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 choose 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. Today, my guest is

Diane Zeus, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in the same year's

National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection Frank Sonnets. Her honors also include a Guggenheim

Fellowship and a 2021 John Updack Award for the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Diane, welcome.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for having me.

So the first poem you've selected to read is owed by Jane Huffman.

Tell us, what was it about this poem that caught your eyes you're looking through the archive?

I got hooked on the archive, to be honest, and seeing how the New Yorker has changed through the years in its

taste around poetry. And Jane's poem interested me in its circularity and how I couldn't decide

if its final statement was a narrative one or a formal one.

If it was really an arse poetica using a narrative in an allegorical way or vice versa,

and probably both because she's just that smart.

Well, why don't we listen to the poem?

This is reading Ode by Jane Huffman.

Ode.

Andrea taught me to ride side saddle.

I rode in small and dizzying circles around her.

I rode around her in small and dizzying circles.

Past the mirror and past the mirror

...