Raymond Antrobus Reads John Lee Clark
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Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On this program, we invite a poet to choose a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in a magazine.

Today, my guest is Raymond Antrobus, who's received the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Ted Hughes Award from the Poetry Society, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, and the Somerset Maugham Award, among other honors. Raymond, welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you. An honor to be here, Kevin. Thank you.

So the first poem you've selected to read is a protactile version of Tinter and Abbey by John Lee Clark. Tell us, what was it about this particular poem that caught your attention?

So John Lee Clark is a poet that I've been following for a long time now, specifically his mode as a deafblind poet, his philosophy around disability in poetry or disabled poetics is something he often talks about.

He's a poet I personally have been taking quite a few cues from in my own work. He uses erasure. He references the syntax of sign language and how that's different to the syntax of written English. Because I am also educated in a deaf school, learned sign languages as a kid. And this is something that I've had to contend with, especially now.

you know, thinking about canons and literature canons, poetry canons, and how John Lee Clarke's own words, he calls it the hearing canon, you know, of all of these poets are like able-bodied who use dissonances

disability often as like a metaphor, you know, and it's even kind of baked into the English language when people say things like, I am deaf too, I am blind too. These kind of clumsy sayings that often don't actually consider the reality of blindness or deafness or just not being a fully abled body coming through the world. So

Yeah, you know, John Lee Clark, again, is almost like an oracle figure to me, you know, in poetry, a living oracle. So I'm so excited to be able to talk about their work because this particular poem that I've chosen, I happen to know the Wordsworth poem that it's referencing. And, you know, this got me thinking as well, John Lee Clark, you know, as well as being a deafblind poet, but also calling himself an American poet,

We met at the TS Eliot. You and I. Me and you, Kevin. You and I, we met at the TS Eliot. And I've been thinking so much about TS Eliot as a figure because...

Technically, he's American, but he claimed Englishness. Right, right. And I've been having conversations with more American poets about what their relationship is with English poetry and English canonical poetry, or even as John Lee Clarke would call it, English hearing canon. Hearing canon, I love that. Because it's something that I think English poets have to contend with in a different way to...

American poets. I think that John Lee Clark is just one of the most stimulating, multi-dimensional... I don't even know where to begin in talking about this poem. Why don't we turn to the poem? This is Raymond Antrobus reading a protactile version of Tintern Abbey by John Lee Clark. When I smelled the smoke...

I knew where I was. Okay, there is water flowing along our flank here. And here, near our knee, is an old church. But let us scroll up our leg a few times. Here, inhale the smoke. Our cold, tipped nose sniffing the back of our fourth hand.

We hand-heel our laps thick turf. Houses with pastures that give me an edifice rub up against the very fingernails. The grass continues back to the brash water and here I need a cave. Thank you. Perhaps someone is holed up in there, tending to flames that tickle your palm warm.

but never mind let us rove ahead to where i found give me tree heavy with foliage can you feel that now a claw for the knobbly roots where i laid my head and crumbled clumps of dirt that i brushed off i had been here before and then let me think

A fist? No, no, give me an upturned claw and feel it swaying because of the rolling sun bumping into finger planets. You were right, we do need a fist after all. Sliding the fire out of our palm, we fold those thimbles into one world.

It makes perfect sense for the sun to claim our shoulder, our muscular star, our many-jointed spear, our electric arm, all shaking and snapping through five cycles of sweat and blizzard, each wobbly turn a summons. We have indeed come back to breathe in sweet earth's smoky hand.

That was a pro-tactile version of Tintern Abbey by John Lee Clark, which was published in the September 18th, 2023 issue of The New Yorker. So beautifully done, Raymond. Thank you so much for that. I really feel like you brought it into a different realm. And it's almost like there's many realms that this poem occupies, which I love. And so many of them are tactile. You know, there's so many hands and fists involved.

And it ends with the word hand. And especially in that second stanza, let me think a fist. No, no. But then that fist comes back. We do need a fist after all. And, you know, the nature that sort of.

I don't know. The 10-turn Abbey kind of quality becomes almost personal and embodied for me. Yeah. And that's totally intentional because when you read the Wordsworth poem that John Lee Clark is responding to, there's a few...

in the Wordsworth poem to beauty being impossible for a blind person to capture. Like you couldn't capture this landscape or Tintern Abbey and the significance of, you know, the river and the history without your eyes. And here, centuries later, we have a deaf, blind poet

taking up Wordsworth on that challenge in a way. Like, you know, he's accepting Wordsworth's challenge. He's like, okay, let's go. Let's get tactile. And I'm going to open this poem with what I smell and the layers of the smoke that, you know, you've got like the smoke that's establishing the terrain. You know, smoke itself is a kind of clever obscurity. You know, it's there and it's not there. And then there's the idea of a kind of smoke

screen between Wordsworth and Clark. I mean, there's so much work going on in this point. It just gives me goosebumps. Well, the way you talk about it too, and the way you rendered it, I think was so beautiful. Let us rove ahead to where I found, give me tree. It's almost like the nature is being conjured by the speaker, which I think is one of the things that

I feel like it's taking issue with or, or responding to a riffing off of nature emanating toward the receiving genius poet. Instead, it's like, give me tree. Like, like, uh, I don't know, like it's going to be made up or I'm going to take what I need out of this nature. Um,

this world in some way. I don't know. There's something beautiful about that. Oh, totally. And give me tree is again, coming from the perspective of the poet, John Lee Clark at this, give me tree, you know, uh,

Because he uses a tactile kind of sign language, which embodies the full, you know, the chest is employed in his language as well as the hands. Give me trees and this kind of, I don't know, affirmation, this kind of command. And I feel like the whole poem is kind of an instruction and a guide, a searching, like a double edgedness throughout, like a subtle affirmation of...

and capability, again, you know, of this, of a disabled poet, of a disabled voice. It's not a bitter poem. It's not an angry poem. I don't really sense bitterness, but I do sense a kind of lyrical mischievousness. You know, the poem is full of play, right? Yes. It's full of play.

Well, and the grass continues back to the brash water. And here I need a cave. Like there's a kind of conjuring. It feels almost like a spell is being cast. Oh, exactly. Yes. And that spell and that conjuring and talking about the arm, the line of the flames that tickle your palm warm and like the verb tickle.

the work that that's doing. So in sign language poetry, in BSL or ASL, or we also have a thing called visual vernacular, verbs in poems are literally movements. You know, you don't say them, you move as the verb. And, you know, verb, obviously, this kind of action word, this doing word. So that's...

the other layer, I feel the kind of, you know, the, the fourth hand to use a term from the Johnny Clark's poem of this fourth wall, this fourth hand, um, this like way that he, he's just speaking at so many languages at once. And I think that, you know, it's the true mark of, of, I, you know, this is just my opinion because it's,

If you're going to talk back to Wordsworth, like you say, this great poet, you're going to have to meet the poet on those levels, right? And I think he does it. I think John Lee Clark accomplishes that and more. Well, and I think it's not a translation. It's not trying to say, oh, you heard this in that poem, I'm going to tell you what it's like. But it has a quality of...

this word just popped in my head of resurrection, almost of, of that. And, and there's a kind of both a satisfaction in the body embodiment and a kind of, um,

I just, I'm trying to put my finger on, but, you know, maybe that's the point. It's a fist. It's a finger. It's a physical motion. And there's a kind of elusiveness that is part of the playfulness. Right, exactly. And what you're saying about the resurrection is so on point because we're also in an abbey, in a church. And it happens to be quite a

historical landmark in Wales. And by sheer coincidence, when I got the email to be invited onto this podcast to speak with you, I was actually in Wales on my first father-son trip. Oh, amazing. Yeah, it was like there were so many kind of stars aligning with this poem and with this conversation. And just like...

the thing that you're saying about the resurrection or the kind of other worldliness is, you know, if we go back to that kind of the physical place of this abbey, and I read a little bit about the historical significance of this abbey, which is that

you know, in the 15th century when it was surrendered, you know, this particular land was conquered, it became like a catalyst for the next 500 years of Welsh history. So language change, culture change, like, you know, and so there's a real significant thing about this abbey now not having a roof, right? It's not contained. Right, right. And so there's something uncontainable about,

about the poem and what the poet is proposing, about what Wordsworth is attempting with this idea of beauty and the capturing of beauty. It's taking place in this kind of holy, earthy, gothic, ancient place that's built to inspire and contain awe and fear and timelessness. And that's like a poem, like an ambitious poem, right? Yes, yes.

Well, and I see it in the poem too. Toward the end, there's a kind of, well, there's a groundedness and then a kind of ascent almost in the second. Finger planets, the fire out of our palm. We fold those symbols into one world. That is an amazing line. And-

Someone else might end there, but instead it keeps going. It makes perfect sense for the sun to claim our shoulder. There's a kind of furthering, and maybe it's that roofless gesturing up that happens. And this end, the muscular star...

Many join its fear, electric arm. There's that mix of the natural and the made that I think is really important to the poet as well. Sweat and blizzard, each wobbly turn a summons. I mean, any of these are just lines I wish I could conjure up. But it keeps going with, we have indeed come back to breathe in sweet earth's smoky hand, which you read so beautifully about.

I wonder about that we at the end of the poem. Did you take it as all of us we? Or how do you read that we? I read that as a kind of, you know, again, the fourth hand, the fourth wall, the kind of wink, the hey, we, we're all in on this.

Like, even if we have different vantage points and perspectives, we right now are speaking across oceans, you know, talking to this American and English tradition of poetry. And then the kind of romantic idea within the poem and within this conversation of, you know, where the body meets the natural world and the natural elements is,

when I think about this idea of the muscular, the muscles and the shoulder, the star, you know, because I had to look up

Because ASL, American Sign Language, and BSL, British Sign Language, are quite different, actually. Right. But sun is a similar enough motion that it would make sense in a deaf British person or a deaf American person. Oh, wow. That's amazing. They're both up in the sky. And this is what I mean about almost like an overwhelming stimulation I get from a poem like this. Because I'm thinking...

multi-dimensional. This is the closest I get to being a bilingual, trilingual kind of poet. I get to read like a translator. You're doing it so beautifully and helping us understand. I'm always fascinated by African-American sign language, which

in part comes about from what I come to understand, you know, segregation, but also I think from versions of, you know, black style. And there's a lot of black deaf activists who write beautifully about it much better than I can speak about it. You know, do you think about that kind of cultural? Is there a black British sign language? You know, how does culture impact

Yeah.

translator. Yeah, we were talking about some of the signs that are quite, you know, taken different ways in different contexts. For example, the sign for a word like India.

doesn't translate well in India itself because the sign for India is like if you look at the shape of India as a country, you make the shape with your hands like a V shape. But in Indian sign language, that is the sign for vagina. So it's actually like, you know, people get offended in India because it's like, why are you calling my country a vagina? Yeah.

And these are like very real deaf world conversations. So to go back to what you're saying about like a black British sign language and a black American sign language, it's kind of like it's, you know, language being its own technology, its own organism. It's,

molding in its own kind of way. I do really recommend watching John Lee Clark talk on YouTube. There's a couple of YouTube videos of him in which you can see how he uses the tactile language and he requires two translators, one on each hand, to translate

his poems and his conversations. Like even right now, I'm able to speak more fluid with you. I've got captions up on the screen. There's all of this technology and we're able to speak so much more fluidly now as deaf people, you know, and we're better integrated into the world. And this poem, John Lee Clark's poem,

Even that is a kind of technology that is actually really well integrated into the world, into the deaf world, into the hearing world, into this tactile blind world, even though it's like a poem on a visual thing on the screen text. Now in our October 23rd, 2023 issue, the New Yorker publisher poem Signs Music, which you'll read for us in a moment, begins.

Is there anything you'd like to say about the poem beforehand? Anything you might want listeners to know going in? Yeah, so like John Lee Clark, I have different versions of my poems. I have like an English written version of my poem. I have a spoken version of my poems. And then I have like a sign language BSL, often, version of my poems. This is a poem in which when I work with...

sign language interpreters, they instantly understand that it's been written by a deaf poet because they can see some of the syntax. So in BSL, for example, concrete nouns, they begin sentences. You have to begin your sentence with a noun, with an object, with a thing, and you have to place that thing. So when I read this poem or perform it with interpreters, I always make sure that the interpreter...

is very close to me. They touch my shoulders so that you can see that they are an extension, in a way, of my body and of the poem. Because there's a part in the middle of the poem when I list objects and the way in which those objects come, the order in which they come, just flows really well, like on the hand and on the...

on the body. And that's something that's not picked up in the audio or the text version of this poem. But it is something that I think about, you know, when composing. The other thing I want to mention is the birds that appear in this poem, which kind of cohere or chime with John Lee Clark's poem and Wordsworth as a kind of, you know, that nature thing.

You know, the romantic connotation of the poet in nature. And that's nature with a capital N as words would do. And I wanted to, you know, as well as, you know, I'm a British and I'm a Jamaican poet. And Bomali was taught to me by my dad as a poet. You know, my dad wanted me to understand Bomali as a poet. So Three Little Birds is a kind of a head nod, obviously.

A very kind of cheeky little head nod, because this is the last poem in the book, which is called Science Music, in which there's some stuff in there about Pumwale. And I guess one more thing I should say is that birds is a sound that I can't hear without hearing aids. So it's not until I got hearing aids that I was able to access birdsong. And that's, you know, these are significant things, I guess, to the poem.

Well, here is Raymond Antrobus reading his poem Signs Music. Signs Music. The first word my son signed was music. Both hands, fingers conducting, music for everything, even hunger. Open mouth for the chew, chew, spoon squealing music.

We'd play a record while he ate music, when he wanted milk, so I pour and hum a lullaby or I Don't Know by Bill Withers because it's okay not to know what you want and I want him to know that. Music is wiping the table off of the plates. Music is fill my forehead for fever. It's whatever occurs in the centre of the body, whatever makes arms raise up.

The second word my son signed was bird. Beaked finger to thumb, bird. For everything outside, window, sky, tree, roof, chimney, aerial, airplane, birds.

I saw I'd given him a sign name, fingers to eyes, raising from thumbs, wide eye, meaning watchful of the earth, in three different roots, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin. I love how he clings to my shoulders and turns his head to point at the soft body of a caterpillar, sliding across the counter and signs, music. Well, that was Raymond Antrobus reading...

Signs. Music. 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 world.

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 till Fridays 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. What a beautiful poem. I instantly, I mean, you know, sometimes poems take a few times. I think it instantly was like this poem does all the things that you sort of

But also so much more. I think there's something about the learning of the language from the son that's also about the learning of so many other things. This connection, you know, hearing a new or for the first time bird. It's all there to me. I saw I had given him a sign name. And then you just you describe it fingers to eyes raising bird.

From thumbs. I love that we get the sign before we get the, for the rest of us, translation of that.

Yeah, I'm so overjoyed that this is the poem that you selected, Kevin. So thank you for giving this a home in the New Yorker. It's been a journey because it's a poem which I wrote while my son was just starting speech. And there was this point where he had acquired more sign language than he had speech.

And I knew that was going to change with my son's hearing. So I was just kind of ruminating on that, the fact that he had more language of the hand, of the body, of the face, you know, than of the speech, of the sound. And that's going to come later. But the fact that the sign...

was, you know, still kind of forming a foundation for him. And that's something that I really thought about, you know, having a hearing son, like I want him to be invited into to learn sign, basically, and to be able to read a poem when he's older, like John Lee Clark, and get as much out of it.

Right. You know, as his dad does. First of all, you had me at the first word my son signed. I mean, it starts so beautifully. And it's about that connection, of course, that is physical. And you say it there, both hands, fingers conducting. What a break. Music for everything, even hunger. Okay. You know, now you have me even more because I think it's about need, but also about...

open mouth for the choo-choo, spoon squealing music, we'd play a record. I mean, there's so much of the tactileness, just to keep with that word, that's happening here, but so much about the body and also about...

Right, right.

Because it's okay not to know what you want, and I want him to know that. I mean, I can see why it's the title poem. Did you know it when you were writing it? Were you like, this is the one? I had that rare gift of having a manuscript, and this was literally the last poem I wrote for it. It was kind of like it landed. It's like, okay, I need to go back to language. I need to go back to...

becoming a father and like you said I need to go back to the play and I get I guess these are the things that you know poets like John Lee Clark have given me like a license and an inspiration to be playful with these things which are also marginalized languages with very painful history so in adopting these tools this language for joy and for communion and for learning like

Because I'm also a teacher. I know you teach as well, Kevin. Yeah, I don't as much as I used to, but yes, I did it for 20 years. So yes, continue, please. Yes. So, you know, there's also that kind of lineage of the poet as teacher, right? The poet as one who brings an idea into a classroom and says to everyone, hey, everyone, look at this. Let's play with this. Let's get really almost childlike with this. Like, you know, beginner's mind.

Because this is a poem that is a pure osmosis of just being around my son as someone who's forming and acquiring speech, language, sound, shape, handshape, you know, and how that's communicating something. Right, right.

you know, so yeah, like it, and it falls in well, I think with the rest of the book, which, uh, so the book signs music is a, it's a two, it's two poems, a sequence poem. Um, and it's a poem I started writing, um, uh,

pretty much the day my partner told me that, you know, we were going to be parents. I decided writing this like really long poem, not knowing what was happening. And it became very bitty. Like I was like writing little bits here. I mean, I thought about Lucille Clifton, right? And how she wrote these short poems while she was parenting and parenting became the poetic of her work. And so that kind of

to me, I think, in this book. So there's also like a Lucille Clifton lineage in there, which is to say an African-American character

way of speaking because my son is also American. You know, his mom is from New Orleans. I see. You have no choice but to have music. I have no choice. Jamaica, New Orleans? I mean, what else you got? That's what I'm saying. These are the most musical places on earth among them. Totally, totally. And language has to serve that, you know. That's what I got to give him, you know. Well, I love that there's this kind of

hinge of the title signs comma music which it could be an equal sign it could be a directional sign you know there's something about the joining of it

Were you thinking about ones first and then... Is it signs first, then music? How does that title resonate, especially with what you're saying to us about how you composed the book? You know, Kevin, even though it's only two words and a comma, the amount of consideration and...

staring out the window because it wasn't just it wasn't just the it was also like where do I put the emphasis do I emphasize the signs or do I emphasize the music in the title is it like signs in italic and then music as you know maybe even like a bold like it was even a whole font thing you were having a font experience right yeah right because I but I went with signs because I decided that

signs had to be the active. That's almost like the verb there, like the signs, music. And like you just very cleverly pointed out, because you're a poet and you get these figurative language things with more than one meaning, there's also the whole thing of like something giving you a sign, like you say, a direction or a sign from beyond the body, from the heavens, from the gods, you know, like... Yes. So there is this kind of...

I don't know, higher, almost like divine quality there, but it's still earthy and grounded enough to be like, well, this is on the hand. This is on the body. This is part of us. It's of the earth. It's again, that capital N nature. So yeah, you know, it kind of, it sang to me,

and it stayed with me. I thought I would have to kind of make a point of defending it with my editors. I often play a game called Justify My Line where if they point out a line that they want to get rid of,

then I have to justify it. And if I can't make a case for it, it goes. We all should be doing this. So besides music, I was like, I had a whole case for how I was going to do it. And no one asked for the defense. Everyone was like, yeah, yeah, this works. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry, but you nailed it. So I hate to break it to you. You don't have to defend it.

I mean, it doesn't always happen, obviously. You know, we are many, many failures, many failures before this. But this was like, there weren't that many drafts to this poem and I am quite a, quite an obsessive reviser. And, you know, so this is something that I felt like I really wanted it to remain, like the energy of it, the fact that it came so quickly, like a,

But again, I think it's years of reading and thinking of poets like John Luke Clarke, which gave me this access. You know, what I love about this poem...

Like you said, there's play, there's music, there's birds, which make me think of augury and seeing. And I love this beaked finger-to-thumb bird for everything outside, window, sky. And again, there's your son as an infant encountering the outside almost like a poet in nature. But there's also aerial airplane scenes.

Just a great, great catalog. And I think it does, you know, both the title and the poem do what I think poems, good poems do, is that they enact rather than describe. They're not telling you, you know, about it. It's really you're in the experience of...

what I think of as deep connection and pleasure and the ecstatic in the biggest sense. So thank you for that. I mean, if only all my poems could do that. If only we could do that every time we show up at our desks. Hey, I think once in a while it works. And, you know, it was thankful for that. And I'm thankful for you for this poem. As we end, I did want to talk for a moment about

And it's a very different tone, but I think it'd be great to just mention on him because we're publishing work from Boyega Otobonjo's first big major book, Adam, which is coming out from Faber and Faber and really soon. And you are how I knew about his work. Maybe you know that, that you told me that he had new work, but he had died last year.

You know, very tragically. And so do you want to say just a word or two to those of us who are coming to his work? You know, I'm so pleased that we're able to feature him and do an excerpt, a longer feature, which is going to be quite beautiful. But also it's hard to talk about and think about. So, you know, if you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I just recently received my copy of Adam, the title of Boyega's book. And when he told me that his book is called Adam, I was, oh man, I was like, man, a debut, a debut book called Adam? Yeah.

And, you know, because I knew, I'm familiar with the themes of the things he's writing about. So, you know, he's from a, you know, he's got quite an evangelical, Nigerian, Christian atmosphere in his upbringing. But then he's also got like Kfelekuti and all of these other entities of...

of language, of energy, of story, of ancientness and newness. And talking about, you know, you were asking me about Black Britishness. I feel like Brieger or de Banjo captured in his book a kind of Black Britishness that is, you know, it's not, I guess like... I don't think you see it everywhere, for one. I mean, it's not represented in the way that...

it's not yeah and it does seem like black Britishness has now come to like pop culture consciousness in an interesting way you know we've always been here but I feel I think the music has got a lot to do with that with like you know Drake crossing over and discovering grime music and you know there's more you know J. Cole these big American rappers who put

Sure.

But Boyega as a person was also this kind of very joyful, blokey lad, mate down the pub, you know what I mean? You know, he had this kind of very buoyant spirit and he could also, he would code switch as well, you know, and that code switching is in the poems.

It is, absolutely. You know? Yeah. You see the ways that he's writing. And, you know, we were talking about being trilingual, and I feel like that's in the poems. There's this multilingual sense of everything from Yoruba influences to T.S. Eliot, who we mentioned earlier, too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, I love this book.

It was a real moment to hold this book in a physical form as an object and not be able to hold him in the physical form. He dreamt about this book, about Adam. He had a big vision for this book.

Yeah. And like T.S. Eliot is actually someone he spoke about to me once. Like, yeah, you know, I want to be in that room. He actually came to our reading, Kevin. You know, he was there. Like he came when we read T.S. Eliot. He was in the audience. And I spoke to him about that afterwards. He was just kind of like, I want to be there. You know, I want to be on that stage. And I was like, Boyega, you'll go be there. You're the next one. When your book comes out, you'll be there. Right, right. You know, and so to...

Yeah, it's such a, I don't know, abrupt end, but also there's this kind of beginning of, you know, his work and his life becoming public now, you know? And I should say, my poem, Science Music, like there are poems in there that wouldn't exist without Boyega. He edited a couple of my poems. I helped him edit some of his. There's a poem in Adam where he wrote,

like an early draft of it in my, in my mom's house. He came, he came up to my mom's house and we're talking about, um, yeah, we were talking about this dialect and, you know, yeah, like I guess I'm kind of black Britishness to kind of ends talk and putting that into a poem. Cause I had a poem called that he liked and he did a, he, he was like playing with that in a, in a poem. And, um, and yeah, and I read it, I read it in the, you know, Adam recently, man. And it was,

Yeah, it was a real moment. Like I say, it was like, wow, this was like a real kind of intimate memory I have. And now it's in the book and now it's this public thing and now it belongs to everyone. And there's something really bittersweet about that, you know. So he's a great poet. I can't wait for his book to be out in the world and for more people to be talking about his work. Well, so beautifully said. And thank you for helping us keep his flame alive and alive.

I only wish I had gotten to know his work earlier. And, you know, your brotherhood and community comes across beautifully. And the book is really gorgeous. Thank you. Thank you. I know Boyega is, you know, wherever he is, I know he feels that. Well, and I'm looking forward to your book, too, Signs Music. When is it out again? It's out in September, the U.S., September 17th with Tin House and UK, September 12th with Picador.

Well, we look forward to it. Thank you so much for talking with us today. As you can tell, I could keep going. I know. It's really a pleasure. It's really a pleasure. Signs Music by Raymond Antrobus, as well as John Lee Clark's, a pro-tactile version of Tinter and Abbey, can be found on newyorker.com. John Lee Clark's most recent book of poems is How to Communicate. Raymond Antrobus' forthcoming collection is Signs Music.

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 Christian Scott Atunde-Ajua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Rope-A-Dope.

The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Michelle Moses, with help from Hannah Eisenman. Hi there, I'm Laleh Arakoglu, host of Women Who Travel. At the start of this year, I spoke to my friends and colleagues at Condé Nast Traveler, Megan Spirell and Artie Menon, who've masterminded a bumper list of where to travel in 2025. It was fascinating to hear the places they're excited about, like Kodiak Island in Alaska.

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

banyan style steam baths and saunas and whatnot. So you can come face to face with a bear and then go to your steam bath to process what happened that day. If I come face to face with a bear, I better get a steam bath after. Or share the steam bath with a bear. I mean, stranger things have happened. Join me on Women Who Travel for more adventures wherever you get your podcasts. From PR.