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 poets to choose a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and

discuss,

along with one of their own poems that's appeared in our pages.

My guest today is Craig Morgan Tysher, the poet and critic whose collection of The Trembling Answers,

received the 2018 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Welcome, Craig.

Hi.

Thanks for joining us.

Yeah.

So the poem you've selected from the archive is Sun by Forrest Gander.

What drew you to this poem while you're looking through our archive?

Well, it has the same title as a poem of mine that's in the archive, and so that made it easy.

I actually had a really hard time picking a poem. I mean, there, there's so much. It's almost 100 years of, you know, pretty good poems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, some of them, really, some of the major poems of any poets, kind of education in poetry. But finally, I just sort of decided to go with my gut. And when I had first read this poem, when it came out, it slaughtered me and it, you know, it wasn't that long ago.

But I think of, you know, when I think of New Yorker poems that matter to me, this one kind of

jumps right now.

Great. Well, why don't we hear the poem? Here's Craig Morgan Titer, reading Sun by Forrest Gander.

Son, it's not the mirror that is draped, but what remains unspoken between us.

Why say anything about death, how the body comes to deploy the myriad worm as if it were a manageable concept, not searing exquisite

singularity, to serve it up like a eulogy or a tale of my own or your own suffering, some

kind of self-abasement.

...