Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

As you may know, on this program, we ask poets to pick a poem from the New Yorker archive,

to read and discuss.

Then we ask them to read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine.

Today, my guest is Vajeshachatri. His work has been honored with the magazine. Today, my guest is Vajé Shashatri.

His work has been honored with the James Lachlan Award

and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry,

and he recently became poetry editor of the Paris Review.

Vijay, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me, Kevin.

So the poem you've chosen to read today

is The Moon and the U Tree by Sylvia Plath.

What about this poem struck you as you were looking through the archive?

Well, it struck me that the New Yorker had published this poem in a two-page spread after she had died right before the American edition of Ariel came out.

And I thought that was fascinating.

And I've always looked at that spread, which has a bunch of other poems, including this one,

and this is the very last one on that two-page spread.

And this one kept coming back to me with a certain insistence

because of purely technical qualities that have re-interested me in it.

I mean, I've been reading Plath since, you know, the early 70s. And, uh, and I know the poems well and sometimes

they just dazzle me and sometimes I don't read them for five or six years. And, uh, but it had been

...