Julia Alvarez Reads Judy Page Heitzman
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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What is the purpose of the New Yorker Poetry Podcast?
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Hi, 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 a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then, they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine. Today, my guest is Julia Alvarez. She's the author of many novels, nonfiction books, children's books, and poetry collections, including, most recently, visitations. She's received a Hispanic Heritage Award, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, and, in 2013, a National Medal of Arts. She's also the subject of a PBS American Masters documentary. Julia, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Thank you, Kevin, for inviting me to the big table.
Well, you've been there a while. I'm just happy to join you. The first poem you've chosen to read is The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill by Judy Page Heitzman. What was it that drew you to this particular poem?
Well, I was in a fluster of trying among the many riches that the New Yorker has published to select a poem. And then I remembered this little poem that I've been very fond of. And this occasion gave me hope. the opportunity to revisit it. And I'm just fond of it. I used it a lot in my writing workshops because it was always a great writing prompt. Everyone has a school, grammar school or high school memory. You had to sit there for eight hours and look a lot at at your environment and your teacher and your classmates. So a lot of it got stored in there. So it was a great writing prompt. And also for my students that I knew were going to go on and be teachers, I thought, you know, we try to equip them with all kinds of smarts, but it's really the things that the students come back with are the least likely things that you never studied for.
So I went and I discovered it was still there with all my teaching folders.
Why don't we listen to the poem? Here's Julia Alvarez reading The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill by Judy Page Heitzman.
The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill While most of us copied letters out of books, Mrs. Lawrence carved and cleaned her nails. Now the red and buff cardinals at my back room window make me miss her, her room, the hallway, even the chimney outside that broke up the sky. In my memory, it is afternoon. Sun streams in through the door next to the fire escape where we are lined up, getting our coats on to go out to the playground. The tetherball, its towering height, the swings. She tells me to make sure the line does not move up over the threshold. That would be dangerous. So I stand guard at the door. Somehow it happens the way things seem to happen when we're not really looking, or we are looking, just not the right way.
Kids crush up like cattle, pushing me over the line. Judy is not a good leader, is all Mrs. Lawrence says. She says it quietly. Still, everybody hears. Her arms hang down like sausages. I hear her every time I fail.
That was The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill by Judy Page Heitzman, which was originally published in the December 2, 1991 issue of The New Yorker. Well, you set it up for us so beautifully. This poem is about disappointment in some way, or is it about not being seen or being seen in a way that one doesn't want to be seen?
It's just a poem that's full of little surprises. You sort of Only till the last stanza do you see that last bit coming.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:30
2
What is the purpose of the New Yorker Poetry Podcast?
0:30–8:00
3
Why did Julia Alvarez choose 'The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill'?
8:00–23:29
4
What themes are explored in Judy Page Heitzman's poem?
23:29–25:58
5
How does Julia Alvarez interpret the poem's tone and details?
25:58–37:52