Craig Morgan Teicher and Kevin Young Discuss Two Poems Titled 'Son'

Tune in to the New Yorker's Poetry Podcast to hear a discussion between the magazine's poetry editor, Kevin Young, and Craig Morgan Teicher, author of the recent collection of essays about poetry, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress. In each episode of the podcast, guests are invited to pick a poem from the magazine's extensive archive. For his visit, Craig Morgan Teicher selected Forrest Gander's poem, "Son," then shared his own poem with the same title. "So the poem you’ve selected from the archive is 'Son' by Forrest Gander," Kevin Young begins. "What drew you to this poem while you were looking through our archive?" From there: 

Craig Morgan Teicher: Well, it has the same title as a poem of mine that’s in the archive. And so that made it easy. I actually had a really hard time picking a poem. I mean obviously there’s so much.

Kevin Young: It’s almost a hundred years of, you know, pretty good poems.

Craig Morgan Teicher: Yeah, yeah yeah. I mean and, you know, some of them, really, some of the major poems of any poet’s kind of education in poetry. But finally I just sort of decided to go with my gut, and when I had first read this poem when it came out, it slaughtered me, and it wasn’t that long ago. But I think of, you know, when I think of New Yorker poems that mattered to me this one kind of jumps right now.

Kevin Young: Great. Well, why don’t we hear the poem? Here’s Craig Morgan Teicher reading “Son” by Forrest Gander.

[“Son” by Forrest Gander]

Kevin Young: That was quite beautiful and I loved how you read it. That was “Son,” by Forrest Gander, which ran in the April 16, 2018, issue of the magazine. And this poem was occasioned, it seems clear, by the loss of his wife, the great poet C. D. Wright, who happened to be my old teacher. And so this poem, I remember reading it and thinking what a powerful, fearless, gimlet-eyed poem. And you know just thinking of it technically on the page, you know, you have these couplets, which of course mirrors these pairs, both father and son and mother and son and husband and wife. You know the whole of these connections, you know, even us, reader and poet, and you also have that great slant rhyme, “I kept it from the ones I love . . . / . . . It’s just in you her blood runs.” Those sounds, I think. What do you make of sort of the form and the the tone how they kind of coalesce in this poem?

Craig Morgan Teicher: I mean, I mean, so I think two things. You know in addition to the couplets which, of course, you have this kind of twinning—the lines are wildly uneven, you know, and so there’s this way that it seems to strain against that, like—you know it’s a poem about failing to communicate, ultimately, and so there’s this way that the misshapen lines seem to figure that. But then the other thing that I, you know, especially reading it aloud, you know, this mix of short and long sentences—you know, the “greyhound stood transfixed. I stood transfixed.” These moments where he’s repeating himself, he’s trying to get it right and kind of failing—you know, in the second to last line, “I gave my life to strangers; I kept it from the ones I love”—I mean he’s trying to, he’s almost trying to rewrite that phrase and make it more true or something. And you know that seems to keep happening, that the sentences have these little tensions and arguments with each other.

Learn more (and listen to Teicher read both poems) at the New Yorker.