Naomi Shihab Nye and Danusha Laméris in Conversation

Spring is almost officially here. This week, poets Naomi Shihab Nye and Danusha Laméris reflect on the year that has passed—a year that has been so different and difficult to comprehend. Nye and Laméris remind us that poetry makes sense when things stop making sense—that poetry can take us over, under, or through difficulty.

Nye is the Poetry Foundation's Young People’s Poet Laureate, and one of the guest editors of the magazine's special issue dedicated to poems for young people. When we asked her who she wanted to speak with on the podcast, she said Danusha Laméris, the last person she really spent time with before the lockdown began. The two were essentially meeting for the first time, but they sound like “new-old friends.” They’ve spent a year getting to know each other from afar by exchanging letters, poems, and packages between San Antonio, Texas, and Santa Cruz, California.

You’ll hear poems from Nye and Laméris, including Nye’s poem in the current issue of Poetry, “Every day as a wide field, every page.”