Maya C. Popa Reads Brenda Shaughnessy

March 25, 2026·42 min·3 clips

Maya C. Popa reads her New Yorker poem 'The World Was All Before Them,' ending with the line: 'Eden, by which I mean, you will leave me.'

Maya C. Popa arrives with gratitude. Kevin Young sets up the episode as a reading from the New Yorker archive, then asks why Brenda Shaughnessy's Artless stayed with her. The poem quickly takes over the room. Popa hears it as personal and intimate, but she does not treat that intimacy as a simple trail of biographical clues. Young follows that line carefully, talking about the poem's move toward the root of the matter, where a life and a heart can appear without turning into a portrait of the poet. The close reading gets physical and musical. The meat stub of us, the loud hub of us, and the repeated us feel less like decoration than pressure points. Popa listens for the strain inside that repetition. In her reading, us sounds stubborn, communal, and uneasy, as though the poem keeps pressing private feeling into shared implication. Young hears tragedy sitting next to triumph. The line about fighting fire with fire opens into a kind of senselessness that both speakers take seriously without flattening it into gloom. Confession stays complicated. Popa suggests the poem may start from the self, as all poems do, while still moving beyond a narrow confessional frame. She keeps returning to distillation: how a poem can essentialize or alchemize experience until only the necessary details remain. The craft talk is precise. Her contrast between an ostensible subject and an underlying subject comes down to a practical question: does each detail feed the poem's deeper motion? The mood is generous and grave. Young's brief agreements leave Popa room to keep testing how form carries feeling.

As heard by us

A close, admiring conversation about Brenda Shaughnessy's "Artless" and the pressure poetry puts on private feeling.

Maya C. Popa's visit to The New Yorker: Poetry begins with Brenda Shaughnessy's "Artless," a poem she admires for its sound, humor, and serious lyric force.

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Press play for a poem discussion that hears sonic pleasure, humor, and tragedy at once.

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