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 ask poets to pick a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then,

they read one of their own poems that's appeared in the magazine. My guest today is the writer and artist Clarence Major, whose recent honors include a Penn,

Oakland, Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award in the

Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

Clarence, welcome.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Kevin.

The poem you've chosen to read today is Downpour by Billy Collins.

What was it about this particular poem that caught your attention as you're looking through our archives?

Well, I think it speaks to the moment we're in, especially as it progresses. it's just so many layers.

It has deep implications about all kinds of things having to do with the American idiom,

with the tradition of modern poetry, what it says about which tradition it's speaking from, as well as perhaps even rejecting to some degree, particularly because of where we are now, it struck me as a very useful and interesting

poem to talk about, you know, because it has so much to do with, on a superficial level, the

supermarket, which has become such an important place now for people, you know.

Absolutely.

And also, you know, the death toll mounting and remembering the dead with reverence and compassion and so on.

All right. Well, why don't we hear the poem? Here's Clarence Major reading Downpour by Billy Collins.

Last night, we ended up on the couch trying to remember all of the friends who had died so far.

And this morning I wrote them down, in alphabetical order, on the flip side of a shopping list you had left on the kitchen table.

So many of them had been swept away as if by a hand from the sky. It was good to recall them.

I was thinking under the cold lights of a supermarket as I guided a cart with a wobbly wheel

...