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 ask poets to select a poem for the New Yorker archive to read and discuss,

along with one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine.

My guest today is Peter Balakian, whose honors include the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry,

the Presidential Medal, and Moses Cornazzi Medal from the Republic of Armenia,

and the Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy.

Welcome, Peter. Thanks for joining us.

Great to be here, Kevin. It's really great to have you. The poem you picked is In a Dark

Time by Theater Retke. Can you tell us why this particular poem stood out to you from the archive?

You know, it's one of Retke's late poems, and I find Retke's a powerful figure from mid-20th century American poetry and poetry in

English. And this poem strikes me as having a kind of urgency and what I might even call an existential

richness to it,

that gives it an enduring power.

I first encountered this poem in the early 1970s,

and it's a poem that has stayed with me over the decades,

a poem I continue to teach.

And I have written about Retke, and this is a poem I've also written about.

Let's hear it. Here's Peter Balakian, reading In a Dark Time by Theodore Rutke.

In a dark time, one. In a dark time, the eye begins to see. I meet my shadow in the deepening

shade. I hear my echo in the echoing wood, a lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren, beasts of the hill, serpents of the den.

...