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 select 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 were featuring in this episode also appear in the anthology

A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker,

1925 to 2025, available for purchase from the New Yorker store wherever you buy books.

Today, my guest is Henri Cole.

He's the author of many poetry collections, including The Other Love, as well as a member

of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

and the recipient of honors, including the Tom Gunn Award and the Jackson Poetry Prize.

Welcome, Henri.

Thanks for joining me.

Thank you.

So the first poem you've chosen to read is Vita Nova by Louise Gleck.

What was it about this particular poem that caught your attention when you were looking through the anthology?

Well, I was impressed that this poem, which comes from the mid-90s,

I was impressed that it seems to track between the present memory and dreamscape.

And I find it, you know, sentence by sentence, a perfectly accessible poem,

but then in a total way, kind of difficult. So I like that it was both those things.

And I was, I guess that's something I'm always trying to do in my own work. And so I was trying

to figure that out. Also, in the 90s, I taught at Harvard, and for a brief time, Louise came and taught there.

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