You're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

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

On this program, we ask poets to choose a poem for the New Yorker Archive, to read and discuss,

along with one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine.

My guest today is Campbell McGrath, who's published nearly a dozen collections of poetry,

and whose honors include fellowships from United States artists, the Library of Congress,

the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.

Thanks so much for being here.

Well, it's my pleasure, needless to say.

So, the poem you've selected is realism by Cheslaw Milosh.

Tell us what in particular drew you to this poem as you're browsing through the archive?

Well, you know, I didn't even need to browse through the archives.

I remember this poem from the New Yorker even before it becoming, you know, a poem in his books that I read again and again and again.

All right, let's hear it.

This is Campbell McGrath, reading Realism by Cheslaw Milosh, translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Haas.

Realism.

We are not so badly off if we can admire Dutch painting.

For that means we shrug off what we have been told for 100, 200 years,

though we lost much of our previous confidence.

Now we agree that those trees outside the window, which probably exist, only pretend to greenness and treeness, and that the language loses when it tries to cope with clusters of molecules.

And yet this here, a jar, a tin plate, a half-pealed lemon, walnuts, a loaf of bread, last, and so strongly

it is hard not to believe in their lastingness. And thus abstract art is brought to shame,

...