On a cloudy and humid morning in August, the documentary filmmaker Nanfu Wang was chatting with her mother, Zaodi, at her neighborhood park in New Jersey. Wang’s two-year-old son, Jamie, wearing a sailor top adorned with a cartoon lobster and some tangerine stains, gleefully swayed back and forth on a swing, occasionally asking his mother for an extra push. Zaodi, who still lives in the same small village in China where Wang was born and raised, was making her fourth visit to the States, and she was pleased to see her daughter’s progress. Wang and her husband’s new house is an upgrade from their two-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, and Wang’s documentary “One Child Nation,” about China’s one-child policy, which was in effect from 1979 to 2015, had just hit theatres. Three nights before, Zaodi had attended a screening of the film at Film Forum, in Manhattan. “It was a full house—every single seat was filled,” she recalled. “I’m so proud. So many people came, and so many people asked her questions. I was so happy.” Her face broke into an unselfconscious smile.

“One Child Nation,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, is part investigative report, part family history. Co-directed with Jialing Zhang, the film follows a Chinese family that is jailed for human trafficking after they moved thousands of abandoned Chinese babies—almost all of them girls—into state-run orphanages, and an American couple who started a foundation to help track down the girls’ biological families. It features a village midwife who now provides free infertility services in an attempt to find redemption for the thousands of late-term abortions that she performed while the one-child policy was in effect. Wang, who was born in 1985, also interviews her family members, sometimes while holding the then newborn Jamie in her arms, and gently presses them to reveal how the policy shaped their lives and community. At one point in the film, Zaodi admits that if her second child—Zhihao, who was born five years after Nanfu—had been a girl, she would have been pressured to abandon the infant.

In unflinching and often graphic terms, the documentary shows the obscene human impact of the one-child policy: forced sterilizations and terminations, kidnappings sanctioned by local officials, and untold numbers of newborns left to their deaths. The Chinese government mounted an inescapable propaganda campaign—using billboards and posters, schoolchildren’s textbooks, even matchbooks and playing cards—to insist that the policy was the only option for the nation’s survival.

Zaodi likes her daughter’s film but disagrees with her politics. “If not for the family-planning policy, there would have been too many people in China,” Zaodi said, giving Jamie a push on the swing. She is fifty-six and has been a schoolteacher for three decades. “Quality-of-life standards would be really low. We’d live far worse off than we do now. Families can’t support so many children. From my generation, some had six or seven kids. Some don’t have enough to eat; some even starved to death.”

Her daughter was ready with a rebuttal. “These are the theories the government told you,” she said. “You are just repeating the propaganda.” Her boy was starting to whine—something about his legs. Wang bent over him, rubbed his legs, and continued her argument. “Many other countries have high population density, like Japan. Education can help improve living standards and make people voluntarily not want kids.”

“Chinese people are of low quality all around. Education is not enough,” Zaodi said, invoking the popular Chinese myth of suzhi, or inner quality.

“I am so shocked by this theory—so many people think this way, that Chinese people are of low quality and are not suitable for voting in a general election, not suitable for democracy,” Wang said. “Isn’t everyone born equal? Why would you think you are born a lesser person than an American?”

Zaodi had stopped speaking; she only smiled and nodded, appeasingly. The baby’s eyelids were drooping, and it had started to drizzle. Mother and daughter decided to head back home.

Wang was born and raised in the southern province of Jiangxi, in Wang Village, where Zaodi teaches kindergarten. The village is surrounded by rivers, and the same families have lived there for generations, most of them sharing the surname Wang. Zaodi and her late husband were substitute teachers (literally “barefoot teachers” in Mandarin); they were paid poorly, even by rural-village standards. Wang recalls foraging through trash dumps, open fields, and riverbeds for scraps of metal and plastic, which she collected and sold to recyclers for pocket money. The family didn’t have a television. “When I walked by a neighbor’s house and saw they had a TV, I was filled with longing for that little thing, bright with lights,” she said.

Wang was close with her father, Qinhua, who was a storyteller and a big reader; he introduced her to “Treasure Island” when she was seven. He had suffered from heart disease since childhood, and, although he was initially admitted to study at a university, he failed a physical exam that was required for prospective college students in nineteen-seventies China. After the birth of Wang’s brother, Zhihao, their father took out a loan and bought chickens to raise, preparing and selling savory tea eggs to earn extra cash. Wang remembers shouting, despite her shyness, “Tea eggs! Five cents each!” at passersby in streets and alleys. When her father died, of a stroke, at the age of thirty-four, he left behind several notebooks: diaries and some manuscripts of short fiction and poems. “My father’s life was full of bitterness,” Wang said. “He made many attempts at different things in his life but never succeeded. His biggest dream was to go to college.”

Wang was eleven when her father died, and her brother was seven. She developed insomnia; her mother became depressed. It was clear that there was no way Zaodi could repay the loan on top of paying school fees for two children much longer. She decided that her daughter should go to technical school, instead of high school, so that she could begin supporting the family sooner; there, Wang would train to become a general-education teacher, with a focus on English. Wang cried at her mother’s decision but obeyed readily. “I agreed with the mindset that my brother was too young to leave school,” she said. “And what would a boy do if he doesn’t go to high school and college?”

Wang worked as a salesgirl in her uncle’s souvenir store, in the provincial capital, Nanchang, and as an English teacher in Fengcheng, putting herself through college part-time before testing into a master’s program in Shanghai, where she was offered an administrative job. But the idea of doing the same thing, day after day, year after year, was dismaying to her. Her mother was shocked. When you have a stable job and an assigned apartment in Shanghai, Zaodi thought, what more could you want?

What her daughter wanted was to dig deeper into her newfound sense of the injustice that was permeating her world, hinging on class and gender. “If the health-care system hadn’t been unjust, my father wouldn’t have died—we didn’t have money and couldn’t afford to send him to a hospital,” Wang said. “Because I was a girl and I wasn’t able to go to high school, I was discriminated against, and it was difficult to find a job.” She wanted to find ways to expose injustice wherever it existed and was disappointed with the state of journalism in China. So she applied to fourteen state universities in the U.S., and was offered a full scholarship by the master’s program in media studies at Ohio University.

Wang was twenty-six and doing many things for the first time: getting a visa, travelling outside of China, watching films in English, touching a camera. (She once spent hours trying to remove a lens, before discovering the release button.) A class on documentary film, she recalled, “was like an explosion.” Up until that point, Wang’s experience of documentaries had been limited to historical and wildlife films made by China Central Television (CCTV), the state television broadcaster. Michael Moore’s “Sicko” and “Roger and Me” revealed to her that movies could be at once “political and entertaining”; Alan Berliner’s “Nobody’s Business” showed that documentaries could make the stuff of ordinary life into compelling and universal art. “I didn’t know any of this existed,” she said. “And I was, like, O.K., this is what I want to do.”

Wang remembers this time as, in some respects, the happiest of her life. “You can feel that you are growing and learning every day. That kind of energy and satisfaction is tremendous.” At the same time, she was extremely homesick. “It was almost like two worlds, and the world before is a past life,” she said. “All my best friends, my entire life, was behind me.”

She landed at N.Y.U. for graduate school, where her thesis project was a film she shot in China, called “Hooligan Sparrow,” about Ye Haiyan, a sex-workers’ advocate who led a protest seeking justice for a group of elementary-school students in Hainan who were sexually abused by their principal. Two weeks into filming, Chinese secret-police forces called Zaodi to ask about her daughter’s whereabouts. A former roommate of Wang’s in Shanghai was taken to a police station for questioning. Plainclothes policemen would surround and harass Wang while she was filming, and, in one instance that’s captured in the documentary, they seized her footage; fortunately, a friend was secretly recording the scene. Without intending to, Wang became part of the story she was telling, with her own video diaries becoming fodder for her movie.

“Hooligan Sparrow” won a George Polk Award and a Peabody, and Wang considers it to be her political awakening. “I often say that it felt like ‘The Truman Show,’ in that moment when they bring down the wall and he finally sees the real world. That’s very much how I felt,” Wang said. “And now, on the other side of the wall, I see all my friends and people I know. But they don’t ever see my side.”

That distance might be partly a matter of language: the script and video diaries of “Hooligan Sparrow” are in English, as is all of the voice-over for “One Child Nation.” (Between these projects, Wang made her second feature, “I Am Another You,” about a young drifter she met in Florida.) Wang said that she tried to make a Chinese version of “Hooligan Sparrow,” but the Chinese vocabulary for human rights felt uncomfortable. “In China, words like ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’ are given negative undertones,” she said. “I realized that I couldn’t tell this story in Chinese. I know what the translations are, and I know the expressions. But it feels embarrassing and unnatural. I almost feel as if I don’t dare to say these words.”

A few months after the one-child policy was relaxed, in 2015, a colleague of Wang’s asked her what she thought about it. “I said that I didn’t think it affected my life at all,” she recalled. “It was like my mind wouldn’t look beyond what I was taught.”

But when Wang became pregnant with her son, in 2017, she started to feel connected to the world and the people in it in new ways. “I became super aware of every single danger around me, and of dangers in the future, like climate change,” she said. She looked at strangers and acquaintances differently: as people who were tenderly loved by their mothers. She talked about the one-child policy with her mother, who recounted brutal stories of coerced sterilizations and abortions. Zaodi had told her daughter versions of these stories before. “But it was the first time I actually imagined those stories from the perspective of an adult, as a woman and as a mother,” Wang said.

After “Hooligan Sparrow,” Wang knew to be more careful while making “One Child Nation.” During filming, she avoided taking public transportation that required I.D., in order to avoid surveillance, and she filmed mostly indoors and rarely in public. She said that the filmmaking process sometimes felt feel like going through therapy, with painful memories sometimes rushing back. “In middle school, in Fengcheng, everyone else was an only child,” she said. “I felt poor and backward and uneducated and ashamed—those were the labels that were put on people.”

Wang is close with her brother, who works in Beijing as a programmer for Amazon (which is also, coincidentally, the distributor of “One Child Nation”). She harbors no hard feelings about any favoritism that he was shown as a child—in fact, she seems to harbor few hard feelings in general. “What happens, happens” is something that she likes to say. “It probably sounds insane,” she remarked once, about safety concerns during filming, “but if I experience something bad, it’s one of the experiences in life, too.” She has few complaints about growing up poor; she says that she only wished she had been exposed to music. At one point during our conversations, she told me about feeling desperate enough to apply for a sub–minimum-wage job after finishing her graduate degree at N.Y.U. Attempting to commiserate with her about this low point, I threw out the word “hopeless.” She gently corrected me. “Hopeless is a heavy word,” she said.

As we were leaving the park, we spotted a couple of deer behind some trees. “Deer! Two of them,” Wang said to Jamie, as she pushed him in the stroller. On the walk home, Zaodi told me that she hopes her daughter will not make more movies about China. “It reflects poorly on her,” she said. “In the village, people will look at her disapprovingly. And, if the government finds out, it will be bad, too. I worry that she will be arrested.”

Wang said that she has been saddened when friends have confronted her about how she has portrayed China. “They think that I have changed, and that I was brainwashed in the West,” she said. “I hate to see the injustice, the dissatisfaction, and seeing my loved ones being oblivious to propaganda—but there’s nothing more I can do.”

Later that day, while her mother and son were taking afternoon naps, Wang went upstairs to the third floor of her house, where she plans to use a tiny loft space, beneath a skylight, as her office. (She edited “One Child Nation” in her old apartment in Crown Heights, in between Jamie’s naps and feedings, and her iMac shared a desk with her breast pump.) In the loft, two iMacs were waiting to be plugged in, and a few boxes were scattered on the floor: one contained her prizes, another housed old production notes. Zaodi said that she is pleased that her daughter plans to make her next documentary in a country far from China, although its central figure is an activist, and its themes are Communism, propaganda, and human rights.

Wang vividly remembers the summer day that her father’s body was brought back from the morgue, to his family’s house, in Wang Village. For three days, he was laid in their living room for people to pay their respects. Wang, at twelve, didn’t understand what death meant. “I felt that he was still alive, and just choosing not to communicate with others,” she said. When people started to put nails in the casket, she thought they were murdering him—he would be trapped inside and die. Howling, she tried to fight them, and adults in her family pulled her away. In the year that followed, she developed a superstitious belief that she was going to die at thirty-four, like he did.

She turns thirty-four in December and no longer expects to die this year. But she says that the urge to live a bigger, hungrier life—as if to make up for the time she expected to lose—has stayed with her. “It’s not about extending my life expectancy, the length, but expanding the width of my life,” she said. “Every time I make a film, the film also makes me.”

Ariel Francisco joins Kevin Young to read “By a Lake in Minnesota,” by James Wright, and his own poem “Along the East River and in the Bronx Young Men Were Singing.” Francisco is a poet and translator who published his début poetry collection, “All My Heroes Are Broke,” in 2017. His new book, “A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship,” is forthcoming in 2020.

Below is an automated transcript of this podcast episode.

Kevin Young [00:00:06] 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 poets to select a poem from The New Yorker archive to read and discuss. Then we ask them to read a poem of their own that's appeared in the magazine. My guest today is the poet and translator. Ariel Francisco who published his debut collection, "All my Heroes Are Broke" in 2017. Welcome Ariel, thank you for joining us.

Ariel Francisco [00:00:35] Thanks for having me man. I'm really excited.

Kevin Young [00:00:37] So I'm excited too. The poem you've chosen to read today is James Wright's poem "By a Lake in Minnesota." What drew you to this particular poem while you were looking through our archive.

Ariel Francisco [00:00:48] Yeah looking through the archive was just a ton of fun so just typing in you know all the poets I admire and looking through all the poems that they've published in The New Yorker and I had forgotten about this James Wright poem though it is in, I think it's in "The Branch Will Not Break,".

Kevin Young [00:01:03] Right.

Ariel Francisco [00:01:04] Which is one of my favorite books. But it has so many good poems that even the good ones get buried amongst the other good ones so it was like finding something familiar that I had forgotten that I really liked. So was a joy to encounter it again in the archives.

Kevin Young [00:01:18] Great let's hear it. This is Ariel Francisco reading "By a Lake in Minnesota" by James Wright.

Ariel Francisco [00:01:25] "By a Lake in Minnesota" by James Wright.

Kevin Young [00:01:59] Mm hmm I love that. That was "By a Lake in Minnesota," written by James Wright which was originally published in the September 17th 1960, issue of the magazine. I love how it starts upshore and ends with this down shore.

Ariel Francisco [00:02:13] Yeah that opening line is just bananas. Upshore from the cloud m dash. That's great right.

Kevin Young [00:02:20] I do love an m dash. I'll be honest.

Ariel Francisco [00:02:23] Back to back m dashes.

Kevin Young [00:02:24] Eah you gotta do it sometimes. Emily Dickinson. So tell me what else drew you to this. I mean it's interesting in contrast to the poem we're going to see by you because I feel like they're talking to each other in a funny way. In part this is a — is it a study of nature or is it nature as seen from the city. You know that pastoral tradition. How do you think of it?

Ariel Francisco [00:02:46] It's almost an existential crisis for me this kind of observation of you know these gigantic things the sky and then you know Twilight as a whale and then sort of coming back down small to the beaver and then back out again to the moon walking. You know it's like this breathing this kind of huge small huge. And then the smallest of all is you know the speaker standing in the dark at the end just kind of under the weight of everything. It's kind of terrifying but it's fantastic.

Kevin Young [00:03:13] Well and he's waiting as in waiting for a train or something. But he's also feeling that weight. I love how you highlight that.

Ariel Francisco [00:03:21] Yeah I mean that's the slow wail of country Twilight.

Kevin Young [00:03:24] I mean that's one of the great line I want to steal it instantly. I mean it feels very american if that makes sense of feels like something someone might say. But at the same time it's so lyrical and rooted in this kind of surrealism that Wright is invested in, especially around this time and moving from his book "St. Judas," a book I love.

Ariel Francisco [00:03:44] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:03:45] Because it's a transition book you know and then "The Branch Will Not Break," which is just a few years later as you mentioned in this poem is of that time you know those incredible poems of nature and, you know, I have wasted my life right up the grand pronouncements that it always returns to the I for Wright.

Ariel Francisco [00:04:05] Yeah. And this one in particular I do, you know that that change he made from kind of those formal poems and then sort of throwing everything out and building this new kind of style. And I coming so late right. It's just I stand is the I think the only I in this poem, right there before the dark is, it's just great to you know to have him come into the poem finally just at the very end as like the smallest part of it.

Kevin Young [00:04:31] Well I wonder do you think of him as a poet of place a poet of existential crisis are they the same for him?

Ariel Francisco [00:04:39] I think they might be I think he's definitely a poet of place not just that but you know that especially that lying in a hammock. I love teaching that poem to my students because that's just it gets no more specific than that, that title. You know–

Kevin Young [00:04:51] Yes.

Ariel Francisco [00:04:51] Tells you so much. Even if you've never been there you can't really know it but you can you can imagine it. So in a literal sense you know he's always conjuring places that we know he's familiar with that we might not be but we can be through the poem and there's definitely always for me in his work some kind of existential dread happening and it helps feel it when you can imagine the place that he's in even if it's just like standing by a lake. Right.

Kevin Young [00:05:17] Yeah. I love that. I also feel like he's a poet invested and even the title "St. Judas" plays with this kind of Christian iconography and there's a kind of descent ascent that is happening in these poems you know darkness and very Manichean you know like large dark and light up and down you know like me and no one, or the God that is sort of congured but not. And these these beavers interest me you know he knows they're mother and child, right.

Ariel Francisco [00:05:50] Yeah. There's no question there.

Kevin Young [00:05:51] They're kind of this holy family almost.

Ariel Francisco [00:05:54] Yeah. And I mean maybe what's absent you know if the poems kind of being written in that time for him to you know project that onto them is kind of a tiny detail that might get lost. But you know probably hugely important to what he was going through at those times.

Kevin Young [00:06:09] I'm struck too by the the shortness of the lines which I was not quite this years old but you know fairly recently I remember that listening to him read "A blessing," his famous poem of you know stopping and seeing these two horses which come up to him.

Ariel Francisco [00:06:24] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:06:25] And he reads it incredibly slow — every word. Line.You know like wow it's so emphasized.

Ariel Francisco [00:06:33] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:06:33] And I think that's partially that break he's having between these kind of more formal poems and even the subject matter of those which were wonderful but then really opening up the work and changing it. These shorter lines I think really strike me too.

Ariel Francisco [00:06:50] Yeah they're they're tricky. I fear the long line in my own writing. So I it. Yeah I it's difficult to go. The closer you get to the margin.

Kevin Young [00:07:00] I know there's like a cat there that like swipes your hand.

Ariel Francisco [00:07:03] Like the cliff's edge you know. So I stay away from the margin of the page. I like I like the short lines but, but his short lines are incredible. Even you know just looking at the shortest ones 'full of roses on the shore of the ground I stand pause waiting for dark.' Like just how much they contain is really difficult to to try and accomplish I think.

Kevin Young [00:07:27] Well it makes you know this is perhaps obvious, but it makes every word count.

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Ariel Francisco [00:07:31] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:07:32] I mean he has that other poem about autumn comes to Martins Ferry Ohio and you know there's that amazing moment it's like therefore there's a line that says therefore it's in a poem. And I remember reading that and you know there's all sorts of questions of race in the poem and it's really wrestling with class and race in an interesting way I think when I was much younger I think I thought it was only troubling but I think he's troubled.

Ariel Francisco [00:07:58] Right.

Kevin Young [00:07:58] And he's trying to write about it. I was like therefore that troubled me more than anything know like I had rules in my mind of what you could do and therefore as a line.

Ariel Francisco [00:08:06] Right.

Kevin Young [00:08:06] Or even you know of the ground as it is here and below you know but below is not just as we were saying you know a place, it's a state.

Ariel Francisco [00:08:16] Yeah yeah.

Kevin Young [00:08:16] And I think understanding that therefore is a state and and below as a state and that he is trying to conjure them with the least words possible I think is really a fruitful thing for us to think about.

Ariel Francisco [00:08:28] Yeah yeah absolutely. It's like a proclamation you know the importance of what follows or what comes before but just to have that small unit of language standing by itself is something.

Kevin Young [00:08:40] Are you comfortable with proclamations in poems?

Ariel Francisco [00:08:43] Yeah I'm comfortable with most things in poems. They're hard to do. I mean he's you know 'I've wasted my life' is probably one of the best ones. But it's difficult to pull off the kind of I don't know if it's a confidence or if it's an understanding of where it goes in the poem and and what that does to a reader to have it at the end is one thing right to have it in the middle and then might have the promise of like an answer but not give the answer you know it can be tricky. I don't know how many proclamations I've made in my own poems.

Kevin Young [00:09:14] We're going to see in a minute, aren't we? Well the other thing I was interested in and I was aware of this I was thinking about it when I was rereading as how influenced by surrealism but specifically Latin American surrealism and poets like Viejo who are I think really doing interesting things. How do you do you think of that at all or how does this poem speak to that for you?

Ariel Francisco [00:09:36] Yeah that's something that really interests me about James Wright especially in that time. That's when he was hanging out with Robert Bly and they were translating Viejo and I think Lorca and Neruda and also you know kind of all those guys in the sixties. And I I've I had read those Viejo, Lorca, Neruda before.

Kevin Young [00:09:56] Sure.

Ariel Francisco [00:09:56] I ecountered James Wright and Robert Bly, from my dad because he has you know all these books and he's very familiar with those guys. So it's really interesting to see that relationship and to not know. At the time that I read either that one had influence the other and then to kind of come to that knowledge after I'd be like Oh wow. And then go back and sort of you know put the two side by side or look at what he was translating during that time. It's really really interesting and his translations of Herman Hesse, too I think are really fantastic as well.

Kevin Young [00:10:30] Well I mean Lorca's all over this poem.

Ariel Francisco [00:10:32] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:10:32] Lorca is able I think to do that. You know those little ballads and these little songs that he's able to kind of conjure not just nature and he grew up in the country.

Ariel Francisco [00:10:43] Right.

Kevin Young [00:10:44] Well but in the country and yet he's able to control so much spiritual agony or national questions through these this nature and you can see that influence I think here in the delicacy. Let's call it.

Ariel Francisco [00:10:59] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:10:59] There's a real precision that Lorca has and a music.

Ariel Francisco [00:11:03] Yeah. Lorca's wild man. I mean his range like stylistically is the entire spectrum. He's got those you know those long kind of ballads but he also wrote like haiku and these very small lyric poems as well. Yeah. He's he's amazing and it's it's just crazy to me to see him in in James Wright's poems like when that when that comes up.

Kevin Young [00:11:25] He's the man. I mean I think Lorca is one of the greats. Partially because of the range you know and also because in a weird way you know he was a of course you know executed and murdered by the Franco regime and you realize that they read his poetry as political. All of those poems that could be read as a political —

Ariel Francisco [00:11:50] Right.

Kevin Young [00:11:51] In some way they saw as deeply political and also you know they were homophobic and.

Ariel Francisco [00:11:54] Right.

Kevin Young [00:11:54] All these questions. But I think that's really interesting in this political moment we're in now where how do you write a political poem and maybe you do it like Lorca does you know. And another way to put it is oh we should be paying attention that nature can be political. That writing about this song who you choose to write about and I think it's one of the political parts of Lorca is he's choosing to write about this small vulnerable folk or a cricket. Oh you know that's really powerful and subversive.

Ariel Francisco [00:12:22] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:12:23] And you know I think of that too and we turn to your poem which I want to talk about in one second but I wonder if how we make use and think about the political in this moment.

Ariel Francisco [00:12:35] Yeah people will say that you know the act alone of writing a poem in in such a world right especially in a world and a country that only really values material that you know like what are you doing that's making money for somebody else. If you're writing poetry in a world that only values that that's political right or you know I think a lot of people would agree with that. I think I would agree with that as well. But you know tackling specific subject matters can be really really difficult. And and that's something that I'm currently struggling with I see other people struggling with it as well like how do you address this. These things that are happening in a way that makes sense for the poem as opposed to like you have a big Twitter following you can address these things and a lot of people would see it maybe more than in a poem. So in you know what mediums does it make sense to talk about certain things.

Kevin Young [00:13:27] That's a great interesting question.

Ariel Francisco [00:13:29] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:13:30] Let's leave that hanging but I want to get back to it because in the March 18, 2019, issue of the magazine The New Yorker published your poem "Along the East River and in The Bronx Young Men Were Singing," which you'll read for us shortly. Is there anything you want to tell us about it before you do?

Ariel Francisco [00:13:46] The title is taken from Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman." Its actually kind of funny because a friend translated this poem into Spanish.

Kevin Young [00:13:55] Translated your poem.

Ariel Francisco [00:13:56] Yeah. And then he also translated the title into Spanish which ended up being different than Lorca's original.

Kevin Young [00:14:01] Right. Right. Exactly.

Ariel Francisco [00:14:03] So that was that was a little fun.

Kevin Young [00:14:04] It sounds great.

Ariel Francisco [00:14:05] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:14:05] Well I'd love to hear it. Here is Ariel Francisco reading his poem "Along the East River and in The Bronx Young Men Were Singing."

Ariel Francisco [00:14:15] "Along the East River and in the Bronx Young Men Were Singing" By Ariel Francisco

Kevin Young [00:15:28] That was "Along the East River and in The Bronx Young Men Were Singing," by Ariel Francisco. So this Lorca title I think has served you well. It has this tremendous energy I think. And I'm thinking of that era of Lorca in a way Poet in New York.

Ariel Francisco [00:15:46] Yes.

Kevin Young [00:15:46] So here's a poet seeing more than any one person can see but at the same time hearing so much that we overlook.

Ariel Francisco [00:15:55] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:15:56] I especially love the whisper of moss and mold moving which is ominous but also the rush of a popped fire hydrant the racket of eviction notices. There is this real clamor that is Whitman-esque on the one hand and also I think very much your own and tell me about that how that came about for you. This list, this litany.

Ariel Francisco [00:16:19] There's a there's a small collection called Ode to Walt Whitman. Yes that's a small collection of lurkers translations that my dad had got me for Christmas. I had read it before but I was rereading it again maybe like two years ago and that line really stood out to me because you don't often read about the Bronx in poems. You know it's there's a lot about New York City and now more about Brooklyn but it really caught my attention.

Kevin Young [00:16:42] There's no Brooklyn Bridge in this poem and that's what I was like. All right. High bridge, different bridges.

Ariel Francisco [00:16:47] Yeah. Yeah. And that's the the neighborhood where I'm from is is high bridge in the Bronx. So it's really cool that you know a poet like Lorca was writing about the Bronx and something about that line stood out to me in a kind of litany is not a mode that I ever write in. So just trying was I trying or maybe this line gave me access to this kind of other kind of lurking mode maybe because I'm very much more of like this James Wright poem like Here I am you know the I standing observing kind of thinking about things and here I I somehow totally removed. I mean there's still I but it's a more.

Kevin Young [00:17:24] It's an ear as well.

Ariel Francisco [00:17:25] Yeah. Yeah that's a really good way of putting it. Yeah it's much more of an ear and not really there. Like standing there you know my typically I would be on the bridge looking out thinking about things that that'll be my mode in here somehow this line of Lorca's gave me sort of maybe permission is the right word or it kind of opened my eyes and ears to this other mode that I could get into.

Kevin Young [00:17:49] Knowing it's a poem of of home. It also feels like a poem not of exile quite but of elsewhere. It's like a poem that's able to you know if it was on a drone dare I say he would be zooming way up.

Ariel Francisco [00:18:05] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:18:05] You know you're zooming incredibly up and then also into people's houses and you can see the moss. Yeah it's Whitman ask in that way. But I also think the subject matter to me is special in that it's speaking to New York it's thinking about New York but it also is saying like I can list the trains. That's part of the poetry or the lyricism right place.

Ariel Francisco [00:18:28] Yeah yeah. And knowing it that well or you know having that specificity I think is very important to you know. So you know you only named if you're writing about a place and you know I always had the one train, the two train.

Kevin Young [00:18:40] Yeah.

Ariel Francisco [00:18:41] And I'm talking about the Bronx. There's you know my cousins out there be like hey, hold on.

Kevin Young [00:18:43] Yeah, you messed up, like, what about my train?

Ariel Francisco [00:18:47] Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:18:47] Because I had this feeling when you said that to I was like the two. Yeah goes right to the Schomburg Center.

Ariel Francisco [00:18:52] Yeah. And and that's what I love about going back to James Wright that idea of place. Like sometimes you do recognize the place and that small detail is enough to completely pull you into the poem.

Kevin Young [00:19:03] Well, it's a different kind of pastoral I think here you know for him it feels like he's looking at it from the Rust Belt Midwest looking at nature.

Ariel Francisco [00:19:12] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:19:13] And here you're maybe you're doing the same thing. I mean you're you're you're looking at a sort of inside out but it's part of the poem you know the right. It's his other poems that you know that he has this other life right. And this I which in the poetic tradition it's very familiar to have someone say Oh isn't that beautiful out there. Yeah but they're writing from dirty London here you're sort of saying like no I'm you're not on the bridge right. But you're in a place. Yeah. Of the place. And then from there you go out and that ending is just tremendous east bound into eternity even. I mean three E's that's not easy. And as Morning D stars the sky and I think that verb is really tremendous because of course sometimes in the city it feels D start already but there is something there that you are noting this change. Yeah undoing let's call it.

Ariel Francisco [00:20:06] Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's something I picked up I can't remember the poem off the top but D stars it's something I picked up from Paul Salon whose.

Kevin Young [00:20:14] You don't have to tell all your secrets.

Ariel Francisco [00:20:14] No, but he's great at like –.

Kevin Young [00:20:18] Yeah.

Ariel Francisco [00:20:18] He puts words together like no one else I think.

Kevin Young [00:20:20] But this D starring isn't anyone else's now.

Ariel Francisco [00:20:23] Right. Yeah. You can't say anything about.

Kevin Young [00:20:26] No it's yours now you've made it happen. That's so powerful. I wonder about translation. Yeah and how translation plays into your work as a whole but also specifically here because you mentioned this great effect of translating something back into its native language something I actually ended up doing when there was these Langston Hughes poems that were only in Uzbek and I ended up translating them from a crib back into English and then I found one of the poems later because they had lost and I was like what I was like I got pretty close. You know it's a strange thing to imitate someone you love but you're coming from a different place you translate from the Spanish. Is that right.

Ariel Francisco [00:21:10] Yeah. Spanish to English.

Kevin Young [00:21:11] Yeah. And how does that change your work and is there some of that in this poem.

Ariel Francisco [00:21:16] There might be a little bit of it in this poem coming from Lorca too again that kind of repetition. And it's it's a different kind of lyricism that it brings to me I think as opposed to like just English like writing in relation to something in Spanish I'm not even translating but like having a Spanish poem or Spanish poet in my head as I'm doing it guess gives a different kind of lyricism which again is why I think this poem took the shape that it did which you know is very much different.

Kevin Young [00:21:46] So do you feel like the Spanish lyricism as you put it is that lurking behind this poem.

Ariel Francisco [00:21:52] I think so. I hope so. I hope so. Yeah at least for me. Because without that Lorca even if I had this line if maybe I know someone else's though I think the poem would have come differently because this kind of liniation this kind of repetition is not of my English. I don't know that makes sense even even like a very lyrical mode. I would never think to go there.

Kevin Young [00:22:17] But in Spanish it feels more natural.

Ariel Francisco [00:22:19] It does yeah yeah. And again even though you know I didn't write it in Spanish but there was some somehow there was Spanish in my brain as as I was writing this. If that makes sense.

Kevin Young [00:22:29] It does actually. And do you write in Spanish.

Ariel Francisco [00:22:34] Not too much just emails asking people for permission to translate their their relatives parents.

Kevin Young [00:22:42] And I mean did you ever think of writing in Spanish.

Ariel Francisco [00:22:45] Oh yeah yeah I really want to.

Kevin Young [00:22:48] It's a separate project for you.

Ariel Francisco [00:22:49] It is yeah. It would be. It would be very different. But I really want to try it. I can read in Spanish really really well now. It's gotten a lot better because the translation but for example I still have trouble translating from English to Spanish so there are like some technical things I was always I spoke it well enough to get by in high school and college you know for an easy A, I never had to pay attention. So there are a lot of technical things that I'm missing. If I were to try to write it but I definitely that's something that I really want to do.

Kevin Young [00:23:18] Yeah yeah well I think you speak to how translation sometimes is a one way street for us. You know we try to run translations when we can and I think it's a very important part of the tradition. Yeah I know and certainly as we were talking about it change writes poetry in those deep image poets of the sixties that changed their work.

Ariel Francisco [00:23:38] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:23:39] And you know I think there's a recent effort you see where people are trying to think about translation. How do you know how much poorer we've been for abandoning it as culturally speaking.

Ariel Francisco [00:23:50] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:23:50] And you know what an interesting moment it is to to talk about these different languages we all hear and maybe they don't all have but but can learn from.

Ariel Francisco [00:24:02] Yeah yeah I think it's I think it's vastly important. I mean I've been to the last few months I've been reading poetry almost only in Spanish so not even in translation but kind of finding books that don't exist in English. More part of it to look for more things to try and translate into English but also just to have that in my brain more often than just kind of comprehend things in Spanish and see if that. I don't think it will oppose the English in my brain. I keep talking about my brain is there more than one right? But they mixed together and create some kind of new brain. And I've been trying to learn German to which.

Kevin Young [00:24:41] Those are the two languages I've been translated into Spanish and German.

Ariel Francisco [00:24:44] Oh wow.

Kevin Young [00:24:45] And the reason I knew that the German was working is I traveled in Germany with the translator and he would read we would trade off who would read first and he read this one of my poems and people laughed at the right place. But it was amazing to see that you know. And this kind of I don't want to say it's a lost art because it's still an art. I'm interested in that idea of translating not just from language to language but from mode to mode.

Ariel Francisco [00:25:13] Right. Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:25:14] And I think that's what happens in your poem. There is this you know before it gets dark to get your ass inside there's these are different registers. And I think I wouldn't like one without the other in the poem. The poem is invested in all of you know because it's so ecstatic and embracing. Yeah I think it's invested in these different tones as after after all said you know they were singing they weren't simply speaking or talking you know this you know in song is one of those things that almost doesn't need translation We dance to and listen to different musics all the time. Yeah. Tell me about what's next for you and what you're working on.

Ariel Francisco [00:25:55] I'm working on a couple of translation projects. I'm working a lot of things my second book is set to come out in April from Burro Press.

Kevin Young [00:26:05] What's it called?

Ariel Francisco [00:26:06] It's called "A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship." So it's a big Florida book about growing up there how much I hate it in a hyperbolic kind of way. And also how it's sinking and no one seems to be doing anything about it.

Kevin Young [00:26:20] So you were from the Bronx who grew up in Florida.

Ariel Francisco [00:26:22] Yeah I moved to Florida when I was small I lived in Orlando Until I was eleven and then I moved to Miami and lived there from 2001 until last year. Yeah thats how I felt growing up in Florida.

Kevin Young [00:26:36] So we have a Bronx poem but you have Florida poems now.

Ariel Francisco [00:26:40] Yeah yeah. A lot of Florida poems not quite as celebrated but it's got a weird kind of love to it.

Kevin Young [00:26:48] Yeah sure.

Ariel Francisco [00:26:49] I described it to someone recently as you know when a teenager yells at their stepfather you know my real dad that's that's how I feel about Florida and I feel like that's the energy of that book. It's not totally sincere but in that moment it's.

Kevin Young [00:27:03] Sure yeah. It's passionate.

Ariel Francisco [00:27:04] Yeah.

Kevin Young [00:27:05] Well I'm eager to read it. And then what are your translation products you mentioned.

Ariel Francisco [00:27:09] I'm translating this poem I'm going to butcher his name maybe but it's Jaques View Renault now who was born in Haiti but grew up in the Dominican Republic. So he wrote in Spanish and he was killed during the Civil War in '65. He was just 23 years old but he left behind, you know about a hundred plus pages of poems that are just like really really incredible. He writes a lot about, he makes reference to his homeland a lot. In those poems and he he never mentions really either country he's kind of trying to reconcile you know the the entirety of the island and the collection called poet of one island and it's just it's just really fascinating.

Kevin Young [00:27:49] And they're not translated yet.

Ariel Francisco [00:27:51] No, there's a couple. I think I've only found like three online. I've got the whole thing in English. If any publishers are.

Kevin Young [00:28:03] Yeah. I mean that sounds tremendous. Yeah. It's I have a few coming out and what is the what is the tone of it.

[00:28:10] It's very, it's very very sort of hopeful but with you know this kind of impending, sort of falling apart as you know there. There's very much. Again his writing of like trying to reconcile. But little by little you see his support of like the revolutionaries it grows stronger and stronger through the poems. And then after the poem ends he actually joins the fight and and is killed in the fight. And it's really you know there's there's a huge history of violence from the Dominican Republic against Haiti and it becomes really interesting to have this kind of Haitian born poet fighting for Dominican Independence. You know for a country who probably wouldn't have fought for him just the his whole story. But the poems as well it's it's all in there and it's really really fascinating and while we're I mean geez I look at his poems and poems I was writing when I was twenty three and it's like it's wild.

Kevin Young [00:29:04] Well I can't wait to read and see more and I love this description you have. I think you said hopeful but there's this impending I would almost call it doom and I feel that that's sort of coursing through your poem but also through poetry right now I see a lot of poems that are wrestling with our times and I'm looking forward to seeing more from you about it.

Ariel Francisco [00:29:24] Thank you.

Kevin Young [00:29:25] Ariel, thanks so much for talking with us.

Ariel Francisco [00:29:27] Thanks for having me.

Kevin Young [00:29:28] "Along the East River and in The Bronx Young Men Were Singing" by Ariel Francisco as well as James Wright's "By a Lake in Minnesota," can be found on New Yorker dot com. "Above The River" James Wright's Complete Poems was published in 1992. Ariel Francisco's new book "A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship" is forthcoming in 2020. Thanks so much.

Tag: You may subscribe to this podcast, the fiction podcast, the Writer’s Voice podcast, and the Politics and More podcast by searching for “The New Yorker” in your podcast app. You can hear more poetry read by the authors on newyorker.com and on the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is “The Corner” by Christian Scott Atunde Adjuah, courtesy of Stretch Music and Ropeadope. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Jill Du Boff with help from Hannah Aizenman.

"By a Lake in Minnesota" from The Branch Will Not Break © 1963 by James Wright. Published by Wesleyan University Press and reprinted with permission.