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 a poet to choose a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss.

Then they read one of their poems that's been published in the magazine.

My guest today is the writer Amy Willard, whose debut poetry collection, Neck of the Woods,

won the 2018 Alice James Award from Alice James Books. The recipient of fellowships from

the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the

Breadloaf Riders Conference. She's also a civil rights attorney and the chief program officer

for the ACLU of Virginia. Amy, welcome. Thank you so much, Kevin. I really appreciate the invitation

to be here. Thanks so much for being here. Now, the poem you've decided to read today

is Via Negativa by Charles Wright. Tell us what was it about this particular poem that caught your

eye? What caught my eye is that it's written by Charles Wright, who is someone I call affectionately

my poetry dad. He was one of my first poetry teachers as a very young

undergraduate here in Charlottesville when I was at the University of Virginia. I like to think

he raised me as a poet and raised me through his poetry as well. He has a good breadth of poems in the New Yorker

archive and this one stood out to me as a very classic Charles Wright poem. It's set here in

Virginia, which many of my poems are as well. It has that great wandering drawl of his lines

and that spirituality that he taps into,

that ghost world he taps into

in the music that he creates in those lines.

Well, why don't we listen to the poem?

This is Amy Willard reading Via Negativa by Charles Wright.

Via Negativa. If a man wants to be sure of his road, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.

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