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 archives to read and discuss.

Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine. Today, my guest is the writer Alisa Gonzalez, who was recently a full bride scholar in Poland,

and whose work has received support from the Norman Mailer Foundation and the Breadloaf Writers' Conference.

Welcome, Alisa. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

The poem you've picked from the archive is gathering apricots by Cheswaffe, Munoz.

Can you tell us a bit about why this particular poem caught your attention?

I have, as you say, been a Fulbright scholar in Poland, and so Polish poetry is a particular love and obsession of mine.

But this particular Miloche poem really attracted me because of the kind of revision that happens in the middle, because it comments on the poem that he writes within the context of the poem.

Let's listen to it.

Here's Alisa Gonzalez reading Gathering Apricots by Cheswaffe Miwosh, translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Haas.

Gathering apricots.

In the sun, while there, below, over the bay, only clouds of white mist wander fleeting,

and the range of hills is grayish on the blue.

Apricots, the whole tree full of them in the dark leaves, glimmer,

yellow and red, bringing to mind the garden of the Hesperides and apples of paradise.

I reached for a fruit and suddenly feel the presence and put aside the basket and say,

it's a pity that you died and cannot see these apricots while I

celebrate this undeserved life. Commentary. Alas, I did not say what I should have. I submitted

fog and chaos to a distillation. That other kingdom of being or non-being is always with me and makes itself heard, with thousands of calls, screams, complaints.

And she, the one to whom I turned, is perhaps but a leader of a chorus.

...