Hi, 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 pick a poem from the New Yorker archive. Then, they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine.

The poems we're featuring in this episode also appear in the anthology, A Century of Poetry

in the New Yorker, 1925 to 2025, available for purchase from the New Yorker store, wherever

you buy books. Today, my guest is Bruce Smith, the author of eight poetry collections, including the forthcoming

hungry ghost.

He's received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts

and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National

Endowment for the Arts.

He teaches at Syracuse University.

Bruce, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you, Kevin. Glad to be here.

So the first poem you've chosen to read is Open Letter to My Ancestors by Mary Rufel.

What was it about this particular poem that caught your eye when you were leafing through the

anthology? I thought it had a kind of strange energy, a kind of what Emily Dickinson called domestic mysticism,

and this strange dislocation of past and present. And surprise, it's a word which she uses, you know, in the middle of the poem. So all of those

factors for this poem. Sounds good to me. Why don't we listen to the poem? Here's Bruce Smith

reading Open Letter to My Ancestors by Mary Rufel. Open Letter to My Ancestors.

Sometimes I walk around the house wearing a green clay mask.

It's supposed to be for my skin, but I don't care about that.

I wear it in honor of you.

I am so sadly far away from you. I secretly hope someone rings the doorbell

so they cannot recognize me. Surprise, I am seasick on my long voyage. I've left everything behind

...