Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

As you may know on this program, we ask poets to select a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss.

Then they read a poem of their own that's appeared in the magazine.

My guest today is Ben Perkert, who began contributing poems to our pages in 2012

and whose debut poetry collection, for The Love of Endings, was published in 2018.

Ben, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So the poem you've chosen to read today is Notes on the Reality of the Self by Jory Graham.

What drew to this poem?

Jory's work is tremendously meaningful for me.

Jory also as a person is meaningful for me.

She was my teacher.

I love her work, particularly for the way she can sort of just fix her gaze to something.

And, you know, it should be boring, right?

It's just you're looking at a river.

There's nothing inherently dramatically interesting about that,

except that her mind is such that, I don't know,

I find myself reading with rapt attention.

So I love how she sort of takes this scene

and makes it more than what you might expect.

Well, why don't we hear the poem from our archives?

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