Hi, 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 select a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss.

Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine.

The poems we're featuring today also appear in the anthology A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker,

1925 to 2025, available for purchase from the New Yorker store, or wherever you buy books.

Today my guest is David St. John, who's the author of many poetry collections and the recipient of honors,

including the Rome Fellowship and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the

O.B. Howardeson Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the George Drury Smith Award,

from Beyond Baroque. He's also the editor of Squirrel and Vortex, a volume of collected poems by the late Larry

Levis, forthcoming in 2026.

Welcome, David.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Kevin, it's wonderful to be here.

So the first poem you've chosen to read, which is, I have to say, one of my favorite poems,

is picking grapes in an abandoned vineyard by Larry Levis. What was it that drew you to this

particular poem? Well, it's always been one of the most important poems for me of Larry's early work.

It's the poem he chose to begin his third collection, The Dollmaker's Ghost. And that book has always been really

compelling to me because in some ways it's a kind of litany of ghosts in his life, both familial,

but also the landscape in which he grew up. He grew up outside of Fresno, where I grew up.

We knew each other from the time I was 18.

He grew up on what his family always called the ranch,

...