Shownotes Transcript
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.
On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine. The poems we're featuring today also appear in the anthology A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925-2025, available for purchase from the New Yorker store or wherever you buy books.
Today my guest is David St. John, who's the author of many poetry collections and the recipient of honors, including the Rome Fellowship and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the O.B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the George Drury Smith Award from Beyond Baroque. He's also the editor of Squirrel and Vortex, a volume of collected poems by the late Larry Levis, forthcoming in 2026.
Welcome, David. Thanks so much for joining us. Kevin, it's wonderful to be here. So the first poem you've chosen to read, which is, I have to say, one of my favorite poems, is Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard by Larry Levis. What was it that drew you to this particular poem? Well, it's always been one of the most important poems for me of Larry's early work. It's the poem he chose to begin his third collection, The Dollmaker's Ghost.
And that book has always been really compelling to me because in some ways it's a kind of litany of ghosts in his life, both familial but also the landscape in which he grew up. He grew up outside of Fresno where I grew up. We knew each other from the time I was 18. He grew up on what his family always called the ranch.
And it was grape vineyards for raisins, not for wine. One of the things about this poem that I love is that he grew up among migrant farm workers. And this was an important part of his life, an important part of his work.
Phil Levine says this amazing thing in the documentary film about Larry, which is called Late Style of Fire. Larry Levis, American poet that the director Michelle Poulos and Larry's old friend Greg Donovan made. And Phil says Larry grew up in a home that was
on one side of the divide of the workers and the owners, but in fact he really lived on the other side. And I think that it's really an insightful thing. Well, let's hear the poem. Here's David St. John reading Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard by Larry Levis.
Picking grapes in an abandoned vineyard Picking grapes alone in the late autumn sun A short curved knife in my hand Its blade silver from so many sharpenings Its handle black I still have a scar Where a friend sliced open my right index finger once In a cutting shed The same kind of knife
The grapes drop into the pan and the gnats swarm over them as always. Fifteen years ago, I worked this row of vines beside a dozen families up from Mexico. No one spoke English or wanted to.
One woman who made an omelet with a sheet of tin and five light blue quail eggs had a voice full of dusk and jail cells and bird calls. She spoke in Spanish to no one, as they all did. Their swearing was specific and polite. I remember two of them clearly.
A man named T, six feet nine inches tall at the age of 62, who wore white spats into downtown Fresno each Saturday night. An alcoholic giant whom the women loved. One chilled morning, they found him dead outside the Rose Cafe.
And Angel Dominguez, who came to work for my grandfather in 1910, and who saved for years to buy 20 acres of rotting Thompson seedless vines while the sun flared all one August. He decided he was dying of a rare disease.
and spent his money and his last years on specialists who found nothing wrong. T laughed and, tipping back a bottle of muscatel, said, nothing's wrong, you're just dying. At 17, I discovered Parlier, California, with its sad, topless bar, and its one main street, and its opium.
I would stand still and chalk my cue stick in Johnny Polari's east front pool hole and watch the room filling with tobacco smoke as the sun set through one window. Now all I hear are the vines rustling as I go from one to the next.
The long canes holding up dry leaves reddening so late in the year. What the vines want must be this silence spreading over each town, over the dance halls and the dying parks and the police drowsing in their cruisers under the stars. What the men who worked here wanted.
Was a drink strong enough to let out what laughter they had? I can still see the two of them. Tee smiles and lets his yellow teeth shine, while Angel, the serious one, for whom death was a rare disease, purses his lips and looks down as if he is already mourning himself.
a soft gray hat between his hands. Today, in honor of them, I press my thumb against the flat part of this blade and steady a bunch of red malaga grapes with one hand the way they showed me and cut and close my eyes to hear them laugh at me again.
And then, hearing nothing, no one, carry the grapes up to the solemn house where I was born. That was Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard by Larry Levis, which was originally published in the November 10, 1980 issue of The New Yorker. I love how this poem moves. I always have. And it's one long stanza, but also, I think, one big thought, if that makes sense. And the action of him...
cutting the vines and cutting those grapes, it sends him into a past that feels so present for him, but also seems so much about loss and fate and the future. You know, it feels both particular to him and we have these great figures, T and Angel, who seem like angels in some way, delivering the news from somewhere else in many ways. How do you reckon between the sort of memory that he's evoking and...
the big thoughts that emerge. One of the things that's always really fascinating about Larry's poems is that, I mean, I think it's true of all poetry, that it's about memory and recuperation of the past, and recuperation meaning in its healing way as well, to look back
things in our own experience that sometimes are jagged, disjointed, even troubling, that poems can help enfold them and bring them back into a present of reflection. And one of the things about
the book, The Dollmaker's Ghost, is that it's one of the first times that Larry invites ghosts into his present. There's nothing ephemeral about the ghosts in Larry's poems. They're always material and they're always intimate in ways that aren't always comfortable.
And one of the things that you'll notice about the poem, it has timestamps. And as you go down, it'll say 15 years ago. It's very cinematic in how he's positioning you. Yes, yes, that's a great word. And then he refocuses on a tighter shot of two figures in the poem. And then he gives us the backdrop of
of T, this amazing, really larger-than-life figure. Right. And then he goes down and he says, another timestamp, at 17, I discover. Right. And then the details about Parlier. Well, and really quickly, in three lines...
he gives a whole history of himself. And sort of this other gap, you know, this lacuna that's not in the poem, but that is in others of his poems and sort of is lurking all around the poems about sort of this unspoken addiction or loss and sort of where he's from and who he became. And just in the three lines, he manages to do that. That's absolutely right, Kevin. And one of the things that happens in Larry's poems is
is that Larry becomes a kind of ghostly inhabitant, even of his own work. There's a kind of omniscience of the past, but a sense of looking forward to the person he became and will become, even in the poems set in the past. And then again, right toward the end, he says, today.
In honor of them. So he's always situating us in, quote, real time of the poem or the fictive time of the meditation while always making sure he doesn't lose us. Right. It's a kind of reflection, a kind of movement in memory. Yeah.
that never loses the reader. In other words, it never disappears into a personal past.
It always says, you're here with me. Well, I'm just so excited to talk about this poem because I think it's also, it's a clinic in narration. How do you narrate something? How do you tell a story that isn't one story, but many stories? And it's a story of the self, as we said, but also today in honor of them. Yes. There's all those little moments of specificity and of familiarity that without, I think, claiming more than it is, like,
You have a feeling that he has learned from them. And there's something about that honoring that I think is throughout the poem. He uses humor that feels like it's part of that legacy, that moment where he leans back, T does, and tipping back break a bottle of muscatel. I mean, what a great break. Tipping back said, nothing's wrong. Another break.
You're just dying. And then it goes at 17. And he's remembering his life, but also the danger that's lurking in addiction and this pool hall, which there's a real, I don't know, sense to me at least of danger in the ordinary that I think he captures. That's a great way to put it, Kevin. And I think it's something you see in Levis's poems throughout.
the way in which there's a latent danger in things and places. And his poems are so brilliant in their atmospheric details, but in the suggestion, it's always in the suggestion that the detail allows the reader to have. But I agree about this poem. It is absolutely a clinic in narration, as you said.
Well, and the narrator too, who we know of as him, and it doesn't have that sort of fiction of it being someone else. And in fact, it's a kind of origin story for him. The last lines I think of all the time, and that moment where he says...
and close my eyes to hear them laugh at me again, which is a great lie because it acknowledges that he was sort of this kid who didn't know what they know. And then hearing nothing, no one carry the grapes up into the solemn house where I was born.
That solemn house, I think, that's a novel in and of itself. I mean, what has happened in this house that you'd rather be laughed out in the fields than in the solemnity it feels to me. Oh, that's absolutely true. And in other of the poems and in some of the essays, you see that unpacked with greater detail. But certainly his relationship with his father, who was very austere,
And the way in which Levis is always looking to get out of that house and into the fields with the workers. He has a sense of, I mean, I don't know if I should call it empathy, unity. There's something pervasive about his experience here.
on the land, among the vineyards and the orchards with these men that gives him peace, Kevin. It puts him at ease and has a peace for him that I don't think he knew in his childhood. And I think that it's why he often returns to this landscape and this community of
That he regards, it seems to me, as his second family. It's interesting because I think he manages also to be in the honoring, to understand, I think, the distance required, even if it's a distance of time, but it's also a distance of time.
They're having a slightly different experience than him. And it's his house, you know, that he's returning to. And the title. I mean, anyone else wouldn't give away everything in the title. And instead, he's like picking grapes in an abandoned vineyard. You know, that's such a crucial part. Like, he's kind of picking grapes in the afterlife of all of this. And so he's sort of both a survivor telling a story about what he's seen, but also, I think...
a person trying to reckon with what it means to survive and have, I think, in some way guilt about it. I wonder, too, if you think of the poem as an elegy, and if so, for what? Oh, I do. And I think that one of the things I love about what you just said is there's something posthumous about all of Levis's poems.
There's something in which he understands his, I don't want to say aloneness or solitude, but solitariness in this profound way. In some ways, you read through all of Larry's work, as I've been doing for the collected poems. And many, well, don't forget his second book is called The Afterlife. That's his second book.
Right. So he understands the power of a very present ghost. Not that he thinks of himself as a ghost, but he has that permeability. He's able to move through memory and the past in a way that re-inhabits a landscape. And I think what's elegiac about this poem is
Of course, it's for some aspect of himself, but also for a period of time that felt more fluid across what become very strict borders. And I think that it's one of the things, as you're saying, he's very aware of in the honoring of this past. He understands how fortunate
he was and how fortunate he feels, just his good luck to grow up in this very rural landscape. And yet he understands that it connected him to the earth, I think he would say. Yeah. And to the world of experience that otherwise increasingly became
unavailable to him. Right. Well, and the pool hall kind of is one version of that. Yes. Which we can picture almost from a noir movie or something like that. It has that quality of it. And I love how you say it's cinematic. I want to think together with you about, you know, collecting. And you've mentioned Swirl and Vortex, his collected poems and one you're doing. And we
It includes previously unpublished poems, two of which we were really lucky to publish in The New Yorker, one called Prayer and one called Homage to Willie Mays. I mean, these are both tremendous poems, I think. What's been your experience working on that and putting together a collective? You know, I did the Lucille Clifton Collective with the late Michael S. Glazer, and it's such a...
powerful thing to look through someone's work. And to me, that was so poignant because you see the process. And so I'm curious about if we can reflect on his process, but then on your process of putting together the collective and finding these unknown poems. Well, in some ways, I had the advantage of Larry would always send me his poems. And usually,
individually in letters. I did the same with Larry. And then when we'd have manuscripts, putting together manuscripts, we would send them and say, all right, tell me what sucks. And so I had the advantage of knowing his handwriting.
Which became increasingly illegible. Oh, wow. But the drafts, when he'd send me poems, he would mark potential revisions. He would write alternate passages. I have to say, I had two amazing associate editors, James Jano, wonderful poet, and L.A. Johnson, Liz Johnson. And
They became these archival sleuths, but the process was archaeological. I mean, there's a lot of excavation going into those archives, just all the boxes and boxes of folders. There would be particular poems like prayer, for example, folders with drafts and drafts
And, you know, in the case of Prayer, which I think is really one of his major poems, there were decisions that I had to make in terms of what he had decided. But because we had just known each other so long, I could just sort of slip into, you know, Larry Head for a moment and think, well, what's he saying here? So, yeah. Yeah.
It's really great to hear you talk about that process. And I know people will be so curious how this tremendous poet, who I think gets more and more important by the day, by the year, that we see him as major in ways that maybe he knew he was, maybe he didn't, I don't know. But to me, seem really only to grow. And your book will surely help cement that. I hope that it's a way for people to
differently his achievement, I think. More from my conversation with David St. John after the break. 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, occasionally we get somebody to come on, and I'm always smarter for it. If you get a great historian who can tell you about a presidential election 50, 60 years ago, often it can help you understand about what's happening today.
So if you're looking for weekly insights into what's going on inside the Beltway, please join us every Friday on the Washington Roundtable, part of the New Yorker's Political Scene Podcast. David, welcome back. Thank you. Now, in our May 9th, 1977 issue, the New Yorker published your poem, The Shore, which you'll read for us momentarily. Is there anything you want to let readers know before you read it for us?
Yeah, actually, there is. It's the title poem of my second book. And I was living in Baltimore at the time teaching at Johns Hopkins, and I had begun to spend more time on the Atlantic shore. But I'd grown up spending time on the
the California shore, especially that part of the world, sort of from Big Sur up to Mendocino, all those coastlines. But I began to have a sense of these alternate coastlines, these alternate shores. And I began to think about how important to me
the California coastline had been. And I wanted to think about what it meant that I was on one coastline on one side of the country and looking back, really looking back in memory. But I also was framing this whole book in terms of the disillusion of a relationship.
And so there's a you who figures in fairly explicitly through the poems of the book. And this poem, the title poem, actually became part of a choral symphony that I worked on with the amazing composer Frank Ticheli. And it was a fabulous experience for me. Sure.
But this, the poem, The Shore, really, it was the place where I was able to find a vocabulary for the rest of the poems in the book and a way to think about what we think of as endings or boundaries. And I love the idea of the shore, the beach, that is indeterminate.
that it's changing. Tides change where the land ends and the ocean begins. And I began to think about how
That was so much a metaphor for my own experience, that things were never sliced off. There are no clean cuts in experience. Things are far more permeable. Things reflect each other. We look forward as we look back. Here's David St. John reading his poem, The Shore. The shore, so the tide forgets.
As morning grows too far delivered, as the bowls of rock and wood run dry, what is left seems pearled and lit. As those cases of the museum stood lit with milk jade, rows of opaque vases streaked with orange and yellow smoke, you found a lavender boat
A single figure polling upstream, baskets of pale fish wedged between his legs. Today, the debris of winter stands stacked against the walls. The coils of kelp lie scattered across the floor. The oil fire smokes. You turn down the lantern, hung on its nail. Outside, the boats aligned like sentinels.
Here beside the blue depot, walking the pier, you can see the way the shore approximates the dream. How distances repeat their deaths above these tables and panes of water. As climbing the hills above the harbor, up to the lupine drifting among the lichen-masked pines.
The night is pocked with lamps lit on every boat offshore, galleries of floating stars. Below, on its narrow tracks shelved into the cliff's face, the train begins its slide down to the warehouses by the harbor.
Loaded with diesel, coal, paychecks, whiskey, bedsheets, slabs of ice. For the fish, for the men. You lean on my arm as once I watched you lean at the window. The book stalls below stretched a mile to the key. The afternoon crowd picking over the novels and histories.
You walked out as you walked out last night onto the stone porch. Dusk reddened the walls, the winds sliced off the reefs, the vines of the gourds shook on their lattice. You talked about that night. You stood behind the black pane of the French window, watching my father read some long passage of a famous voyager's book.
You hated that voice filling the room, its light. So tonight we make a soft parenthesis upon the sand's black bed. In that dream we share, there is one shore where we look out upon nothing and the sea our whole lives. Until turning from those waves, we find one shore.
Where we look out upon nothing and the earth our whole lives. Where what is left between shore and sky is traced in the vague wake of the stars, the sandpipers whistling. What we forgive if you wake soon, wake me. That was The Shore by David St. John.
So beautifully read, and I love hearing it after hearing you read the Levis, and I
There are some echoes there I can hear, but I also love how particular it is. And you had said that there was a you in the poem. And I had the experience of reading it where there's a moment toward the beginning where you think there was just a you, a you as an I. Yes. And I love how that comes across. Well done that we are sort of with this you that could be a self for a moment. And then there's that...
Sort of, you lean on my arm as once I watched you lean at the window. And then there's this kind of, I don't know how else to call it, but a kind of, I think of as a betrayal of admitting of hating this father's voice. As it says, it's light. I mean, it's something to me that...
is a kind of sign or portend of more. And then it says, you know, "So tonight we make a soft parenthesis upon the sand's black bed." A beautiful line. And it so incorporates and thinks about sort of language, the way that language is impermanent, and also that this you and I feel a little tenuous at that moment.
All of that I know you meant to do and thought about extraordinarily. But how do you hear it now, that parenthesis and that kind of sense of sound but also of impermanence? Well, I think that the impermanence throughout the course of the book then becomes more specifically articulated in different poems. And I love using the second phrase.
for the sleight of hand it makes possible at times. And I love the sense of it also being an address to the reader. And a woman who I grew up with, our fathers were best friends and we lived in the same neighborhood. And her family life was complicated and her father had a temper.
And so it was a household in which at times was not comfortable for her. And I didn't know this. I mean, we were in elementary school together, junior high school and high school. You know, I left town, but I saw her once when I was back for a visit. And she said, did you know that when I was seven and eight...
And I had to leave my house. She lived only a few blocks away. She said, I would walk over to your house and I would look inside the living room. And she said, the thing that I found intolerable was seeing your father and seeing how calm he was. And times just, you know, you'd be sitting across the room and he'd be reading something to you.
And she said, I hated you for that. That's really powerful. And so, you know, when I was writing the poems of the shore, I think it was within a year that I had, you know, actually, you know, run into her in Fresno. Right, right. And she had told me that story. Wow.
It's complicated even in the poem, but what resonance that provides to know that it is not like dislike, but almost envy. Oh, absolutely. It's a hate born of kind of, I don't know, something more than envy even. Well, a sense of, I mean, in her own life, the profound disappointment and sense of betrayal in her own family. I think, you know, I once said this thing,
in a workshop that I didn't know I'd said, and somebody made a little bumper sticker of it. I said, everything in my poems is invented, even the things that are real. Sure. And of course, that's what we all do. Right. But that was a moment where, talking about what was at work in the shore, that was a detail that was so, in terms of someone having been wounded,
And of course, in relationships, we all understand we bring not only our own woundings, but our partners bring their woundings. And there's some that seem unreparable. And there's some that you try to arch over that particular event. And so for me, that was the right deal to introduce before the speaker and the you make that parenthesis.
So is the parenthesis healing? Is the parenthesis, you know, a parenthesis is kind of out of time, right? Or, you know, I remember in grammar school, they'd say, like, you could not read that part. And of course, then you, in the poem, toward the end, if you aren't looking at it like we might be, there is that moment is traced in the vague wake of parentheses, the stars. Yes.
The sandpipers whistling on parentheses, what we forgive. I mean, what a brilliant moment. So the parentheses come back in a way. Yes. So is it that? Is it the world that's being made into a parenthesis? Or is it the selves? Or is it their unity that the parentheses bring us to? My sense, I mean, I don't want to... Sure.
But I think that the parenthesis on the sand on the beach is really hopeful. I mean, by definition, just the two parentheses include nothing, but may include everything. And so that's how I thought of the two bodies on the beach. How beautiful.
Well, and I think it has that sense of loss we were talking about with Levis. But this ending, which I think is exquisite,
Where what is left between shore and sky is traced in the vague wake of the stars, the sandpipers whistling what we forgive. And someone else would end it there, I think. Go, yeah, that was, but then you have this gnomic, beautiful italics. If you wake soon, wake me.
How do you hear that wake now? And, you know, to me, I'll just show my hands a little bit. The wake is both that sense of being awake, the wake, of course, of shore and water, but also, you know, our sense of a funerarial wake, all of the above, I assume. But how did that come to you? I think that in the storms of relationships,
There are also kinds of darknesses from which we need to awaken. In this case, I wanted to suggest the speaker and the you still with a sense of proximity, closeness, intimacy. I wanted that to be the presiding thing.
sense of the fact that they are together and that in relationships, people share dreams. And dreams not only aspirational, but sometimes all dreams are not good dreams. And I think that there are times when, I mean, I'll just speak of myself, I mean, where I feel like I've been
caught in a dream that, and actually I think this is something Larry writes about all the time,
Dreams have kinds of swirls and vortexes, let's say. And they suck you into them. And there are dreams of darkness. And I think that we may think of night, dreams happening in the dark. But not all dreams in the dark are themselves. Some of those are luminous. And what I wanted the ending to really suggest is
We all live at some edge or shore of ourselves that's always shifting, always moving. And in whatever is happening in this particular dreaming, it's this amazing thing. I mean, the stars are out, the sandpipers in the morning are whistling. I wanted it to feel at least somewhat hopeful. Yeah. Yeah.
Is that the forgiveness? Because it sort of begins with forgetting, you know, and it's the tide who forgets, which I love. And then we, in a big sense, I think, forgive. Is that how you hear it? Absolutely, Kevin. And I mean, that's the hope, you know. I mean, we all have so much to forgive, and not only each other, but ourselves. Yeah.
I really appreciate you spending so much time with us talking about poetry, and it's been a real treat having you. It's been such a great pleasure. The Shore by David St. John, as well as Larry Levis' Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Vineyard, can be found on newyorker.com and in the anthology A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925-2025, out now.
Swirl and Vortex, the collected poems of Larry Levis, is forthcoming in 2026. David St. John's most recent book is Prayer for My Daughter. 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 Persinos with help from Hannah Eisenman.
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