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 invite poets to choose a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss.

Then they read a poem of their own that's appeared in the magazine.

My guest today is Toy Derrickat, the poet, memoirist, and co-founder with Cornelio Citi of the

literary organization, Cave Canem. Toy's honors include the Penn Volker Award for Poetry

and the Patterson Poetry Prize for sustaining the literary achievement in 2020 to receive the

Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime

Achievement in Poetry. Welcome, Toy. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, thank you, Kevin,

for having me. Good to talk. So much to talk about. I want to hear the first poem that you

decide to read, which is, we feel now a largeness coming on by Tracy

K. Smith. What was it that drew you to this poem as you're looking through our archives?

Well, I was so lucky because I had planned to spend the whole weekend going through the archives

to find something. And I started and this poem, having been

published recently, I came upon very quickly and fell madly in love with it. And I needed to go no

further. Well, why don't we hear the poem? Here's Toy Derrickott reading,

We Feel Now a Largeness Coming On by Tracy K. Smith.

We feel now a largeness coming on.

Being called all manner of things from the Dictionary of shame, not English, not words, not heard, but worn,

born, carried, never spent. We feel now a largeness coming on, something passing into us.

We know not in what source it was begun, but rapt, we watch it, rise through our fallen, our slain, our millions dragged, chained, like daylight setting leaves alight, green to gold, to blinding white, like a spirit caught, flame in flesh.

I watched a woman try to shake it once from her shoulders and hips,

a wild, annihilating fright.

...