Hello, 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 archives to read and discuss.

Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine.

This year, in honor of the New Yorker's centenary,

all the poets we're featuring on this podcast 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.

My guest today is Jericho Brown,

who received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

for his collection, The Tradition. He's a 24 MacArthur Fellow and a Chancellor of the Academy of

American Poets. Welcome, Jericho. Thanks for being here. Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me, Kevin. I really

appreciate it. Always good to see you. So the first poem you've chosen to read is When, by Elizabeth Alexander.

What drew you to this particular poem while you're looking through the archives and the anthology?

I think it's the first New Yorker poem that I understood as a New Yorker poem.

It's really the poem that introduced me to the fact that the magazine

that I was reading in doctors' offices and other kinds of waiting rooms was indeed the

New Yorker. And I remember I had only recently, when it come out, met Elizabeth Alexander

and she had been so kind to me. And there used to be this entity called the Cave Canum Liszt Serve.

And on the list serve, everyone there was excited.

All these black poets were excited that Elizabeth Alexander had this poem in the New Yorker.

That was a very black poem at that time.

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