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 choose a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss.

Then they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine.

My guest today is David Baker, who has received honors and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation,

the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Theater Rutke Memorial Foundation.

He served as poetry editor of the Kenyan Review for more than 25 years, and he teaches at Denison University in Ohio.

Welcome, David. Thanks for being here today.

Thanks, Kevin. I'm really pleased to join you.

So the first poem you've selected to read is in passing by Stanley Plumley. Tell us what drew you to this particular poem while you were surfing through the archives?

There's so many things. I could talk about this for quite a while. I have my own New Yorker archives,

I should tell you. The first magazine I subscribed to when I was a kid in college was the New Yorker.

And this is like 1976 or 1977. I had no money. But I was starting to write poems and I thought,

okay, got to get the New Yorker. And I started to cut poems out of the

magazine. And this poem by Stanley Plumley in passing was one of the poems that I cut out of the

magazine and stuck in his book, Summer Celestial. It was June of 1983. I love this poem. I love

Stanley's work. I'm doing quite a bit of work with his poems these

days, probably putting a collected together for him, collected poems, maybe doing something

with his essays, maybe his letters. And I am gearing up to write an essay on wonder, and I'm going to write about awe and the sublime.

And this poem seems to be one of the best examples I can find of something like a sublime configuration in contemporary poetry.

Plus, it's just gorgeous. I love the language. I love his music.

Well, let's listen to the poem. This is David Baker, reading in passing by Stanley Plumley.

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