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 one of their own poems 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 Erica Meitner,

whose books include useful junk and holy mooli Carry Me, which won the 2018 National

Jewish Book Award in Poetry. She's currently a Mandel Institute Cultural Leadership Program

Fellow, and she's the director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Erica, welcome. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me, Kevin.

Now, the first poem you've chosen to read is What Work is by Philip Levine. What was it about this poem

that caught your eye? So there's so many things about this poem that I love. Back when I was about

15, I bought a used copy for 25 cents of a Poulin Jr.'s

contemporary American poetry from a library sale. And in reading through the poems in that

anthology, which was one of the first times I encountered living poets, this poem stood out to me as, first of all, I didn't know

poetry could be so narrative and so accessible. And so there's something about this poem.

It has hidden complexities, but it's really easy to access. And it has a particular kind of

working class anger that I really love about it.

Phil Levine in some ways I feel like is, you know, I didn't know him personally, but he feels

sort of like a poetry forbearer for me or somebody who opened up permission for me to be able

...