Amy Woolard Reads Charles Wright
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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 choose a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then they read one of their poems that's been published in the magazine.

My guest today is the writer Amy Willard, whose debut poetry collection, Neck of the Woods, won the 2018 Alice James Award from Alice James Books. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, she's also a civil rights attorney and the chief program officer for the ACLU of Virginia.

Amy, welcome. Thank you so much, Kevin. I really appreciate the invitation to be here. Thanks so much for being here. Now, the poem you've decided to read today is Via Negativa by Charles Wright. Tell us, what was it about this particular poem that caught your eye? What caught my eye is that it's written by Charles Wright, who is someone who

I call affectionately my poetry dad. He was one of my first poetry teachers as a very young undergraduate here in Charlottesville when I was at the University of Virginia. I like to think he raised me as a poet and raised me through his poetry as well. He has a good breadth of poems in the New Yorker archive, and this one stood out to me as something

a very classic Charles Wright poem. It's set here in Virginia, which many of my poems are as well. It has that great wandering drawl of his lines and that

spirituality that he taps into, that ghost world he taps into in the music that he creates in those lines. Well, why don't we listen to the poem? This is Amy Willard reading Via Negativa by Charles Wright. Via Negativa. If a man wants to be sure of his road, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark. St. John of the Cross.

In southwest Virginia, just this side of Abingdon, the mountains begin to shoulder up. The dogwoods go red and leaf-darkened, and leftover roadside wildflowers neon among the greens. Early October, an Appalachia dyes her hair. What is it about the southern mountains that vacuums me out, that seems to hold me on an invisible flame until I rise up and veer weightless and unrepentant?

The great valley pours into Tennessee, the ridges like epaulettes to the north, landscape in pinks and greens off to the south. How pretty to think that gods abound and everything stays forgotten, that words are dust and everyone's lip that uttered them is dust, our line of discomfort inalterable, sunstruck from naughtness into naughtness.

Our prayers, like raiment, like char scraps, rising without us into an everlasting, which goes on without us, blue into blue into blue. Our prayers, like wet-wrung pieces of glass, surf-spun, unedged, and indestructible and shining. Our lives a scratch on the sky, painless beyond recall.

I never remember going out at night, full moon, stalking the yard in California the way I do here, first frost starting to sort its crystals out, moon shadows tepid and underslung on the lawn. I don't remember, although I should, the emptiness that cold brings and stillness brings. I never remember remembering the odd way evergreens have in nightlight of looming and floating.

The way the spirit leaving your mouth looms to and floats in front of you like breath leading the way as it disappears into the darkness. Long journey, short road, the saying goes, meaning our lives, meaning the afterlife of our nights and days during our sleepwalk through them.

The verbal hunger, the narrowness between the thing itself and the naming of the thing coils like a tapeworm inside us and waits to be filled. Our lives continue on course and reject all meaning, each of us needing his martyrdom, each of us needing that hard love. We sink to our knees like Sunday. We rise and we sink again. There is no pardon for this.

Bottomless water, heart's glass. Each year, the autumn comes that was not supposed to be, back in the garden without language. Each year, dead leaves like words falling about our shoulders. Each year, same words, same flash, and gold guise. So be it. The angel of the serpent that never arrives, never arrives.

The gates stay shut under a shine and a timelessness. On Locust Avenue, the fall's fire collapses across the lawn. The trees bear up their ruin, and everything nudges our lives toward the coming ash. That was Via Negativa by Charles Wright, which was published in the October 15, 2001 issue of The New Yorker. What a beautiful reading, and what a lovely poem. And I love what you said about

I think you called it the drawl of his. And I know you mean not just the sound of the speech, but really that kind of way that the poem feels like it's meandering, but it's so focused. And I think you see that in his form, which if I'm right, is these 10-line stanzas that also sort of drop down and meander. I think he even uses that word. And there's something about that that is really beautiful and I've always admired too.

And it shows itself in phrases like, so be it. You know, something that people say, but you don't always say in a poem. And I wonder if we can start with not the form, though I think the form is so beautiful, but with that language, how is he able, in this poem and in others, to kind of have that mix of raiment and char scraps and...

and everlasting, and then that amazing line, the angel of the serpent that never arrives, you know, all caps, all capitalized, and then never arrives, you know? So tell me about that language, the high and the low and the east and the west and the north and the south. Right. I think it's just what I love so much about his voice. No one can write

in this voice but Charles Wright. It is that mix of Pickwick Dam, Tennessee and Italy and reading Chinese literature and California and Montana and all of these things I think that make him who he is. And I always feel like some of these poems are, it's almost like

Old-fashioned letter writing, you know, the way my grandmother would handwrite letters to me and describe her azaleas out front, but also have these very, you know, informal sort of spoken sentences in what she shares with me. It feels very Southern to me. Well, and also this idea of the verbal hunger, the narrowness between the thing itself and the naming of the thing.

And someone else might stop there, but then he goes on to say, coils like a tapeworm inside us. Okay, amazing. And waits to be filled. Wait, huh? You know, like it keeps going and keeps coiling and uncoiling. And that kind of tapeworm, that verbal hunger is also at work, I think. Absolutely. I mean, he keeps reaching after the unreachable. And I think, you know, that speaks volumes.

to the title that speaks to his, you know, I kind of hate the word project, but project, if you will, this trilogy of landscape and language and the idea of God that he says pushes his poems forward and the intertwining of them. And those lines that drop down, I love, he calls them lowriders, which is hysterical to me because I have the sense that Charles Wright doesn't know

You know, the sort of pop culture reference of lowrider. He says something like they hold up the weight of the line that needs to continue on, you know, so they act almost like branches or, you know, load bearing beams, right?

Mm-hmm. Right. Well, and I think, you know, visually...

It breaks up what could be these blocks of ten. You know, it visually does something as well that I think is sonic. And, you know, my feeling about poems is the visual is the sonic in a poem, especially if not more in a free verse poem or a...

Do you think about the meter in these poems, which I think is so subtle that we might not. And I wonder how you approach that part of the kind of form he's working in. I do all the time. And I think about just how careful a poet he is inside of what looks on the page like just spoken text just coming out of him. But it's so considered.

And certainly shows up in the music of it. I have kind of a funny story. When I was his student, he assigned our workshop to write 50 lines of iambic pentameter as part of the workshop. And it's so hard. It was so hard for me. I was a really young, kind of terrible student.

feral student in college. And I just didn't do it, and I didn't do it. And it was the last class before I was going to graduate college, and he gave me an incomplete. And I went to see him, and he said, I did this because you're going to write these lines, and you're not going to graduate and get your diploma until you do. Oh, wow.

And I finally did. I love it. I think all undergrads should be assigned 50 lines of pentameter or not graduate. Yeah. I thank him for it, though, because I was so concerned with the perfection of the lines. And that's not what he was trying to teach. Right. But I hear this conversation.

country music. You know, in his poems, I hear that very careful music in the syllables that he so carefully chooses in these lines, too.

Well, and this is 50 lines, it so happens. So I assume you wrote something exactly like this. He understood the assignment, apparently. Yeah. Well, what I love, too, are the shifts in the poem. And they happen so often and so quickly and a little bit in what you were saying he calls the low rider, which is a kind of drop-down line, sometimes halfway across the page for those of us

who are following along at home, I wonder about those shifts where he says things like, in the beginning of the poem, he is really a setup. And I think if it was in a workshop, someone would be like, you know, I don't know if you need that beginning. But there's something about that switch between this description that dogwoods go red and leaf darken and leftover roadside wildflowers neon among the greens. I mean, you hear those words.

D sounds, the F sounds, the N sounds, all this kind of lushness that he's describing. And then it's dash early October and Appalachia dyes her hair. Suddenly we're in this wonder of,

but also a feeling of ritual that I think is different than description, you know? And I think that ritual is all around this poem. You know, there's a, where he says, how pretty to think that God's abound. And I keep waiting for him to kind of say something different about that. Like, but actually, you know, I would have a, and thus or, but, and said, he just, that's actually the point is that it is kind of pretty to do that. And he's going to tell you,

the parts of that from notness into notness, our prayers like raiment, like char scraps rising without us into an everlasting, which goes on without us. And the going on keeps going, you know, and I think there's something powerful about that. The kind of suppositions that he's fine with actually leaving as supposition. Yeah. He sort of rests inside that

That rapture. It's almost as if he's writing the poem as you're reading it. And I think that's a really deft...

thing he does regularly where it's it's as if he's observing as you're reading his poems and you're hearing it as it's going through his own senses he writes very careful poems but they really feel impromptu in a lot of ways where things are just coming at him and he's meeting them where they are well I think what's interesting is and I want to talk with you about the title in a second but he also frames it in a in a in a

in St. John of the Cross, you know, like there's big things lurking behind these mountains, you know, and I think there's something about that

that he isn't afraid to do, that sometimes we're in a kind of age of understatement maybe, you know, in some ways. Maybe not, but maybe we are, you know. Like for me, it's like I start to have a Charles Wright poem thought about it. Are we in an age? Oh, anyway. So that's a different podcast. But I think thinking about how do we –

wrestle with these big ideas, which by naming it there, he's helping us know that this is bigger than him. It's bigger than poetry, perhaps. It goes bigger than our time. It's a kind of eternal set of questions. And how do you take the title...

As part of that, what do you, you know, I had to kind of think and look around at what via negativa means, but how do you understand the idea? I understand it through Charles as a means of, you know, one.

One cannot speak of the unspeakable. One cannot speak of the divine. He has a way of treating landscape almost as a kind of medium, a spiritual medium to the unknowable. And I think that is...

Right.

he keeps seeking this idea of the unspeakable and that kind of, that liminal place, that landscape is so adept at joining for us. And certainly, you know, one thing I love about this poem is it talks about places I know very well. I, you know, Locust Avenue is right down the street from me right now. It's where this old house was. I know these mountains. Um,

just this side of Abington. And it is a really, whether you're

you know, religious, I guess, or not. It's a very spiritual place and it makes us feel like we're on a giant rock hurtling through space. You know, it takes us out of this very practical capitalist world that we're in even for a moment and lets us sit in that kind of that ghost space between here and what we can't know. This is beautifully said.

I almost don't want to go beyond what you've just said because it's so perfect. But I do want to understand two things that he does that I don't think everyone can do, which is have these declarations. There is no pardon for this. Bottleness water, heart's glass, and these almost kind of fractured declarations.

juxtapositions that I think is how he sees the poem being built. It is a series of moments, observations, some of them fractured, but ones that, like you're saying, I wrote, run poem my whole life, he would say, it adds up to more than the parts. How do you see that working in the poem, or is that how it works? I mean, I think...

For me, it also feels almost like a kind of humor from him, too, when he says, you know, how pretty to think that God's abound. It's sort of classic of him. And I think some of that is it feels to me like he is in the space of openness, of wanting to seek the unseeable, the unspeakable.

And then also in this place of doubt, you know, where this can't happen. We try and we try and we try. And I think he finds a kind of almost like a gallows humor in that. And I think that's where we find these lines like, there is no pardon for this, or we sink to our knees like Sunday. This humor in the idea that we're

We keep trying, knowing we're not going to find the divine. We're not going to be able to know it other than knowing what it isn't. Yeah. Well, that I think is where we should end because that said so well. And for me, I think knowing how place plays for him and how it plays for you and your work and the poem we're going to hear from you, I think it's so beautiful. Yeah.

Let's turn to that poem. Now, in our March 18th, 2024 issue, The New Yorker published your poem, Late Shift, which you'll read for us momentarily. Did you want to say anything about the poem before we hear it? I think probably what I would just say is that it's situated in kind of an under-production manuscript that is called Wage that really speaks to a spin about

12 years or so full-time working in restaurants, working in precarious industries, and doing that here in Charlottesville. And it's such a meaningful time and place for me, and there's so much I want to say about it. The collection is a bit of a love letter to Charlottesville and to the people I worked with in those spaces. And I will say...

One of the best things that came from the poem appearing in the magazine is that I had restaurant employees reach out to me, email me, and thank me for it and see themselves in it. And that is the best accolade I could think of. Well, here's Amy Willard reading her poem, Late Shift. Late Shift. Those days I could only love someone who was ashamed of their teeth.

the way the dogs will always sleep in the spots they know i'll need to step the things we do so not to lose each other so as to lose something every day church key bar rag the obscene puckered red of maraschino the wrecked line cook in the walk-in his chilled kiss how it tastes like a future eviction thieves in the temple of our bodies

Years later, I will still feel most at home when I eat standing up, when I settle up in cash, when I barter for your attention. Fingernail of heat lightning tapping the tabled sky, a broken pint glass in the ice bin. Every shift Sinead sings, this is the last day of our acquaintance. There are nights I give up on the world, but not my body.

How in the Bruegel, if you didn't know the title, you might not look for Icarus at all. A paper lantern giving its wish back to ground long after we've left. Push a fork into a fish and what you get is a meal. Push a knife into a knuckle and what you get is to be changed. Like Icarus, what I want is to start over but not do it all again. Like Icarus, I wanted the light to love me back.

How in my lungs still nests the fur of every animal I ever kept. Years later, the gods will have me cough up a snow leopard. I thought the main selling point of breathing was we didn't have to be reminded to do it. I never wanted children, but I always liked the one about Athena pouring full-grown from Zeus's forehead. How did we survive before Advil, love? Before the armor of us glinting in the closed kitchen dark?

The way a creaky floorboards one job is to wait. Service means the spoon appears before you know you need it. The water looks to refill itself. The napkin calls a truce. When something is soft, we believe we deserve to touch it, and so we do. When something is sharp, we long to perfect it. Nothing belongs to us until last call. One more, and then no more.

The lights go on and it's time to cough up what's owed. Build a cathedral in the dead of night and then give it a shift meal, a smoking section, a cover charge, a swinging door, a till to reckon. Those days we didn't have a prayer, separated our love from each other like cupping a yolk between the cracked half shells back and again until it's perfect. Forgive ourselves.

Give ourselves the tenderest title and call it a day. How could we ever? How could we not? Baby, draw the spoked sun in the corner of our afternoon sky. Wake us in its slow-cooked gaze.

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The thing that I'm really excited about is the native-owned Kodiak Brown Bear Centre. And if you stay in one of their lovely cottages, there's the opportunity to share space with the largest subspecies of brown bear in the world. And this both terrifies me and makes me all warm and tingly inside. In 2025, there's going to be like

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That was Late Shift by Amy Willard. How great to hear it in your voice. But it is so lively and sonic on the page already. And I remember reading it and thinking, you know, it just moves so assuredly between these

And I think there's something really lovely about that. And it has that similar to right quality of the high and the low and the Sinead O'Connor and the, you know, a broken pint glass in the ice bin. I mean, the danger lurking behind every line, the knives, and then the sort of broken hearts that feel like they're somewhere as part of all of this. And,

to get to that baby at the end, I think is really great. I wonder about this idea of place in the poem and how build a cathedral in the dead of night and then give it a shift meal, a smoking section, a cover charge, a swinging door, a till to reckon. Is there something prayerful about this late shift, this work?

I think for me there certainly was. There's a bit of a chosen family feel to working in these spaces. There is a kind of reverence in the work itself that I really appreciate. And so much of it goes unseen. And it did to me in working in those spaces kind of feel like

Going to a church each night, figuring out that ritual of, you know, setting up spaces and working the shift and all of the repetition that follows with that. It felt like a holy space to me in a way that also was very lowbrow and dangerous and temporary. Felt as though...

We were all building something together and believed something together, though we were really at risk in doing that as well. Right. Well, what I didn't ask you about the Charles Wright poem, I'll ask you about yours, which is, is there an implied we in this poem?

There's a lot of I, there's a you, but is there this kind of we lurking behind it, you think? I think there's a we, but I think part of what I struggle with in writing about this time and this landscape is, you know, there's this kind of like,

the fourth duality that I experienced where I was in the tavern and now I'm not. I'm in the court. And I always felt as though I sort of had one foot in both places. And so there's a we, but I feel like I also have a sense that while I belonged there, only half of me kind of belonged there.

Well, how did we survive before Advil? I mean, how does one make it? What I like is there is a kind of poem that I see sometimes that tries to do, let's call them leaps, you know, says a thing, says a different thing. Charles Wright does it very differently, and I think place grounds it. But I see it more as a kind of almost...

you know, switching channels, uh, effect kind of. And I don't feel that here. Like, I feel like you do do these leaps. Like after the Advil line, you say before the armor of us glinting in the closed kitchen dark, but right before that is, I never wanted children, but I always liked the one about Athena pouring full grown from Zeus's forehead, you know, and then it's Advil and it's sort of the pain of Zeus's, uh, birthing Athena from his head. Um, it's,

is also Advil. I guess what I'm saying is it works more like jazz than I see some of these other things work. And I wondered what kind of music besides O'Connor influenced you here? I mean poetic as well as music in the world. Sure, yeah. I'm really influenced by old school rap actually. So Rakim if you can call Nas old school, he's sort of

medium school, maybe. But there is...

kind of a patter and a musicality and a persistence to their flow that I really admire. And so I think some of it is that. Jazz is really generous, I will take that. From Charles, I think what I learned is this idea of the image narrative, right? Like setting up images against each other and kind of seeing what happens and

I think the music of that for me in his lines, I feel like I adopted from him a bit or I certainly learned it from reading him of just that, you know, his and, and, and. Sometimes I feel like my lines keep getting longer and longer and longer because I just want to put so much in them. Well, I felt like what is guiding us is

isn't that sense of place, though there is a sense of place here, but also a sense of time. And I wonder about...

Other shifts, would they feel different? You know, is this how you're writing about these or is this, you know, unique in its form for you, these long cup line couplets? I've been writing in couplets for a while and it started in my first collection where in part I was, I was writing about, you

Someone who was very close to me, like a sister to me, who died by suicide. And I think the couplets became kind of a way of holding on to her a bit and really thinking about that sense of when you lose someone like that, who's that close to you, you also lose...

half of your sentences sometimes. You lose the inside jokes. You lose the predicate to your subject on some occasions. And so I think the couplets are really still an homage to her and also just the duality of being in this world and being able to exist outside of it at the same time.

Well, when I think of couplets as this, I'm always attracted to them too because they imply a kind of pairing, of course, and they go back in my mind to kind of heroic couplets and this idea of heroism that's kind of lurking behind it. And there's something in this poem that...

is a little bit heroic. You even have gods and the gods. Um, but you also have, I think the humanity of these places and also the kind of uncanny of it. Push it,

a fork into a fish and what you get is a meal, push a knife into a knuckle and what you get is to be changed like Icarus, what I want. You know, there's a sense of myth at work and that kind of pairing of, I would call it the ordinary and the extraordinary, which I think good poems do always, is made kind of manifest in that form for me.

Yeah. And I just, I really like the leanness of them too. Yeah. You know, I keep... They are knife-like. They are. And I keep going back to what I've been taught just because I've been so fortunate to have great teachers. But I think a foundational piece of what I was taught is to be deliberate in writing a line, that a line should hold up.

on its own, no matter what. And I kind of think that about the pairs as well. Yeah. If we think of them as walls. They have to be units. Right. A kind of room or a kind of lean-to in a way with couplets that, like Charles says, they need to hold up

and not break under the weight of themselves. But I want to try to make that branch as long as I can before it breaks under that weight. Well, it implies, like I said, pairing this and this and maybe that kind of and that you're talking about. I wonder too about if you think they speed it up or slow it down. That's so interesting. I definitely think about pace more.

quite a bit. I will say, as probably we should, I read things out loud after I get a draft down to see where I'm tripping up and to see where my breath can't quite hold as it moves through the poem. And so I think for me, like with Charles, I want a kind of drawl in my lines. I want a kind of, not the slowdown, but a kind of unfolding.

So for me, they don't feel fast, but they do feel like a bit of a tumble, a bit of an unraveling. Well said. Well, I want to ask you about wage, which you mentioned. I'm super...

So I never say the title of like a manuscript or my friends will be like, what is it called? It's like, I can't tell you. It's coming out next week, but I cannot speak of it. So I'm really amazed at your ability to know, and it seems exactly right, but I'm curious about sort of how you approach as a whole, you know, just sort of quickly, how are you thinking about it? Um,

I know another of the poems appeared in the magazine. How do we kind of think about these things and how do they come together? Are you a map it out kind of person or you're like, I know I got to get a late shift poem and maybe there's a early shift to, you know, how do you think about it? Yeah, that's a great question. Um,

I really sort of come from a period of writing where you just wrote poems until you felt like you had enough to put in a collection. And I know that's a bit different for some people now that there's plotting out and kind of a full collection.

capture outlining. I don't feel like I'm doing that, but I do feel some structure coming into play. There is a brunch shift poem. There are a handful of shiftless poems because I needed to talk about the day off.

And the way that time plays into this kind of precarious work, you know, late shift is a piece of that. But the flip side is that you don't have mornings sometimes. Your sun is the afternoon sun always. When you get that into this poem. Exactly. Here. Exactly. Yeah.

And so I've thought about the different aspects that I think I want to cover and lift up and really celebrate about that time. I do, like I said, feel like it's a bit of an homage to that group of folks that I'm so tightly bound with. And I want to honor all the aspects of that time, but also show the precarity of it. And so it requires talking about

some of the difficulties. The fact that not everybody makes it out of that business. Sure. We lose a lot of... I've lost people quite early in that work because it is such a physical job that's so interwoven with substance use sometimes and long shifts and night work and not a lot of pay. And so I don't know when I'll have the whole...

Sure. But I know I have about half of it, I think. Yeah. We're never promised another book. And so you're right. I'm superstitious as well. And I think. But you're doing the opposite, which is you speak it into existence. I speak it. I'm trying to manifest it. Yeah. Part of it was just. I think that's good. Wage felt like the title. Like once I had it, it felt certain. And then part of it, I confess, is taking ownership of that. Yeah.

No, I love that. For myself. I love that. Well, I love talking with you about this. I look forward to the full book whenever that is. And, you know, thank you so much for talking with us today. Thank you so much, Kevin. It's been a real pleasure. Late Shift by Amy Willard, as well as Charles Wright's Via Negativa, can be found on newyorker.com. Charles Wright's most recent book of poems is Oblivion Banjo. Amy Willard's latest collection is Neck of the Woods.

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 on the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is The Corner by Christian Scott Atunde-Ajua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Ropa Dope.

The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Jill Duboff of NewYorker.com with help from Hannah Eisenman. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Frey. I'm Vincent Cunningham, and this is Critics at Large, a New Yorker podcast for the culturally curious. Each week, we're going to talk about a big idea that's showing up across the cultural landscape, and we'll trace it through all the mediums we love. Books, movies, television, music, art. And I always want to talk about celebrity gossip, too. Of course.

What are you guys excited to cover in the next few months? There's a new translation of The Iliad that's coming out, Emily Wilson. Really excited to see whether I can read The Iliad again, whether I'm that literate. I mean, the jury is out. I can't wait to hear Adam Driver go again at an Italian accent in Michael Mann's Ferrari. He can't stop. I mean, and bless him. I can't wait. Molto bene. Molto bene.

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