A.O. Scott on the Joy of Close Reading Poetry
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I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. This week, we're talking poetry, both old and new. Later on this episode, we'll have Greg Coles, our poetry editor and poetry expert, with four recommendations of recent collections he thinks you should read.

But first, we're joined by A.O. Scott, Tony Scott, one of our critics who is here to talk about the poetry columns he has been writing this year, as well as the wonderful project that we published at the end of April, which hopefully you saw, focused on helping readers memorize Edna St. Vincent Millay's Requiredo. Tony, welcome back to The Book Review.

Great to be here, Gilbert. Tony, you have done what we call a close read of a poem every month this year in 2025. And I can say as someone who has read poetry in the past, but doesn't regularly, that there's something about the format that makes it

Obviously incredibly appealing, but also undeniable to me. It seems like there's a very low barrier to entry for someone who doesn't regularly partake of poetry. And I wanted to have you explain how you figured out that this was the right way to do it.

In a way, we backed into it, which I think is why it's worked. That is that we didn't start out thinking people should read more poetry and we need to explain to people why poetry is important, why poetry matters, why poetry can change their lives. Because if you start at that level of generality, you'll just turn people off. People will be intimidated or feel lectured at. It's eat your vegetables, they're good for you. And

What I wanted to do was persuade people that poetry was actually fun and accessible and interesting and that you could have a kind of an emotional connection to it and also think about its meaning in a way that didn't feel like school and that was short and enjoyable and an experience that you could have in our digital space at The New York Times that would give you something different

give you a kind of aesthetic experience of poetry. And the way to do that in a way is to share a poem that you like. You can persuade someone who thinks that they don't like a certain kind of food. You can tell them how fancy it is, how exotic it is, how it's eaten at all the best restaurants or whatever, or you can just cook them some food and share it with them. And we were trying that approach that here's a poem, take a few minutes, just a few minutes. These are not long pieces and they're not long poems and just tell

read it with us and see what you think. What has your experience been over the past few years with poetry? Do you talk to people about it? Do you encounter it? Do you feel that that people in your life are encountering poetry anywhere in the world?

It's a good question. I've always been a reader of poetry and I've always been a more or less casual reader of poetry. I did study literature when I was in college and in graduate school and encountered a lot of poetry in that way. But for most of the last decades, it's been something that I just pick up and read in a kind of unsystematic way for pleasure. And there are other people who I know who do that, but not that many. My sense often is that it is something

something that people feel is specialized or esoteric or difficult. And since I don't really feel that way about it, I thought, what if I just tried to talk to someone who hadn't read a poem or who hadn't read very much poetry about why I like it, about what it does for me? I started with poems and poets who I liked and was interested in and was familiar with. But over the past year,

it's been this great adventure in poem hunting, in finding the right things. As we have these, these pieces are formatted a certain way so that the poem is there and my reading of the poem is simultaneously on the screen with it. You need a poem that's short enough and skinny enough to fit on a phone screen along with some of the text of my analysis. And also that's

accessible enough that somebody can read it and get it the first time or feel like they're most of the way to understanding it. Tony, for those readers who have yet to experience one of these on their computer or ideally on their phone, which is really what they're designed for, could you quickly describe what it is that you're doing? You take a poem like Philip Larkin's Party Politics, you take a poem like you did this month, K. Ryan's Turtle, you print the whole poem, but then what?

First of all, there's a beautiful illustration by Isabella Cotillet. That should grab you as well. I have just a few sentences to introduce it, to say, here's a poem, here's a poem about a turtle. And then you see the poem and you read it through. The longest one has been 15 lines. So it's not, it's not a hard or long read. And then there's

The way we usually work is we go through it once for the meaning and for some of the really noticeable effects. Oh, look at the rhymes here. Look at the alliteration. Listen to the rhythm of it. And also think about what does this poem seem to be saying? And going through it

That way. And then we step back from the poem and there's a little bit of information, not too much, not a lot of biographical or historical information, but just something, some interesting piece of information about the poet, about the poet's life, about the form of the poem, about the poem's relationship to other works of literature or poetry. And then we come back and look again

And it looks a little different. So there are always two readings and we go through it again. And usually there's a little bit of a surprise at the end, like something that can send you away with more than just a sense of the poem's meaning, more than just a kind of an intellectual idea of how the poem works and what it's saying. But with it, with

With an experience, with a feeling of it, being moved or delighted or enlightened in a way that I feel like is what the poem is doing. And I'm just helping focus attention on it. I don't think it's a product of my interpretation so much as my paying attention along with the reader to this poem.

Earlier, Tony, you said that you were trying to end on a button that left the reader with a feeling. All journalists try to do this in some way by having just a great kicker, as we call them. But I think it's particularly interesting with these poetry close reads because many people feel as if poetry is something that is

already designed to give them a feeling, to leave them with a feeling, to elicit emotion in some way. And so how do you match your analysis of the piece to the emotion or the feeling that the poem is trying to get across? That's a good question because it is, it's also very subjective so that my sense of the poem and my emotional response to it can be different from someone else's and perhaps different from what the poet intended. So in some ways it's

trying to start off a conversation about it. And often one of the best things about the comments that we get on these pieces is that people have different ideas. People say, oh, I saw it this way, or some people just didn't like it. But I think that what I try to do is imagine that I were...

reading the poem aloud, which I do in the latest one. There is an audio of me reading the poem. But trying in a way to go from that sense, what would that be like? If you listen to this poem being read, what, because you hear a lot, you absorb a lot of meaning and feeling through the ear more maybe than through the eye reading on the page. So is there something that I can do in my critical voice that

can approximate that or contribute to that. And also, is there sometimes, and I think there sometimes is, information that's helpful in the achievement of that effect. So there was a poem that we did, a very short poem by George Oppen, 20th century poet. It's called From a Photograph, and it's describing what it's like for him to look at

a photograph of his daughter and him, a photograph taken when his daughter was very young, was like a toddler. And in a way, he's looking from a distance of 20 years or so at this photograph and just reflecting on it. And it's a very spare poem and in a way, a very analytical poem. There's not a lot of overt feeling or sentimentality in the poem, but it's a very powerful poem. And I think one of the things that we did was,

to try to convey that power was we found the photograph. There is an actual photograph of George Oppen and his daughter taken by his wife, Mary, and this was their only child. And there's something about seeing that photograph and you've just read a kind of a description of it

And then here it is. So that grounds the poem in reality. This is a poem that comes from someone's experience that's very intimate and very personal, even though you wouldn't describe it that way on its own as a poem. And that somehow unlocked me.

So there's something like that often that will bring in a little bit of context, not too much. These are not long sentences.

long journal essays. These are not like academic analyses, but often there's something that's coming from outside of the poem that could help us see what's in it. With something like that photograph or with some of the other archival photographs that I've seen in other

of your poetry pieces, does it mean you have to write differently? You are a critic who has done a job in a certain way for a very long time, which is writing essays of a certain length, maybe multiple ones a week. And here you really have to think about structuring your arguments or the way that you guide a reader through a piece in a different way. Maybe you have to put a pause in your piece to address this photograph, or you have to write to the fact that certain things

stanzas or words or even syllables are being highlighted in the poem itself. It's a much more collaborative approach to criticism than I've ever taken before. Before, I would review a movie or a book or write an essay and I would just be my thoughts and I would write them down and they would be edited and so on. I wasn't thinking about things like that. I wouldn't think about the scroll. How are my words interacting with this other set of words? But

What's great and fascinating and to me very new about this process is that there's a group of us. And the main person I would mention is Eliza Alfrick-Digg, who is

the designer who makes the words move in this way. And I usually write a draft, which is a kind of a prosy talky draft where I do a little more analysis and more kind of point by point explanation and breaking things down than you see on the screen. And then that gets taken out and Eliza turns it into these,

beautiful, surprising, very witty visual effects where instead of me talking about meter, about iambic meter or about rhyme or about alliteration, she just makes the words pop and sometimes literally jump up and down to show it. So I end up almost always cutting and just refining. It's almost maybe like writing a poem in that the words have to be, my words have to be just right

But there have to be as few of them as as we can manage to to get the message across. That's it doesn't feel like something that a writer temperamentally would gravitate towards. But I feel like you certainly over over a certain amount of time have understood the value of this collaboration and how scaling your stuff back in order to support the larger structure of the piece is only to the better.

And I find it very liberating in a way, because I find that the voice that I use in it is a very intimate contact that you have with both the reader and the poem. And I have to just think...

with a lot more rigor and maybe less indulgence about what I'm saying, but it's still on me in a way to keep the reader's attention, to keep the structure there, to keep the argument and the drama and the feeling of the piece active for the reader. I very quickly want to mention a big project that we did fairly recently that was the outgrowth of your work on these poetry close readings projects.

It was a week-long, what we called a poetry challenge, and it was designed in part to help people memorize a poem, which we felt at the book review was something that a certain type of person has always wanted to do and maybe just never had the license to do or the help. And we really were trying to help people. It was a poem called Recuerdo by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

We all memorized it, all of us who worked on the project, as did many readers, I think. And for those listeners who haven't participated, it's still there. It's five days, five articles. You can still do it. You should do it.

it. Tony, I'm wondering if you could talk just for a few minutes about how you think that went and more importantly, what you heard from readers, because one of the things that has been true is that in the comments of all of your poetry articles and certainly in the comments of this, the five days of this poetry challenge, people were just leaving the warmest, most fascinating comments at a time when I feel like discourse on poetry

articles that run on news sites are not particularly warm. So talk to us a little about that. The reader response to it, which has made this project blossom in a way and brought poetry into a position of visibility at the New York Times that I dare say it hasn't had in the past, has been the reader comments that there is something, and I don't think we knew we were doing it when we set out to do it, but we did touch a kind of nerve that people...

when they go to the website and see everything that is happening on any given day, I don't have to list all of the things. It's not calming. It's not fun. It's not beautiful. It doesn't give people a sort of a sense of warmth and fulfillment the way that a poem does. And finding a poem that does and finding, I think, a poem presented in a way that

that gives you that kind of feeling and that distracts you for a couple of minutes from everything else that's going on in the world has been very valuable to readers. And so one of the reasons that we've done more of these pieces and that we felt the freedom to develop that five-day poetry challenge is that readers were saying, give us more of this, give us more of this. And

So the poetry challenge was a challenge for us, too, because it came, the idea bubbled up and we didn't have a lot of time to do it. And we had to think, what is this? What are we going to do? And memorization was definitely a key to it. Some older readers remembered memorizing poems in school as just as sort of part of education and had fond memories of that. A lot of the comments were remembering poems.

English teachers who had encouraged them or made them memorize Shakespeare, Milton, or Kipling, the old staples of the curriculum. But there's also something about memorization. It's a way of

slowing down and focusing on something and paying attention to something in a way that modern internet discourse and modern media consumption don't allow for very much. And that has no particular use. It's just for its own sake. Here's this poem by Ennis St. Vincent Millay. Three stanzas, six lines each. A

a very charming poem about riding back and forth on the Staten Island ferry all night. We were very tired. We were very merry. We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry, the first two lines of every stanza. And once we had hit on that poem, we thought, what is a fun way and an effective way to help people acquire this poem? And a lot of people wrote back to us to say that they felt like it was a really interesting

worthwhile exercise. And now they had this poem that either they would forget or remember some of, or many of whom I've heard personally now go around annoying their friends with this poem and plan to keep doing so. And I think that's a great measure of success. I am going to close by asking if this has allowed you to think differently about poetry in any way?

It absolutely has. It's to some extent confirmed my belief or my hope that

poetry could be something more accessible, more inviting, more in my sense that it is really a democratic form. Language is something that we all have. And what poetry is to me is the intensification and maximization of what language can do. But it's also made me look at poems in a slightly different way, to look at poems with fresher eyes. Because I think a lot about

readers coming to these poems who don't read a lot of poetry or don't read any or stumble on it. And I think, what is a poem at first glance? How does a poem arrive at you in the world? So I'm reading...

and more widely, and I think less driven maybe by my own tastes and prejudices and ideas about what poetry is and what poetry is interesting and more curiosity about the different ways that poets have answered the challenge of writing something that could have some value, some interest, some use that could communicate across time and space and time.

cultural and demographic differences to another reader. Well, Tony, I know that I have been delighted so many times this year by your poetry pieces. I suspect other readers have as well. And as we noted, they are telling us so in the comments. So listeners, if you have not

had an opportunity to check any of these out, please do. Tony's latest piece is about the poem Turtle by K. Ryan. And again, five days of memorizing Edna St. Vincent Millay's Requerto, a poem that will live with me forever. And which is just, it's a delight. It's a delight. We were very tired. We were very merry and we shall be forever. Tony Scott, thank you so much for joining the Book Review Podcast once again.

My pleasure, Gilbert. Thank you. We'll be right back. This podcast is supported by Google Cloud. Right now, a scientist is using AI to analyze proteins, speeding up drug discovery. A major retailer is creating winning marketing campaigns. Global fishing fleets are mapping the unknown depths of the ocean. AI isn't a someday thing. It's a today thing. And Google Cloud is here to help.

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Welcome back. This is the Book Review Podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm now joined by Greg Coles, one of our top editors here at the Book Review. Among his many responsibilities, he is also our poetry editor. It's a privilege to have a poetry editor and it's a privilege to have Greg Coles with us this week. He is going to recommend a few recent poetry collections that he thinks we should all be checking out. Greg, thanks for being here. Always a pleasure, Gilbert. So how do we want to do this?

I could just run them down if that's what you want. I see a pile of books right here, a very small pile, because poetry books are not always the biggest books. You should just start with the one on top. I will do that. The book on top is called New and Collected Hell. It's by a poet named Shane McCray. I should say this book has a subtitle. It is...

A poem. New and Collected Hell, a poem. Shane McRae, fairly prolific poet. He's written a memoir. He's written many books of poetry, taking in his fairly complicated life. He is the son of a white mother and a black father whose white parents

And as you can imagine, this has led to some complicated feelings in Shane McRae personally, socially, about America. And he also has a very racist worldview.

often circles back to these topics in his writing, but filtered, especially in this book, New and Collected Hell, through an allegorical lens. A big kind of phantasmagorical hell here is a very literal place that he's writing about. You think Milton, think Dante, think Blake. This is a mythological fantasy world that he is writing

calling into being. It's called New and Collected Hell because he has visited this place in previous books. He had a book called The Gilded Auction in 2019 with a poem in it called The Hell Poem that forms the heart of this book.

And then in his follow-up book, Cain Named the Animal, he revisited that hell and went into some more of it. And so now he's pulled those together and added new things to it. And he's really mapping the world of hell as Shane McCrae sees it.

Sounds intense. It's very intense. It's often very funny. It's often very satirical. When I say think Dante, there is a poet here who is being led through hell by a guide, as you get in the Inferno. In this case, his guide is a robotic bird named Law, who summons him for an intake interview, leads him through the orientation through hell. There's some corporate satire here. There's some political satire. There's a tyrant beetle in the book.

who just takes pleasure in making people suffer. McRae writes with a lot of beat, a lot of meter. He's very fun to read. He circles back and repeats himself a lot. He's always second guess. He writes something and then immediately calls it into question. I didn't phrase that quite right. And so there's a lot of puzzling things out in a way that makes it

have a real kind of stutter beat to it in a way that's fun to read. It's also very idiomatic. There's a lot of F-bombs in this book, so I'll have to be careful in what I choose to read to you. Yes, please. But I will read you just a little bit of a poem called In a Dream, The Robot Bird Tells Me How It Is I Am in Hell. And it starts like this.

I dreamed I lay at the feet of the demon child twitching, and the robot fluttered down from their shoulder, kicked me hard, and growling, whispered in my ear, My name is Law. I do the work. The boss says he created me in the however long it was between when Cain crushed Abel's forehead with a rock and the first drop of blood hit the ground.

It goes on from there. That sounds great, dark, funny. I'm into both of those things. Tell us about the next book on your pile here. Next book, also maybe a little bit dark. Are you okay, Greg? Maybe more hopeful. Oh, good. This book is by a poet named Alexandra Teague. That's T-E-A-G-U-E. It is her fourth book of poem, and it is called Unwanted.

Ominous Music Intensifying. The title comes in brackets, so it's like stage directions or closed caption. Ominous Music Intensifying tells you the mood right there. This is a very anxious book. I called it dark and

It is. She's writing in a very anxious time. She's reflecting that very anxious time in the book. Again, it's also a very funny book and a book that draws a lot on bigger mythologies, in this case, very American mythologies. The first poem in the book is called America the Beautiful, Thrift Store.

There's also a poem in here called My Country Tis of Thee, arranged for Brazen Bull. So she is taking kind of patriotic themes and mixing and matching them. There is also a through line in here of Yeats. If you're familiar with The Second Coming, the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, the widening gyre, all of that. The rough beast is

surfaces in this collection as a recurring character in America rather than in Bethlehem, as he was in Yeats. And I will again read the start of a poem to you. The rough beast listens to a PSA from Lake America. Down in the deep blue waters of America, where submarines practiced their sonar, there is no creature.

We repeat, there is no creature rising. Beneath the pressure-treated lumber of new docks, the mosquito-swarm whirring of water skiers, the spit-static speakers of the boats blaring past with glittered hulls, only the light shines. Thin as the glaze on breakfast pastries, the McDonald's gold and cheerful beaks of swans,

It goes on from there. The swans are the swans in the boats the tourists ride, the little pedal boats where you're sitting in the body of the swan. And the conceit of this whole poem is, of course, there is a creature. It is the rough beast. It is rising up from the bottom. And the government is making this PSA saying, everything is fine here, nothing to worry about. And

That gives you the mood of this book, which at the same time that it is criticizing America, is holding out hope for America to work together and to live up to its highest ideals. It's a very easy book to read. It's not especially challenging, except maybe in its themes. It is a book that is very...

outraged at what it sees in the country. It holds America to account, but it also is a book that really believes in America and what it can accomplish. Number three,

A book called Ecstasy by Alex Dimitroff. This is a book that our colleague Taz Tobey, who himself is a poet and reviewed for the book review. Alex Dimitroff is a young, youngish New York poet, very connected in the New York poetry scene. He organizes regular poetry readings in town, etc.

A bit of a modern day Frank O'Hara, very much a New York creature, very much a social creature. And this collection, which is his fourth or even fifth collection, it's fairly prolific for a younger poet. It's called Ecstasy. He means that in a religious sense, but he also means it in a party drug sense. This is a collection that is very much about a social scene, about the New York social scene itself.

about being young, about partying, about dancing. There's a lot of sex in this book. There are a lot of drugs and alcohol in this book. And it's a book that is just of a piece of kind of a celebration of youth and beauty. I will also read you a poem from this one called Sunrise. It's not a long poem. Walking toward it on 29th, I unbutton my coat in the wind and light a cigarette easily.

There's no one on this street except for a guy in a suit and a boy coming home from last night. I've been that boy so many times, though I rarely wear suits. I've stopped at the bodega he stops at, lost keys at the bar one block down, gone on dates I hardly remember, because time is the oldest story, and this city doesn't give a s*** about anything old.

It's an illusion, my friend used to say while we danced in the late aughts, high on coke and so much X. It's an illusion you feel this way, so wait till tomorrow, wait till two drinks from now, wait till you meet someone else. And though I never listened to him, something about this sunrise makes me remember that. It makes me feel like, yeah, I'd trade wisdom for youth. I would do it. Any day. I don't care.

Boy, I'm getting nostalgic. Yeah, there's a lot of nostalgia in this book. Tell us about book number four. Book number four is actually one that may be familiar to listeners already because it won this year's Pulitzer Prize. It is by Marie Howe. It's called New and Selected Poems. It is New and Selected Poems. Marie Howe

has been a major figure on the American poetry scene for decades, but she is the farthest thing from prolific. In 40 years, her first collection came out in 1987. This is only her fifth book. So she's like a book a decade kind of a person, and they're not big books, but each one is an event. And Marie Howe has this thing that she does in her poetry where she pulls together the

the like most mundane elements of daily living and ties it to almost a spiritual sense of again a kind of ecstasy or just the bigger picture so she's she does this thing that poetry can do so well of making you feel like every moment is holy every moment has some larger significance to it and she's

captures that in the poems. She also writes a lot about her own life, her personal life. Her second book, What the Living Do, had a through line in it of the death of her brother John by AIDS. Her

and fourth books dealt with the illness and then death of her mother. So she's in writing about small moments, grocery shopping and washing the dishes and things. She is also grappling with kind of the deepest depths of grief, of loneliness, of human yearning and tying all of this together through just really crystalline prose, free verse that is very, again, accessible and

and makes you feel tapped into something bigger, even just as you go about your day. She can often be quite explicitly religious. Her fourth book had a sequence of poems in it all about Mary Magdalene. But again, she takes these religious themes and relates them back down to the intimate and personal and daily. Do any of these have bad words in them? I'm sure they do. She's got a whole...

poem about penises. Okay. Don't read that one. I will not read that one. That is a poem about the male body, about men that she has loved before, but all told through one specific detail of each of the men. Sounds sweet. What do you have instead? Instead of that, I will read you the title poem of that second book, What the Living Do, a poem that

It was published in the early to mid-90s and has just lasted and lasted as kind of a career-defining poem, What the Living Do. Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days. Some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous. And the crusty dishes have piled up, waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the every day we spoke of. It's winter again.

The sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through. The open living room windows, because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off. For weeks now, driving or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking. I've been thinking, this is what the living do.

And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later when buying a hairbrush. This is it. Parking, slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.

We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss. We want more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless. I am living. I remember you.

Incredible. Yeah, that's a wonderful poem. It's a real delight to hear

Anyone read poetry, but I think it's a double delight to hear the poetry editor of the New York Times Book Review do so. Those are great recommendations. They're all wonderful collections. I'll tell you again the names and the poets. We had New and Collected Hell, a poem by Shane McRae. Ominous Music Intensifying by Alexandra Teague. Ecstasy by Alex Dimitroff. And New and Selected Poems by Marie Howe. Fantastic. Craig, thank you so much. Thank you, Gilbert.

Those were my conversations with Tony Scott about the poetry coverage that he has been doing this year, and Greg Coles, our poetry editor, about some recent collections he really wants you to read. I am Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thank you, as always, for listening.

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