When a Poet Chooses Someone Else’s Work
Julia Alvarez sat down with Kevin Young for The New Yorker’s poetry podcast to read and discuss a poem that isn’t hers – “The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill,” by Judy Page Heitzman. That choice alone carries weight. Poets don’t often step into the public role of advocate for another writer’s work without a reason that runs deeper than admiration, and what followed was a conversation that moved between two poems, two voices, and the particular ways memory gets shaped into language.
Alvarez also read her own poem, “Mami at Her Vanity,” making the episode a kind of double portrait – one work selected, one authored, both held up to the light in the same sitting. The pairing wasn’t incidental.
Heitzman’s Poem and What It Holds
Judy Page Heitzman’s “The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill” is a poem with an address – specific, located, rooted in a physical place that carries its own history before any speaker arrives in it. The knitting mill is already a fact. The schoolroom on its second floor is already a fact. The poem works in the space between those two facts and what it felt like to inhabit them. That kind of grounded specificity is exactly the type of writing Alvarez gravitates toward, where the abstract earns its place only after the concrete has done its work.
Bringing Heitzman’s poem onto the podcast extends something real: visibility for a writer who doesn’t occupy the same cultural real estate as Alvarez herself. The New Yorker’s poetry podcast reaches an audience that might not have encountered Heitzman otherwise, and Alvarez’s reading – her voice, her pacing, the interpretive decisions a poet makes when reading aloud – becomes its own kind of commentary before a single word of discussion begins.
Kevin Young’s role as the conversation’s anchor matters here. Young, as poetry editor at The New Yorker, brings his own reading of a poem into every exchange, and the back-and-forth he draws out of Alvarez around Heitzman’s work becomes a kind of triangulated reading – three perspectives, including the listener’s, working the same material from different angles.
Alvarez’s Own Poem in the Mix
“Mami at Her Vanity” pulls the episode toward something more autobiographical. A mother at a vanity is an image with enormous compression built into it – the ritual of appearance, the private self that becomes visible in a mirror, the act of watching someone who doesn’t know they’re being watched. Alvarez reading that poem in the same episode as Heitzman’s schoolroom creates a quiet structural argument: both poems are about spaces, and both are about the people those spaces shaped.
There’s a particular intimacy to hearing a poet read their own work aloud versus hearing it read silently. Breath and hesitation become part of the meaning. Alvarez’s decision about where to slow down in “Mami at Her Vanity” communicates something no printed version of the poem can fully encode.
Poetry Podcasts and the Problem of Attention
The New Yorker’s poetry podcast operates in a strange and specific cultural slot. It assumes listeners willing to sit with a poem for longer than the average digital interaction allows – long enough to hear it read once, discussed, and often read again. That assumption runs against almost everything else about how audio content gets consumed in 2024, and yet the format persists because the audience for it is real, even if it isn’t large.
What Alvarez and Young do in this episode reflects something about how poets actually talk to each other – less about declaring meaning and more about noticing. The conversation around Heitzman’s poem likely included the kind of observation that sounds almost too small until you sit with it: a word that shouldn’t work but does, a line break that changes everything about what comes before it. That’s the texture of serious poetry discussion, and it’s not something that translates easily to other formats.
Heitzman benefits from exactly this kind of platform. A poet can spend years building a body of work that remains essentially private – not because it lacks quality, but because the machinery of literary attention is unevenly distributed. Having Alvarez read your poem on a New Yorker podcast doesn’t resolve that unevenness, but it does create a moment of entry for readers who might follow the thread back to Heitzman’s other work.
The episode also raises something worth sitting with: why do poets choose the poems they choose when asked to advocate for another writer? The selection is never neutral. “The Schoolroom on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill” tells us something about what Alvarez values – place, childhood’s residue, the built environment as emotional architecture. That reading of Alvarez, through her selection of Heitzman, ends up being as revealing as the discussion of either poem on its own terms.
Alvarez’s “Mami at Her Vanity” ends the episode’s informal arc back in the domestic – the intimate interior space where a mother performs, unselfconsciously, the daily maintenance of self. Whether Heitzman’s schoolroom and that vanity mirror are meant to rhyme with each other is a question the episode leaves productively open.
