Brian Lairer on WNYC, and now we continue our WNYC Centennial series,

100 years of 100 things, with thing number 75, three quarters of the way home, a hundred years of

poetry in the New Yorker, as we acknowledge for the second time in this series that the New Yorker

too is celebrating its centennial.

And for a century, the New Yorker has published poetry that captures both the personal

and the political, shaping literary history in the process,

from Langston Hughes to Sylvia Plath, Derek Walcott to Tracy K. Smith.

The magazine's archives reflect shifting literary movements, evolving cultural conversations,

and the enduring power of a well-placed poem.

Sometimes a poem distills something vast into just a few lines like Louise Gluck, writing,

Look up into the light of the lantern.

Don't you see, the calm of darkness is the horror of heaven?

That was the 1980s.

Or Langston Hughes, who reimagines grief in the poem Wake,

Tell all my mourners to mourn in red,

cause ain't no sense in my being dead.

Langston Hughes in the 40s.

As Kevin Young writes in the introduction to the new anthology,

a century of poetry at the New Yorker,

there is a way that poetry must include the unexpected,

the necessary, the prescient.

So that legacy and the work of shaping it is what we're going to talk about right now. Kevin Young,

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