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 poets 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 the magazine.

Today, my guest is Amanda Gorman, who served as the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate, received a 2020 Poets and Writers' and Writers' for Writers' Award, and in 2021 became the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history.

Amanda, welcome.

Thank you for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me.

So the first poem you've selected to read today is Declaration by Tracy K. Smith. Tell us. Thanks so much for having me. So the first poem you've selected to read today is Declaration

by Tracy K. Smith. Tell us what was it about this particular poem that caught your eye as

you're looking through the archive? I love this poem because for me, it's really a master class

in the erasure poem, which is to say, how do you approach a

pre-existing text and discover, interrogate, find new meaning of what has been left unsaid.

And so this is a poem that Tracy K. Smith wrote, basically re-approaching the

Declaration of Independence as a site of deep racial reckoning. Well, let's listen to the poem.

Here is Amanda Gorman reading Declaration by Tracy K. Smith.

Declaration. He has sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people.

He has plundered our, ravaged our, destroyed the lives of our, taking away our, abolishing our most valuable, and altering

fundamentally the forms of our. In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for

redress in the most humble terms.

Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here, taken captive on the high seas to bear.

...