Kevin Young and Deborah Garrison Discuss “A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker”

January 29, 2025·36 min·2 clips

W.S. Merwin's poem written within weeks of 9/11 asks words themselves to speak the unspeakable.

The centenary frames the conversation. Kevin Young introduces A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker, 1925 to 2025, the anthology he worked on with editor Deborah Garrison. Their connection is personal: Garrison has published poems in the magazine, worked on its editorial staff, and edited Young roughly twenty-five years ago. The book is big because they wanted it to feel big enough for a full century. More than 800 poems and almost 1,000 pages become a way to show change, not just pile up favorites. The talk moves into praise and choice. For Garrison, deciding what to write about can be a way of saying a moment deserves attention. Public history matters, but it is not the whole story. Young and Garrison set the news of 1955 beside the smaller intervals poetry can keep. Nikki Giovanni arrives gently. After noting her recent death, Young asks Garrison to read Giovanni's 1997 New Yorker poem Love in Place. The reading slows everything down. The poem remembers love through cornbread, ham, lemon pie, smoking, cuticles, gray hair, music, photographs, and being seen by another person. Young hears the title as a little mysterious, as if love has been placed somewhere and left for us to find. He also hears how Garrison carries Giovanni's page-music into speech. The exchange stays warm and careful. The anthology comes across less like a monument than a living record of poems that made small moments last inside a public magazine.

As heard by us

A thoughtful centenary conversation about poetry, memory, and the editorial choices behind a century-spanning anthology.

Kevin Young and Deborah Garrison use the New Yorker's centenary anthology, A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925 to 2025, as a way to think about poetry as memory: the old yellow 1969 paperback that first drew them in, the new book's almost thousand-page heft, and the…

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