Kaveh Akbar Reads Ellen Bryant Voigt

The New Yorker: Poetry

The New Yorker

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4.4 • 571 Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2018

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kaveh Akbar joins Kevin Young to read and discuss Ellen Bryant Voigt’s poem "Groundhog" and his own poem "What Use is Knowing Anything If No One Is Around". Akbar is the author of the poetry collection “Calling a Wolf a Wolf,” as well as the recipient of a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2018 Levis Reading Prize.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.
0:05.5	I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine.
0:10.1	On this podcast, we asked poets to choose a poem from the magazine's archives to read and discuss,
0:15.5	along with a piece of their own that we published in The New Yorker.
0:18.7	My guest today is Kava Akbar, who's received a Ruth and Dorothy Sergeant Rosenberg Fellowship, a Pushcard Prize, and the 2018 Levis, that's Larry Levis, Reading Prize. Welcome, Kava. Thank you so much for having me. I'm grateful to be here. We're happy to have you. So the poem you've decided to read for us as Groundhog by Ellen Bryant-Voyt.
0:39.4	Yeah. What in particular drew you this piece? Yeah, I encountered this piece early in my,
0:45.4	relatively early in my, I mean, I'm still early in my poetry journey, but I encountered it years ago
0:50.7	when it first appeared in The New Yorker, and it was one of those poems that just arrives like an angel's blaring trumpet, you know, just sort of absolutely ripped the top
0:59.1	of my head off and it was just my first encounter with language that felt so charged and
1:05.2	that played with momentum so intelligently, and the centripetal force and the inertia,
1:10.2	and this poem is just so incantatory and so magical.
1:13.3	Well, let's hear it. Let's hear it. Here's Kava Akbar, reading Groundhog by Ellen Bryant-White.
1:21.9	Groundhog.
1:24.2	Not unlike otters, which we love, frolicing, floating on their backs like truant boys,
1:30.8	unwrapping lunch, same sleek brown pelt, some overtones of gray and rust, though groundhogs
1:38.0	have no swimming hole, and lunch is rooted in the ground beneath short legs, small feet like
1:44.0	a fat man's odd diminutive loafers,
1:47.0	not frolicing but scurrying layers of fat. His coat gleams as though wet, shines, chestnut,
1:54.3	sable, darker head and muzzle lower into the grass, a dark triangular face like the hog-nosed skunk, another delicate nose and not a
2:03.6	snout. Doesn't it matter what they're called? I like swine, which are smart and prefer to be
2:09.2	clean, using their snouts to push their excrement to the side of the pen. But they have hairy skin,
2:15.7	not fur, his fur, shimmers and ripples. He never uproots the mother
	...

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