It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs, and this is National Poetry Month.

And maybe that sounds irrelevant, or even frivolous, given the urgency and the gravity of the issues that make the news every day.

But today, we argue that poetry has everything to do with the news, beginning here, with a brand new poem ripped straight from

the headlines.

Innaugural.

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. Quan 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,

The News from Poems.

Okay, does that work?

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