I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times book review, and this is the book review podcast.

This week, we're talking poetry, both old and new.

Later on this episode, we'll have Greg Coles, our poetry editor and poetry expert, with four recommendations

of recent collections he thinks you should read. But first, we're joined by A.O. Scott,

Tony Scott, one of our critics who is here to talk about the poetry columns he has been writing this

year, as well as the wonderful project that we published at the end of April,

which hopefully you saw, focused on helping readers memorize Edna St. Vincent Malay's Requiredo.

Tony, welcome back to the Book Review.

Great to be here, Gilbert.

Tony, you have done what we call a close read of a poem every month this year in 2025. And I can say as someone who

has read poetry in the past, but doesn't regularly, that there's something about the format

that makes it obviously incredibly appealing, but also undeniable to me. It seems like there's a very

low barrier to

entry for someone who doesn't regularly partake of poetry. And I wanted to have you explain how

you figured out that this was the right way to do it. In a way, we backed into it, which I think

is why it's worked. That is that we didn't start out

thinking people should read more poetry. And we need to explain to people why poetry is important,

why poetry matters, why poetry can change their lives. Because if you start at that level of

generality, you'll just turn people off. People will be intimidated or feel lectured at.

It's eat your vegetables. They're good for you. And what I wanted to do is persuade people

that poetry was actually fun and accessible and interesting and that you could have a kind of

an emotional connection to it and also think about its meaning

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