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

Today, my guest is Ray Armantrout, whose many books include Go Figure, Finalists, Conjure,

and Wobble.

Her collection, Verst, won a National Book Critic Circle Award in the 2010 Pulitzer Prize

for Poetry.

Welcome, Ray.

Thanks so much for being here.

Hi, Kevin.

Nice to be here.

So the first poem you've chosen to read is Mother by Dorothy Alaska. What drew you to this particular poem while you were perusing the archives? It seems so simple in a way, but it's not. It's got very simple language, and yet it's a kind of riddle, so I wanted to come back to it.

Well, let's listen to the poem. This is Ray Armantrout, reading Mother by Dorothy O'Laskey.

Mother, I went in the Rose Garden in the middle the night, to find the things I lost there.

"'Mother, I searched for you for seven nights and could not find you.

"'They left your perfume everywhere, a kind of toying aspect, and scratched your picture with their talons. "' I replaced it, despite their anger, and still

got up in the morning to feed the babies their first meal. Mother, I wore a lilac dress,

and stepped through the thistle. The alligators had already overtaken the endless landscape.

Your body was somewhere there, and it was my job to

bury it. In my head, your voice rang out with the strangest aroma. The gods had left you in the

rose garden. Mother, I went in before dawn to find you. I didn't know they left so many noxious animals there to hurt me. Terrible fear upon

...