Hey, podcast listeners, it's Anne here, and I want to welcome you to the beginning of our celebration of National Poetry Month.

And first off, if that sounds a little irrelevant or even frivolous, given the urgency and, you know, the gravity of the issues that make the news every day, well, we are arguing that poetry has everything to do with the news.

So let's begin here, with a brand new poem ripped straight from the headlines.

Inaudual.

Let me repeat.

Of the different varieties, it's the guilt of being one without the attendant narratives of fire and night.

Children littering the shore like sea glass, or walking across entire continents, souls bloodied, coupled with the fact that

I've never used the word to describe myself, not once in 43 years until today.

Refugee.

Yes, I have always called myself an immigrant, but it is only now in this icy light that I bend my knee and bow, the top of my head sword kissed.

Once I got on a plane. I left. It was done. I became me. I did not suffer in the way of such suffering,

but I am a refugee from a war this country conducted.

May this be the dawn of an error in which we do not

have to live a particular life in order to respect it.

The way 19th century art brought us the word empathy.

Before then, there was only a luminousness we had to believe was there.

Kwan Barry is an award-winning poet and novelist.

She was born in Saigon and raised in the U.S.

And she's an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is the same campus where I work, so I see her around town.

A few weeks ago, Kwan emailed that poem to me and to a few other friends, and she also announced that for the rest of the year, she's going to be writing and publishing one new poem a week in response to current events.

Now, as a journalist, I think this sounds great.

So we got together here in the studio to talk about starting a new radio series,

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