You're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

As you may know 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 Forrest Gander, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets,

a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his

collection, Be With. Welcome, Forrest. Thanks so much for joining us.

Glad to be with you, Kevin. Thank you. Good to see you. Good to see you. So the first poem we selected to read is Privacy by Ada Limon.

Can you tell us what it was about this particular poem that caught your eye as you were looking through the archives?

Well, a lot of her poems have to do with the relationship between the human and the non-human world.

And so that drew me to it at first.

And then there was just so much resonance in it with other poems, with literary history,

and with, I think, one of the major concerns about poetry itself, which is about the making of meaning. Let's listen to the poem. Here is Foriskander reading Privacy by Adela Limon.

Privacy. On the black, wet branches of the linden, still clinging to umber leaves of late fall, to Crowsland. They say, stop,

and still I want to make them into something they are not. Odin's ravens, the Bruha's eyes.

What news are they bringing of our world to the world of the gods? It can't be good. More suffering all

around, more stinging nettles and toxic blades shoved into the scarred parts of us, the minor ones

underneath the trees. Rain comes while I'm still standing, a trickle of water from

whatever we believe is beyond the sky. The crows seem enormous, but only because I am watching

them too closely. They do not care to be seen as symbols. A shake of a wing, and both of them

are gone. There was no message given, no message I was asked to give, only their great absence and

my sad privacy, returning like the bracing empty wind on the black wet branches

...