with Soyinka and Senghor, kissed hello on both cheeks, quoted Baraka's black art. Fuck poems, and they are useful. Tore up the disco dance floor, were gold-lit, photographed well, did not smoke, said ciao. Then all the men's faces were spotted.

That Was When by Elizabeth Alexander, which was published in the April 15, 2002 issue of The New Yorker.

That's such a powerful poem. Isn't it something? And a sonnet, no one can sonnet like Elizabeth can. But then also just those sounds when you were reading it, you brought them out. Those B sounds starting with black men, but then also boyfriend troubles, boyfriend troubles, Bamako and Bahia, bad humors from a house. I mean, suddenly you're in this music and you get swept away, which I think is one of the points. And then what do you make of this song?

Horrible gap, let's call it. And then that last line, which is so powerful. I saw the death. I saw that death of AIDS in the 1980s and 90s, which really took so many men away from us, but really completely wiped out an entire generation of black gay poets who

who otherwise I probably would have been getting on their nerves and they would have been getting on mine. They are here for me in word, but I never got to know them in presence. When I think in particular of a poet like Melvin Dixon, I think this poem really centers on Elizabeth Alexander and Melvin Dixon had a pretty famous friendship with one another. And I think he was in many ways a mentor to her or she saw him that way.

But poets like him, filmmakers like Marlon T. Riggs, poet performers like S. X. Hemphill, you know, these are the people that are like my fathers and my grandfathers, but they weren't necessarily here. And yet I have them on video and I have their books and I have their poems. And that has always meant the world to me. So coming across this poem.

which ultimately is an elegy for an entire generation of Black men, coming across this poem really assured me that what I was reaching toward and what seemed to be reaching after me was a real thing, was a real piece of literature that had happened and was a fine influence to have in the world.

I'm really taken, actually, you know, when you think about this as a sonnet, about how the second half of the poem is really a syllabus, a bibliography. Go look these people up, read them. And that bibliography seems to me to be created by this generation of men who are saying, go see who these people are. And Elizabeth Alexander is in a way, right?

disseminating that message to the rest of the world through a platform like The New Yorker. So that was very, it was just very important to me. Can I just tell you this one other thing that I love about this poem? Please.

I love that in spite of the fact that this seems a kind of free verse sonnet, it rhymes. It is not a free verse sonnet. You know, Spotted rhymes with gold lit. Obviously Troubles rhymes with troubles. Sauce rhymes with house. Baraka rhymes with Bahia. Do you know what I mean? Right. It's a sonic wonder. I mean, it absolutely is.

And so throughout this poem, she has thought of ways that in spite of the fact that the rhyme is scattered in ways that we do not expect, which might be one way of thinking about the queer life. In spite of that, there is a oneness that we associate with the sonnet. And that oneness is driving this poem forward through sound and through rhyme. It's just a gem. It's really brilliant. It's a poem that I know is good because when first I read it, I felt pride.

You know that feeling when you read something or you see something? You know, we have that feeling also when we see Simone Biles do flips, right? It's as if we have done, I did those flips. Do you know what I mean? Right. I remember when Serena Williams would win yet another match, you would feel like you had won the match. And that's the similar feeling that I had to this poem and maybe a barometer by which we can talk about.

the efficacy of poems, period. Right? Something we don't get to talk about in classrooms is what kind of feeling can come through a poem in terms of pride. And I'm always very proud of this poem and very proud of Elizabeth for having written it. Elizabeth Alexander is just a very special person in our world. And I do think at the core of her being a poet, but also leading the Mellon Foundation at this point in her life, but also as you have,

having been in the academy and chaired departments of African-American studies. It's a really big career, but it's also a career that mimics the kinds of careers we used to read about that Black people had, where, you know, you read about Maya Angelou being a train conductor and, you know,

Busboy and the poet for Langston Hughes. Or Langston Hughes. Like Langston Hughes literally seems to have had every job that anyone could ever have. A plongeur. That's my favorite one in Paris, you know, like a...

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I really, I get excited about her as a figure because she is with us presently, but that career is a historical one. And not just for Black people, but for Black women in particular. And I always appreciate her announcement of herself as a race woman at that time. During that period, I had never heard anyone, it was a phrase you read, right?

But you didn't hear anybody say that they were a race man or a race woman, you know. And I remember when I first met Elizabeth Alexander, she had given a talk in which she said that.

She also, the day I met Elizabeth Alexander, introduced me to all these Black poets that I had never heard of. Because of her, I knew who Forrest, I knew who Melvin Dixon was already, but because of her, I knew who Forrest Hamer was, another Black poet who became so important to me and whose work I love. And that's who she is as a person. She's always spreading and introducing and giving, which is why the job she has now is such a great job for her in particular.

Sure. I want to linger over the poem just a hair more because I think you nailed it with this bibliography idea. It does both. It name checks people in that way that I think is so powerful, but she also manages to embody them. And the black men break or divine and that divinity.

that she's saying in both a vernacular way, which I love, but then also in this kind of afterlife way. I think that tension there is so powerful. And I can point to moments throughout the poem

knew how to clear bad humors from a house. There's more happening there, right, than just that thing that I know that they knew how to do. But also these bad humors have taken over. They are in that gap in the line that we're talking about, those deaths. I wonder how you see that as well.

Well, what I'm really taken by early on in this poem is that if we look at this poem as a sonnet, right, let's say the first quatrain, things are personal, right? Things start in this way where obviously the speaker is saying, I had these experiences with the black men.

the divine black men. So already in the first two lines of the poem, she's made black men heavenly. Isn't that something that lovely to read in a poem? Oh, thank God. You know, she makes black men heavenly and you're right. Things get as specific as that green peppercorn sauce sort of pointing to their ability, right? The cleanness.

Clearing bad humors from the house. Of course, I imagine the opportunity to have someone smudge your home, right? Or get the bad spirits out that these people had all of that ability and that it got as personal as that.

I could tell them about my boyfriend troubles, which I really love about the first four or five lines in this poem. And then the poem begins to move across time and space. It's got to go to Bahia. It's got to go to the Baldwin Villa in St. Paul. And then once we get Baldwin's name, we begin to get those names, the Baldwin, the Soyinka, the Senghor, and even the Baraka, which for me becomes very important because she ends up setting

these queer Black men in the same position as these more known, probably straight historical figure Black men, including Nobel laureates. Do you know what I mean? And so suddenly they are set with them. They drink with them. They eat with them. They go to their homes. I also love just how community oriented that part of the poem becomes and how it speaks to the ways in which Black art is always connected

And then after that moment, things turn again to the party. Tore up the disco dance floor where gold lit photographed whale did not smoke said ciao. I was just mentioning to you before we started this podcast, the first time I ever heard somebody say the word ciao. It was I didn't think people really said it. I just thought it was something people did to say goodbye on a TV show like Dynasty or something like that.

And this poem encapsulates the fact that people really did say ciao. Right, right. And it's a kind of moment in the poem where it's so artful. They did not smoke. So there's a kind of moment of health. And then they say ciao. They say goodbye. And then, oh, that...

And that's why the epiphany in this poem is not just with the last line, but also with the strophe break, the stanza break. Right after that 13th line, there's this break where that child, that goodbye becomes embodied through the white space in the poem. And then we get that single line, "Then all the men's faces were spotted."

which tells us so much of what we need to know and what we already know. And it sort of checks our memory and our love and our understanding of history. There is a 100% illusion made in that moment. And yet it's not an illusion to a particular piece of literature. It's an illusion to a time that if you don't know, you ought to know. You ought to know what we lost.

And you ought to know that what we lost was in relationship to

to these other things, including the clearing of bad humors to your house, to the learning of Amiri Baraka's poem. Isn't it lovely also, you said, I think 2002, and New York has got this poem quoting Amiri Baraka's poem, Black Art, and it's got this nice little cuss word in it. It's like, wow, they published that in the New Yorker in 2002? So she becomes also a vehicle for

all of language, including the profane, right? Right. What's the divine and the profane? It has a whole of a life. Yeah. I was wondering if you think of it as a love poem.

Oh, I do. I mean, but that's sort of cheating because I think every poem is a love poem. You think every poem is a love poem? Yeah. What poem? Have you read a poem that's not a love poem? I want to hear more about this. Really? I don't even think it's – I think that if I were to say every poem is a political poem, we'd take that much easier nowadays, I think. But every poem is a love poem because somebody just had to write it down. Right.

Somebody just had to get it right. And it was out of love of that moment of writing, out of love for that poem itself. And the back of every poem is love, is a desire to get it right, to convey it, to embody clarity, to make music out of words. That's all love stuff right there, no matter whether or not you're crying while you write the poem.

And in this particular poem, while there is a great deal of sorrow at the end, this poem is a party poem.

In the early 1980s, the Black men were divine, spoke French, had read everything, had read everything. Do you know what I mean? Made filet mignon with green peppercorn sauce. Like there's this way that this poem is just a good time until you get to that last line. And that last line is, I miss you. I love you. And I really love how that I miss you. I love you rather than getting told to us in the abstract. Right.

is told to us through image, then all the men's faces were spotted. We have to imagine that. And some of us have to remember that when all the men's faces were spotted. So yeah, it's definitely, no doubt about it, 100% a love poem. And I have to say,

I love this boyfriend troubles moment in this poem. And that she repeats, she knows I love it, so she repeats it. Yeah, she gives it to you twice. Like, someone's telling them and someone declaiming. I love declaiming, which is, you know, there's a performative quality, not that it isn't true, but that it's like larger than life. I mean, singing it, right? Operatically declaimed. You know, singing boyfriend troubles. I just, I love that and I love the

the intimacy of that and the understanding of that. There are only so many situations under which you are telling someone your boyfriend troubles. That has to be a certain kind of intimacy. And she knows that and employs that information in this poem. That's the kind of thing I'm after when I'm reading and writing poems. I want to say intimacy by showing you intimacy. And I think Elizabeth Alexander manages that. ♪

More from my conversation with Jericho Brown after the break. Hi, I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker. Each week on the Writer's Voice podcast, New Yorker fiction writers read their newly published stories from the magazine. You can hear from authors like Colson Whitehead. Turner nudged Elwood, who had a look of horror on his face. They saw it. Griff wasn't going down. He was going to go for it, no matter what happened after.

or Joy Williams. Her father was silent. Slowly, he passed his hand over his hair. This usually meant that he was traveling to a place immune to her presence, a place that indeed contradicted her presence. She might as well go to lunch. Listen to new stories or dive into our archive of great fiction. You can find the work of your favorite fiction writers and discover new ones. Listen and follow The Writer's Voice wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back. Thank you. Glad to be back. Now, in our May 27, 2013 issue, The New Yorker published your poem, Coliseum, which we'll hear you read momentarily. Is there anything you'd like to tell us about the poem first? I'll just say that it was the first poem that ever got in The New Yorker that I wrote. And it was completely engineered by my good friend and my colleague at Emory, Tiffany Yannick.

She created this world at Drew University where she was teaching at the time, where rather than a poet and a fiction writer read, she had convinced her colleague to allow two poets to read. Tiffany, by the way, is a fiction writer. And she invited me to read with Paul Muldoon.

And she told me if Paul Muldoon, who was the poetry editor at the New Yorker at the time, if he hears you read, you'll get a poem in the New Yorker, I promise. I'll never forget she said that. I said, okay, Tiffany, whatever. I'll come do the reading. And I gave the reading and I met Paul and we had a good time. We had dinner. You know, all the things that happen at a reading at a university happen.

And then the next day, Paul Muldoon sent me an email saying, I would love to see one of your lovely poems for The New Yorker. And I remember he said lovely poems, and I was so flattered by that. I was so happy. And I said, Tiffany, look, it worked. And then he proceeded to reject poem after poem after poem that I sent him. And then one day... They were lovely enough one day, it sounds like. Yeah.

He did take this poem. So this is Colosseum. You know, it just has some really personal excitement for me because I remember sending Paul Muldoon poem after poem after poem until he took this one and feeling some pride in it because he finally took this one. I'll read it. Colosseum. I don't remember how I hurt myself.

the pain mine long enough for me to lose the wound that invented it as none of us knows the beauty of our own eyes until a man tells us they are why god made brown then that same man says he lives to touch the smoothest parts suggesting our surface area can be understood by degrees of satin

Him I will follow until I am as rough outside as I am within. I cannot locate the origin of slaughter, but I know how my own feels, that I live with it and sometimes use it to get the living done. Because I am what gladiators call a man in love. Love being any reminder we survived. That was Coliseum by Jericho Brown.

Well, one of the things I love about this poem is it too is a love poem. Mm-hmm. Definitely. But you say all poems are love poems, but this one- I haven't seen the one this night. Makes it explicit, because I am what gladiators call a man in love. Love being any reminder we survived. Mm-hmm. Tell me about this gladiator.

Well, you know, I just think the love thing, the erotic thing, there is something about it that always includes the feeling of war, the feeling of conquer. There is something about it where you want to achieve. You want to make it. You want to go the long haul. You want to get where you're going. And I'm not just talking about through the sex act, right? One of the things that I say all the time is, and one of the things that I have, I have this poem called Stand and Love.

one of its lines or part of the poem suggests that when you're cuddling with your lover, you feel like you're doing something. You know, it's as if you, I think in the poem I say, it's as if we planted a garden. But in actuality, we were only lying in bed.

But that doing, that feeling of making it, that feeling of long as we together, baby, which makes you feel like you have sort of overcome the world in order to be with your beloved. Do you know what I mean? Or that in any situation, if I am with my beloved, that situation doesn't matter because I am with my beloved, right? And I think that is part of why the gladiator shows up. Earlier in the poem,

really in terms of just the way I write.

Earlier in the poem, I say, "Long enough for me to lose the wound that invented it." And I imagine that me, although I don't remember the actual act of writing this poem, me as a poet, the kind of thing I do is if I have a wound earlier in the poem, later in the poem, you're going to get a gladiator. And I think, to be honest with you, I should also say that at some point, maybe that word gladiator was a word like captain or commander.

But then the word gladiator, I think, creates more and better of an image and more archetypal of an image. So that's the word that I settled on. Yeah, so that's the kind of thing that that word does. Well, I'm interested in form as well because this has a kind of naturalistic form and sometimes your work has a more...

inherited or, you know, in the wonderful case of the many forms you've invented, a kind of invented form, right? Yeah. But this feels a little more like loose in that way. I wonder about that. Yeah, this poem is very much a free verse poem, which is what I was working in at the time. I'm still working with a kind of internal rhyme. I'm always...

interested in sound and interested in making music. But my goal when I was writing this poem and many of the poems in my second book was making use of free verse in order to reach what I thought of as the sublime.

I wanted to make really small poems. And I wanted those really small poems in the way of Dickinson all the way to a figure like Lucille Clifton. I wanted those really small poems to make us feel that we had somehow reached a point of transcendence.

or to have in them a feeling of revelation by the time you get to the end. There's a way that you can read a poem and by the end of the last line, you sort of feel, even if your eyes didn't open anymore physically, it's as if your eye has been opened, like, "Oh, I see more."

And I wanted to do that in that book, throughout that book. I wanted to do that through the free verse poem really as a kind of a homage or a modeling after so many poems that I like by people like Emily Dickinson, by Langston Hughes. I love the short poems of Langston Hughes. And so I wanted to do something where it is a free verse poem, but certain things about the music lulled us, right, or woke us up.

And so that was really my goal with this poem, "Colosseum." And that title came after I wrote the word gladiator. So there's a way, you know, and I tell my students this all the time, the beginning of the poem will tell you the end of the poem and the end of the poem will tell you your title. So the oneness of a poem is always about resonance and ricochet. And so, you know, you ricochet back and forth up and down the poem and everything's got to matter. Nothing gets said in a poem once.

If it gets said in an abstraction, it's going to get said in an image another time. If there's a sound that's made once, then you've got to make that sound again at least once. So that's something that I was really working toward in this poem. And those are from the New Testament? Is that the book? Yeah, the New Testament. I know my bibliography of speaking bibliographies. Yeah.

You know, this book, when it came out, I got the copies. And the first thing I did was drive by Natasha Trethewey's house, my colleague at Emory at the time. And I put the book in her mailbox. And the next day she sent me a text message. She said, Jericho, you left a book in my mailbox and you did not knock on my door. And then she sent another text message saying, I love this, made me cry. I never told her this. She said,

I just finished it. I had put it in her box the night before. She said, I just finished it. It's beautiful. But Jericho, how are you going to read any of these poems in front of people?

And at the time, it seemed like this book was so risque in its queerness. And one of the ways I know it's a love poem and one of the reasons why this is the opening of the book is it was the first book where beginning to end, first poem to last poem, I was a Black queer poet. You know what I mean? And I was also in love at the time. So it was very easy for me to write these poems, these very loving, erotic poems.

And so I think I figured out how to read from it. But it was very difficult at first reading from that book, The New Testament, because audiences were not used to it at that time, even when this book came out. You know, and that book came out in 2014, Kevin. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Sure. There really wasn't a lot of that going on in The New Yorker.

For instance, do you know what I mean? And I feel this way very strongly about myself and other poets, James Allen Hall, Randall Mann, black queer poets who I don't always agree with, like Rinaldo Wilson. Like, I really feel like we ushered in something and we made something very acceptable and very normal in this world and for this genre that was not necessarily so in the same way. It's not that there weren't queer poems. It's not that there weren't graphics.

queer poems, but we were putting these poems in places that they had never been. And we were reading these poems aloud in spaces where they had never been read aloud. And we were people who were in many ways publishing poems that were being used in a movement for Black art.

We were writing the poems that of that time were the Black poems and were included in that idea of the Black poem. And before that moment, Black queer poets were not always included in the whole of the thought of Black poems.

And we created that. And I'm very proud of that. You know, coming on this show, talking about people like Melvin Dixon, talking about SXHempfield, talking about Rylan T. Riggs. I can be very proud of myself and my compatriots, my comrades, that we actually changed this world. And so now you read poems by people like Phillip B. Williams and Danez Smith and Ricky Laurentis, trans people. You read these poems and you sort of take for granted that.

What even in 2014 seemed racy.

And I know it seemed racy because those younger poets were sending me emails like, I can't believe you've got this poem in the New Yorker. Do you know what I mean? Well, we all didn't have the luxury of you putting it in our mailbox. So the New Yorker helped with that quality, I think. One last question, because I could talk to you all day. You know, and we have all night, all day. So I wonder about the southerness that circles all this, because some of the things you're talking about are

are so tied to that, whether it's sonically or the language in Colosseum has this kind of Southern, if not language, then outlook. Him I will follow until I am as rough outside as I am within.

I cannot locate the origin of slaughter, but I know how my own feels that I live with it and sometimes use it to get the living done. That is a Southern sentiment to me. It is a survival. It is taking that thing and turning it around and, you know, making, you know, hog maws into a delicacy. And use it to get the living done.

is the kind of improvisation in Southern speak that lifts the language, right? It is somehow both country and dignified.

which is always sort of something that I noticed in my grandmother speaking, in my grandfather speaking, a way of being who you are, but also letting the world know I am human. I am a grown man. Do you know what I mean? Being grown is a thing, yeah. Yeah, it's definitely a thing in the South, yeah. And being divine, divinity, which ties us back to Elizabeth's poem, I think also is coursing through there too.

Yeah. And, you know, love in the way that Baldwin talks about it, you know, I think he reminds us that love is the thing that gets you through. You know, it's the thing that binds us and it's the only thing that can make us, you know, whether he's talking about being a nation or being a people or being a citizen or being alive and human, that's where he turned to. Yeah. Yeah. That's who Baldwin was. That's for sure. 100%. When I got the whiting, you

You know, when you get the Whiting, they give you these books. I wouldn't know that, Jericho, but tell us about winning a Whiting Award. They give you these Library of Congress books, and the book is sort of suggesting who you are in the tradition of. And I remember I got James Baldwin, which was...

completely like maybe the biggest compliment at that time that I had ever gotten. And I had read everything in that book, but I sat down and I read it again because they had given it to me. And I think there is something in my worldview, a certain belief in God that is tied to the fact that I am from the South and a certain belief in black people and our resilience. You know, this might have been my hardest experience

Black History Month ever. It was really lovely that you published that poem that was an elegy to Nikki. But it's also sort of hard seeing it because I miss her so much. And I think of her as a figure so important. You know, Nikki Giovanni is the poet, the contemporary poet.

that we were reading when we were six and seven years old. That's right. And you might have gotten some Paul Lawrence Dunbar and you might have gotten some Langston Hughes, but you also got Nikki Giovanni's ego tripping when you were in elementary school. And that kind of work means she was literally transforming our people.

She was making us further illiterate people and making us think about poetry and poems and line break and line. And I don't know, thinking about her and her role in that and how she maintained that role as a people's poet throughout her life brings me back to somebody like Baldwin who understood the writer as a figure for the people.

And I love him for that. You know, I never met the man, but I've always loved him and I appreciate him. He probably would have wanted to beat me up or something, but I like him. No, I think that what you said about Nikki is so powerful because

I think it was always there, but I think when she passed away and you read the poem that we were lucky enough to publish, Black Dictionary, as a eulogy for her at her funeral, I think people you saw online came to understand something they might have not understood, unfortunately, the day before. And I think...

Having met her and known her a little bit, not as well as you, but to see how people finally got it. And I saw this with Lucille Clifton, who I did know well. And I've seen the ways that people are understanding some of the tradition, just to name check your most recent book.

That is still being written, still being established, and we don't always fully know. And that poems, anthologies, they rewrite the past and help us place this. I'll give you one last example that's actually in the anthology is the poem Gwendolyn Brooks by Anthony Walton, which is this elegy for Gwendolyn Brooks where he talks about how

There was something that she saw that he didn't see till he read her about these black men on the corner, you know, and that he both talks about and praises her, but also kind of says, I didn't understand until Gwendolyn Brooks. And there was something in your black dictionary that was celebratory, but also about kind of what happens after, I guess. And then understanding, you know,

Trying to describe a huge thing in small words, but how we kind of can celebrate while alive, but then also the duty we have after and the Black Dictionary that we're all in. Yeah, yeah. And Kevin, what you're talking about and the reason why it's hard to find words is because you're talking about the value of poetry.

You know, we live in a society that likes to put a dollar sign on everything. I mean, not by everything. I mean, even our emotions, you know? Sure, sure. When I talk to my students about this, what I tell them is poems are like trees. And, you know, we walk by trees all the time, every day. We pay them absolutely no attention. We definitely do not think of them as oxygen providers. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. If the trees were gone...

If I walk out of this room and all the trees that I walked by were not here, I would notice and I would miss them. I would understand that they were adding value to my life, that they were changing me, that they had something to do with my survival and my ability to see beauty in the world. But I would not be able to recognize that until they were gone.

because all day long I am taking trees for granted. And that's what I believe about the power and the value of poetry that we don't always know. Even poets, even the way poets treat poetry, even the way poets treat one another, we don't always know just how valuable, just how important poetry is to keeping this world turning. And yet, when a poet passes, we very quickly find out, we remember, we know.

Thank you so much for talking with me today. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Colosseum by Jericho Brown, as well as Elizabeth Alexander's When, can be found on newyorker.com. Elizabeth Alexander's most recent book is The Trayvon Generation. Jericho Brown's latest collection is The Tradition. 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. ♪

Hi, I'm Susan Glasser. I'm Jane Mayer. And I'm Evan Osnos. And we host the Washington Roundtable from the New Yorker's Political Scene Podcast. ♪

For me, this is the water cooler. This is a wonderful chance to sit down with two of the smartest colleagues in the country and, you know, just kind of compare notes. No, that's so true, because first of all, we are actually friends in real life, but I can't wait until Friday to hear what you guys think. Everybody sees the headlines, but you guys fill in the gaps. I also think, though, accountability.

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