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 poets 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.

My guest today is the writer Eileen Miles, who has published more than 20 books of poetry and prose,

and whose honors include the Publishing Triangle's 2020 Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award,

an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, multiple Lambda Literary Awards in a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Welcome, Eileen. Thanks so much for joining.

Hey, Kevin. Glad to be here. So the first poem from the archive you selected to read is Without by Joy Harjo.

Tell us, what about this particular poem caught your attention while you're looking through the archive?

You know, it's pretty recent, so I almost felt like that was cheating, but, you know, I just saw it in the fall. And A, I like joy some.

We met a few years ago, and we kind of immediately got a hit of each other being peers.

And that was interesting to be on this planet in the same amount of time and have things in common and stuff.

And so right away, I saw the poem and it just, it's spacious. Like,

I love a poem that has lots of air between the lines. I read it right away because she's a friend.

And first, the title, I think, is amazing because titles or poems are funny because they're

like outside the poem. And somehow a title like without is sort of like a doubling like

it seems like very unstable like you're outside of the poem and it's almost telling you that it's

further out in a way or or what does it mean so I went into the poem with a kind of nice

unsteady abstract feel and the first line is incredible because it's so full. It's like a thesis statement.

It just announces the world will keep trudging through time without us.

Well, why don't we listen to the poem? This is Eileen Miles, reading Without by Joy Harjo.

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