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 poets to pick a poem from the New Yorker archive, to read and

discuss, along with a poem of their own that's appeared in the magazine. My guest today is Natasha Trethewey, a former U.S. poet lauret, and a current chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

She's received a Heinz Award and Academy of American Poets Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,

among many, many, many other distinctions.

Welcome, Natasha. Thanks for coming.

Thank you for having me.

So the poem you brought with you today is Toadstools by Charles Wright.

Can you say a bit about why this poem stuck out to you?

Well, you know, this is a poem that when I first read it and read the final lines that you'll hear, it almost knocked me over because it spoke directly to my experience.

It gave an articulation of something that I had felt for a long time, but hadn't quite said myself.

Well, let's hear this. This is Natasha Trethaway, reading Toadstools by Charles Wright.

Toadstools. The toadstools are starting to come up, circular and dry. Nothing will touch them. Gophers or chipmunks, wasps,

or swallows. They glow in the twilight like rooted willow the wisps. Nothing will touch them.

As though little roundabouts from the bunched, unbearable, powers, dominions, as though orphans rode

heard in the short grass, as though they had heard the call, they will always be with us,

transcendors of the world. Someone will try to stick his beak into their otherworldly styrofoam.

Someone may try to taste a taste of forever.

For some, it's a refuge.

For some, a shady place to fall down.

Grief is a floating barge boat.

...