You're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry writer of the New Yorker magazine, and director of the Schaumburg Center for Research in Black Culture. On this program, we invite poets to select a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss, along with a poem of their own that's appeared in the magazine. My guest today is Catherine Barnett, who's received such honors as a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and for her second book, A Game of Boxes, the James Lockland Award. Welcome, Catherine. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

The poem we've chosen to read for us is Maybe All This by Vislawa Simborska. Can you tell us why this poem stood out to you when you're looking through the archives?

Shimborska is a poet I've loved for her radical uncertainty and radical doubt sort of with a profound comic intelligence

and a philosophical intelligence. So this poem you'll hear has all these maybes, which is a

form of radical doubt. And it is marked by question marks. You don't actually need to have a question mark because the maybe is already introducing all the doubt.

And I love being a poet because I can inhabit and enlarge questions of doubt and uncertainty and all that we don't know.

I can pay attention to what we don't know.

I used to be a journalist and was supposed to be an authority.

And I love Zimborshka because she is an authority of not knowing.

She says, I don't know is the most important phrase we should cling to, really.

I'm dying to hear. Let's hear the poem, shall we?

Okay.

Here's Catherine Barnett reading Maybe All This by Vizlawa Simborska,

translated by Claire Kavanaugh and Stanislaw, Baransec.

Maybe All This.

Maybe All This is happening in some lab, under one lamp by day and billions by night?

Maybe we're experimental generations, poured from one vial to the next, shaken in test tubes, not scrutinized by eyes alone, each of us separately, plucked up by tweezers in the end.

Or maybe it's more like this. No interference?

The changes occur on their own, according to plan?

The graph's needle slowly etches its predictable zigzags?

Maybe thus far we aren't of much interest.

The control monitors aren't usually plugged in.

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