AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Kevin Young and Cindy Juyoung Ok on All the Things Poetry Does

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

Kevin Young: What the world couldn't say until someone saw it first. And now it's everywhere.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I'm Cindy Juyoung Ok, very excited to introduce the one and only Kevin Young. His poems take many forms from minstrel show to elegy, occasionals to film noir, even liner notes and biography. And their many revolutions as Young moves yonder across genre, his work has become unmistakable in his authoring or editing of over 20 books, most recently the poetry collection Stones, the nonfiction investigation Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News, and the children's book Emile and the Field. Kevin also directs the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and he's the poetry editor at the New Yorker. “My mouth a harp,/heart a harmonica,” opens Dear Darkness, his 2008 collection. Music is indeed both the inlet and the depth. Today we get to hear songs from the July/August 2023 issue of Poetry magazine. Kevin, thank you so much for being here.

Kevin Young: Thanks for having me.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Your newest poems and poetry are so focused on sight, on visual art, tourism's gaze, the physical directions of hope maybe. Many have noted your role in curating and defining art, and also the fact that your father was an eye doctor. I wonder how that interest in the visual through language led you to the world of art, or vice versa?

Kevin Young: Well, it's funny, I was just having this conversation yesterday when I was telling someone yet again, I'm a visual person, and they said, I mean, they're a visual person too. And they were like, oh, I thought poets would be, I don't know, more word based, which I think is actually a misnomer maybe, you know, poems are visual. The difference, I think, is that the sound and the sight of a poem are the same. You know, how it looks on the page should influence how it sounds. I studied with Denise Levertov, the terrific poet, and she would yell at you if you're a poem, if you didn't read, your line breaks or your poems sort of didn't conform to that. And she would always say, “the page is a score. “And that idea that the page is a sonic instrument really helps name a thing that I always thought but or instinctively came to. But she really helped give language for that to me or a language to me for that. And that kind of sense of sound is so important to a poem, but it's a visual sense, really. I don't, you know, since it's like the water I'm swimming in, it's hard for me to step back and say, oh, these are what these poems are about? I think I had written and read those poems a couple of times before I realized, oh yeah, I work in a museum. So, people will read these poems as like somehow, but they're like written before it was even a thought that I would be in this role. So, you know, that's a separate thing they really came from a few of them come from travels in Europe and confronting, you know, once you see Keats's death mask, I don't see how you can't think about all the things that that implies, both that people thought, you know, it was more common then, of course, to make a death mask, but also that he was so important at the moment. And then to be in the space where he died is really haunting. But also I think I hope it's a little life affirming, though. I think the poem is pretty much thinking about that yearning that he must have had dying, staring at the Spanish steps.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. And the yearning that you discussed. It's very spectacular in your poems, the beauty, but also the interest in spectacle. Right? Spectacular. Would you read for us “The Stair” and introduce it if you have anything you want us to know?

Kevin Young: Sure. Yeah. So these poems in poetry are from a sequence that's going to be at the end of my next book that riffs off Dante. This is from the start of what I guess you'd call the purgatory section. So, it's called “The Stair.”

(READS POEM)

        The heart, it hoards—
how I know this—

The small, strangled
        shining room Keats lost
his life in—and to—

beyond the window sunlight
        arranging itself
on the Spanish Steps

while the poet watches.
        Outside, snapshots
of the tourists

& teenagers tired
        of what they don’t
know yet. What will

become of us? Ash.
        Unasking. The death
mask made of Keats

no longer breathing—
        look at it
not look at us.

Beyond the window
        the stairs stretch heavenward
stranded, without

one ounce of shade.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow. The fact that it is from the purgatory section is called “The Stair.” This kind of interesting view about descent and ascent feels so alive in your reading of it, in the way it sort of leads us through and to language. “The Stair” also, there's a moment of the death and the mask, and then there's also unmasking.

Kevin Young: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And so then we also get this kind of unmasking putting those together.

Kevin Young: I like it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it's beautiful. It reminds me almost of... There's a theory about teaching very young children about art, about color, where instead of showing them a color wheel or making them define the colors and mixing them, students are placed in environments with, for example, orange things, and then they have red and they have yellow. And then, you know, over time they sort of figure out that red and yellow make orange. So, there's this kind of math-ness in your language that's also this art. Like what's around and what can be put together.

Kevin Young: Yeah, I mean, for me, it's a lot, it's music, of course. But again, thinking of the visual “ash” “unasking,” there's that kind of un-ashing in there. But also there's for me always that kind of visual, like death and Keats, they kind of look alike in a weird way. If you just stand back and stare at them. “Breathing,” you know, there's the “death” “breath” rhyme that I think is, you know, one avoids, but it's sort of visually there in the poem. You know, for me, the idea of looking, it's important to notice that the death mask isn't regarding us. You know, that's it's for the living. And it's an interesting tradition. And I lost some dear relatives in the past few weeks, one just two days ago. And so, you know, I'm thinking a lot about that way in which, you know, someone's gone and you can't sort of say all those things and you realize grief is about the things we have to reckon with as living folks, not necessarily what the dead are going through. But there's a lot of what thinking about that in these poems.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I'm so sorry to hear about the loss and especially in succession, that can be really difficult. I thought you were going to say a few years, but a few weeks is, of course. Yeah, it's a difficult time.

Kevin Young: Yeah, sorry.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: But this poem actually did remind me of the Book of Hours, which, of course, is about, it moves through your father's death and your son's birth, which I think were two years apart. And the heart of that book seems to me to be the heart. There's there are all these scenes about the heart of the parents, you know, the baby on the chest, the heart of the child's older sister, the heart of the sonogram, the relief. And then there's this decision as an only child of whether to donate the heart of the father upon his death. And it's very pivotal and beautiful kind of understanding of grief and how it works with everything else that is in life. I think that there's like sort of that purgatory that you're talking about, but certainly a grief that's held in that space that's in between maybe.

Kevin Young: In this poem you mean or in Book of Hours?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I guess in both. Maybe in both. But that...

Kevin Young: Well, there's a heart that starts this poem, “The Stair.”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Exactly. Yeah. There's that first couplet, "The heart, it hoards—/how I know this—" The H starts and then the T and the D phonetically are sort of flip flops, flip sides of the same coin. They're both stop consonants, I think it's called. The D letting less air out. So, literally in moving from “heart” to “hoard,” the mouth closes up, “it hoards” and so the heart moves itself, hoards itself and returns us more to the vowel of the heart, the how, and we get back to that beat. But there seems to be this connection about those periods of grief and being in the beginning stages of grief.

Kevin Young: I think for me there's also, you know, those poems in Book of Hours, which I appreciate you mentioning. They were poems I both wrote some of them at the time of my father's dying, but some of them but I waited like ten years to publish them on purpose, you know, and I wanted them to be sort of the moment, but also of these kind of later moments. There's a reflectiveness, I hope, in them, but they are meant to feel and I don't know how else to write about it, sort of immediate, you know, trying to write about the actual things that happen as opposed to the feelings about what happened. And I really tried in Book of Hours to use the events to find the metaphor within them. I think it was a way of kind of making meaning out of, you know, having to empty a pool or having to empty his house or taking his stuff to Goodwill. You know, it seemed like that was the metaphor not to like import things, which I think is great, too. I think this poem does more of that. And, you know, I think you think when you're writing, especially when you're writing about the blues, you're like, oh, you know the blues. I got my blues covered, you know, that was it. And then they come back for you, you know, And you have to find, for me at least, I have to find different ways. So, the blues are always waiting in a good way as a form to kind of name grief in order to get past it, name pain. In a weird way that sort of first couplet because, you know, rereading Dante, you realize he often has these kind of ending couplets, these ending kind of moments because you think of the terza rima, but you don't always think about sort of the endings or in La Vida Nuova the, you know, sonnets amidst the prose. And so for me to start with, the couplet was kind of different because it wasn't a lesson or a thing you gleaned. It was more like something, when you're starting out as a writer, you would cut out. You're like, oh, that's not part of the poem. And, and I think that's why it works better as a sequence than just one poem. It's like, it's a kind of fragment, but also not a fragment.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right, it's sort of an invitation.

Kevin Young: Oh, I like that. I'm going to start using that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Definitely. I'm curious also because you mentioned the Book of Hours. So you published the book ten years after your father's death, but now you're, I think almost ten years out, maybe next year you'll be ten years out. So, how do you think or read back on that work differently now?

Kevin Young: I mean, the kid that was sort of being born in that book is now going to be 17. So you think as much about that, like, oh my God, he's as tall as me. I'm not going to admit that he's taller. I mean, that's much more what I think about, you know, is life. But looking back on it, there were a lot of things that I learned. You know, there were a lot of things that you kind of write a book you don't always think about. I remember I was doing a radio thing and it was literally only when I'd probably, you know, it was probably a year after I was saying Book of Hours. And I kept saying, oh, I have to spell it out because it sounds like, O-U-R-S, like.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: O-U-R-S!

Kevin Young: And that was really interesting because the ours was obviously my family, but also sort of all of ours. And I don't know, I always think back on how you can write these deeply personal things and they have this resonance and obviously that's an obvious thing looking back. But when you're in the midst of it, especially when you're writing about birth, which I was very conscious about, that you it's sort of this transformative thing, and especially not having given the actual birth, you know, just having been coaching and, you know, hoping and being there, you feel like you have to write about it doesn't mean you have to publish it and doesn't mean it's good. And so I'm heartened that those poems seem to have a life still and try to capture both the pain and the pleasure and that sort of full circle of life, which is how it felt for me.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: In the same way that the poems that you've written for weddings are now read at other weddings. The poems that you've written in the Book of Hours are now read for people who are in that space or who are moving through that space. As you mentioned in the anthology, you edited The Art of Losing about poems about grief. A lot of people turn to poetry in those periods. It's something that can comfort or expand or transform.

Kevin Young: Well, because you're not alone for a moment, you know. And I think it's poetry and music. Those are the things we turn to. You know, art more broadly. But I'm always, you know, when people are like, “What does poetry do? It does nothing.” It's like, “You're nuts.” Like, what are you talking about? Like, how are you saying that? You know, like, it does the most important things, like it's waiting for you and it's not insisting. There's something about that that we don't have much of, it feels like I feel like that's eroding the place that culture lives but isn't, you know, forced on you or calculated or there's a, you know, paid ad lurking beneath. And poems are so much about utterance and so much about a moment. And I think that grief is made up of these moments that you can't quite name always. Maybe a poem names it, maybe a poem describes it. But there are things in the anthology I did The Art of Losing, which I did after Dear Darkness but before Book of Hours that really helped me, and some of them I had carried with me before, and then some I found. And you know, how do you... There aren't movies about some of that, you know, there aren't, there isn't like a short film you play and then you feel like differently in that moment. But there is a poem about, you know, losing a child, you know, there are, you know, I'm not saying there aren't artworks about it, but I'm saying there's something about that moment capturing the feeling married to language, which is, in my experience, the exact thing you lose. You lose the words to describe how you feel about a person. We send flowers, we read poems, we listen to music, we sing it. Those are the things to me that bring us back to the earth and to the body and to like our shared selves.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I'm curious about your first book, Most Way Home, which also deals with grief and family or sometimes an imagined grief and a particular kind of Louisiana poetics. And then “home” has come to me in so many things in your work. But in your most recent book, Stones, we have a return to that home, those various griefs where your ancestors are buried, which is also, of course, where your son's ancestors are buried, who's young and alongside you in those pages, it feels almost like to go from Louisiana to Louisiana through these books. It's like you're going from home base in a baseball diamond and then returning to the final base. You're home again.

Kevin Young: I love that. A field, a baseball.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, you get back to home base, but now you're a bit dirtier. You're, you know, your uniform is... But how has that movement in terms of Louisiana, in terms of home shifted you whether it's as this kind of player in the game or even just as a writer?

Kevin Young: I mean Louisiana, you know, shaped my first book very much and shaped me. I think, when I was writing those poems or maybe like right when I was starting, I thought everyone had that sort of experience, like the place where you went that you called home, that wasn't where you lived, you know, that's sort of was my experience of growing up and moving around a lot. My parents left, but a lot of my relatives, if not all, are still in these two patches of land in Louisiana, which is really beautiful. I was just there a couple of months ago and I was there with my son, you know, who, as you said in Stones, is young. And I think, you know, poets get too logical sometimes. We're never accused of that but sometimes you're like, well, he was older in this book, like Brown, the book before he was sort of becoming a teenager. And I was like, well, how will they ever understand that he's two in this, you know, of course no one reads poems that way. So, writing about him as a young, you know, an infant who's learning to speak, a toddler, I should say, there was something about that, too, about like his coming to language when I was sort of returning to these stones, these gravestones, but also the kind of stone paths of these dirt roads and places that I knew so well. And for me, he's kind of a witness in these different ways. Louisiana was always there for me. And I think I thought that everyone had this experience of home being this distant place in a way. But I realized more as I was finishing that first book, Most Way Home, that actually that was more like an African American experience and thinking about displacement and migration. And that was all tied up in that book for me. The first cover for that book has a painting by William H. Johnson called like Breakdown with Flat Tire [sic] where a family is fixing this flat tire by the road. They're clearly getting out of didge, you know. And so there was something about that, the breakdown, the flat tire, the escape. The also, is they escape thwarted or is it really escape, all that was in, sort of, that book. But it was also a book of memory, but just not my memories and thinking about my family's sort of memory, collective memory about losing land and losing faith and different things. And in Stones, it's more my memory.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. I think that Lucille Clifton choosing it is also very special for the National Poetry Series because there's this way in which that is also a part of the memory, this sort of tradition, the verbal kind of sense. Colson Whitehead, who I think you've been friends with for a long time, I think there are even sequences dedicated to him, talked about in an interview, a poster above his desk for many years that was about you and maybe related to this book. Could you tell us a little about that?

Kevin Young: Which poster? I'm sorry.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: He mentioned there was a poster that was an ad that you had blown up. It was a runaway slave.

Kevin Young: Oh, yes.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes. And that he had it for a long time, right above his desk.

Kevin Young: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I did a, the first book—sorry—the first poem in my first book is called “Reward” and it's a runaway slave ad and, of an ancestor of sorts, one Elizabeth Young in that case. And so I was trying to, you know, and then I weirdly, not weirdly, then before it was a book, before anything, I had written it when I was in college. And I did letter press printing, shout out to the Bow and Arrow Press, which was in my dorm, you know, And I just heard they might be getting rid of the press, which upsets me to no end. But that press is where I learned not just to print, but to write in a way because let me tell you, settin’ type of stuff you write that's overly windy and like goes on and on. You're like, no, actually I'm cutting that word.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You realize.

Kevin Young: It's physical, the words, you know. And they're also lead, you know, you're like, they could kill you. They're heavy, but soft, you know. I mean, it's all the metaphors that come to mind. But I printed that poem. That was one of the first things I printed as a kind of broadside. And I made like, I don't know, six or seven copies of it. And Col had one.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Was that when you were in college still?

Kevin Young: Yeah, I wrote most of Most Way Home when I was in school, actually.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You've talked about a course you took in college with Lucie Brock-Broido.

Kevin Young: Yeah, I took a few courses with Lucie. I was her first, in her first year was my first year. So that was a kind of.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So you were a pair?

Kevin Young: We kind of grew up in that weird way, and her book had just come out. I realized now, like at the time, she always had a book, you know, it was out. But I realized her book, A Hunger, had just come out and she was in this moment of becoming herself, though she always was. She was quite, if you knew Lucie, she was always you know, “I only write in the autumn,” you know, I don't think she ever said the word “fall.” And, but she was really great as a teacher, you know, scrawling over your work. And really, I mean, she took it as her own.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And she, in the class, she taught about persona poems or requiring you to write persona poems. Did Most Way Home develop through or with that? You went on to publish so many books that moved through personas and also to write about persona and modernism and the history of Black persona. Do you remember any of the personas you were writing in that class? Was there any, like Jack Johnson or Detective Jones at that time?

Kevin Young: Well, I'll tell you a secret only cause you're so nice, which is that actually, I don't think I wrote any of those poems. I wrote, like, the Amistad poems in that class. So, the poems that became Ardency 20 years later, I started because I stumbled across, I think, it's Blassingame’s book, Slave Testimony, which I mentioned in the notes of that book. And there was these letters from the Amistads who mutinied on the slave ship and took it over and then had that crazy journey steering toward what they knew to be the rising sun and the East –  Africa. And at night, the slavers, who were navigators, would reroute them. And so these enslaved people who were, you know, mostly Mende, had this incredible journey. But also then, you know, they get found off the you know, they started outside Havana and here they are on Long Island. I mean, that's where they were caught. They were thrown in jail. I mean, the mind starts to reel, you know, and that case is so central. And now I think people know more about it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think the book helped people know more about it.

Kevin Young: Well, thanks. But for me, like, that was just like, what? No one came to my house and told me about this, you know. I had no idea about it. It was totally left out of any curriculum.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Of course.

Kevin Young: Even in college. So, and their voice was really what struck me is that they were so clearly to me thinking of masks, writing these poems, well, sorry, writing these letters, which, you know, seemed to be poems, or to have something poetic about them cause they were trying to navigate this new language, this new land, this new religion, cause they were being proselytized and converted at the same time they were being taught English, which seemed largely symbolic. And, you know, by writing to and daring to write to the president, to have, you know, the former president, John Quincy Adams, represent them all the way to the Supreme Court, just a powerful case. But I was just really struck by the language. And so those persona, these letters were a real thing. And I had written another letter, a persona letter that once upon a time was in an earlier draft of what became my first book, I think, in her first class. And it was really navigating slavery. And I'm sure there was something where I was writing these poems about to this white figure that was also at play. And she, I think, understood that. And we would kind of, to be honest, like butt heads over those poems sometimes, because I think they were so wild in a way for me at least. And it was so freeing to write in this totally different voice, which she was so encouraging of. But they didn't, they weren't, they were sometimes brutal in their lack of, you know, florid language or whatever. They were spare sometimes.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And some of them are about English learning too. There are sections of Ardency that have these words put aside to help people learn, but those words are chosen so carefully. Those words give us an understanding of what was valued, what needed names.

Kevin Young: Sure. I think that's the last section which... So, what happened is I wrote the middle section first. So I wrote these letters and then these speech acts that were kind of, the speech acts were kind of pared to the letters. And those I did, I think, write at the time. But I knew at the time that I couldn't write this Cinque section, you know, even though Cinque was fairly young, he's probably in his early 20s. I just wasn't able to do it yet. And that was one of the wisest things I did, is set those aside and, you know, I worked on other parts and it's a longer story than we have time for cause if you work on something for 20 years, what I found later is the hardest thing was letting go of it, you know, was really being like, you know, I thought I would, you know, die and they'd find it in a drawer, you know. And so to like, show it and let air into it was tough, even though I had, you know, shown them to other readers. But it was so long ago, you realize no one remembers your poems from college or that you don't publish. And I'm the guy who kept everything. Like I kept every other person's workshop poems, you know. So, they're somewhere.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, maybe some of your friends’ poems that you could look back on.

Kevin Young: Yeah. But, you know, Lucie was so instrumental and freeing in terms of, you know, the poem isn't... And I think at the time the poem was kind of post-confessional, really. And she was like, your poem can be super weird. And she was writing The Master Letters, which are, of course, great. And here are these other letters that I was trying to write.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Were the racial dynamics of workshop very different from what you sense now? Was there much understanding and discussion about power dynamics in that way?

Kevin Young: I don't know what workshops are like now.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kevin Young: You know, I don't know, you know. I don't think I'm a good example of that because we actually had a fairly diverse workshop. It was kind of, there were poets there who I think are doing really interesting work still, some stopped writing, but there was a real range of people and people of color and gay folks and everything, you know, in those classes. So the idea that it was one way I think is not true, A, and B, also, you know, I became part of the Darkroom around then, and so I had all-Black settings and sort of always did. We founded a magazine that Col was the fiction editor of. So, I never thought of it in those terms. And I think it's important because I think people think the battle days were then and things were like a certain way and now they're great. That's just a human tendency. And I think actually things are complicated and some, you know, if you ever hear Sonia Sanchez talk about her experience, like in formal poetry classes, you realize how much she carried with that. And she thinks about it a lot now. And she made her own forms, blues haiku, etc., because they didn't suit her. I took class with Levertov and realized that the tools she had to think about the sonic quality of verse, I just said, “Oh, my sonic quality is..”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Different.

Kevin Young: Necessarily different. But it was, I wouldn't have gotten there perhaps if she hadn't helped me think about it, or she helped me name a thing. So I'm, you know, of the mind you take what you get and a good teacher lets you become you. There are teachers who try to make you like them, you know. You have to sometimes resist that along the way. The other thing I would say is, I took Seamus Heaney at the time and he was such a great example of, you know, understatement, both in his work, but also just as a teacher. He'd be like, “Oh, maybe, you know, tuck that in, oh, I don't know. “And you'd be like, Oh my God, that's the best advice I've ever heard in my entire life. I use it all the time. I would constantly tell my students, “Tuck it in,” you know, what are you doing, you know. And so he also then, later I realized had this great example of how do you write about the country that you come from? And I don't, I meant that more like the rural land. But I think he meant both and he helped me understand both.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Speaking of, you know, this idea of the country, Ardency is an example of a book that is so much about foundational US history that of course, can sometimes be elided. You once wrote asking, “is there something especially American about the hoax?” And I wondered if there's something uniquely American also about your writing, about the way that you have uniquely posited over the course of many books, how a country has especially used and abused Blackness as a fulcrum, you know, revealing, including in the hoax book, The history of the hoax is incredibly racialized from the very beginning. What is it meant to you to write in a US context? Do you wanna talk a little bit about any recognition in terms of the American poetics?

Kevin Young: Yeah, you know, I think for me. Um. I think I have to look backwards at it because for me, a book like African American Poetry, which is my most recent anthology I did, was so important because it looks back on these 250 years of Black poetry, it precedes the nation.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kevin Young: And so we have to understand the nation. I think, you have to understand that poetry, but even more to understand poetry, you have to understand this poetry. And I think that wasn't something that when I was growing up, people necessarily knew I came to it through the other anthologies that cleared that way. I mean, whether it's you know, Black Fire or Black Poetry from the Black Poets USA that Langston Hughes did, or The New Negro, which I came to much later. Or you know, the paperbacks my parents had that had Langston Hughes's late poems, The Panther & the Lash. You know, all these kind of ways that Black Arts transformed publishing and the Harlem Renaissance before it. But you know, I'm well aware we're in the 250th anniversary of Phillis Wheatley's book you know, and her publication in 1773, which I have, kickoff that. So it's part of the fabric. When I was writing, if we flash back to The Grey Album you know, that was a book where I started off writing as a, it was prose nonfiction about trying to understand the ways that you know, Blackness was central to Americanness, trying to name it. But that got solved pretty quick.
(LAUGHS) You know, (LAUGHS) I didn't have to prove that. After a while I was like oh, yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It is.

Kevin Young: And so (LAUGHS) then I really was, became interested in what I think the subtitle On the Blackness of Blackness suggests, which is you know, what is Black about Blackness? What makes it unique? How does it work? And that's when I really started thinking about improvisation and what I call storying. And these resources that I saw everywhere from poetry to music and how I could sort of name them so that others saw them the way I saw them. But you know, I think there's been a lot of change in the poetry world that I think you know, people now can hear that, but maybe when I said that people didn't talk about it, I was talking about particular people and you know, I always had some sense of that, I think other Black poets did. But I think now it's something that we can talk about on a podcast and not have to prove. And I think that's the real sea change.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, so that book, the 2012 book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness is so many things because it's literary and cultural criticism. It's a history. It presents a sort of organizing theory of all these different kinds of music and Black music. And I would argue even you know, it's, could be read as poetry and it's sort of a fractal study. So I'm curious about what that process is like when you're researching. Is it different when you're writing what some would call nonfiction versus poetry? Is there a different way that you're following your impulses and interests?

Kevin Young: Yeah, I mean, a poem you know, you probably should read, but you don't have to read and (LAUGHS) and a nonfiction book you have to read. (LAUGHS) I don't know for me, that's a book too, where I was figuring out how to write a book of nonfiction, which is different than writing an essay, which I always did. And I love poets’ essays, and I love poets’ novels. You know, they're, I think, always really interesting. Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks is one of my favorite books. But you know, it was a way to kind of figure that out. And some of it I had written, some of it I had thought about forever, but to turn into a book is a different beast. And I learned a lot in that book. And then when I was writing Bunk, it took me a long time to admit it was a history. I mean, it probably took me, I think it took like six years to write it probably took me three or four (LAUGHS) and I was like writing it as a history, but inside out, like the end was in the middle. And it was when I finally realized that was a history.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh.

Kevin Young: And so I'm working on a nonfiction book now, which I won't get into, but I started out being like oh, it's a history. You know, that really helped me. So now I'm really interested in stories and the way that stories kind of illuminate, and I don't, sure The Grey Album is interested in that. I think The Grey Album is interested in the kind of music of history and what I call the history of music, that kind of doubleness of that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And storying in a different way.

Kevin Young: Yeah. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: But yeah, you saved yourself three years, I guess, with this new book.

Kevin Young: (LAUGHS) Yeah. I mean, I had written it, but like the structure part was galling me, and then one of my friends read it and he was like, “Yeah, it gets really interesting on page 250 when you start talking about P. T. Barnum.” I was like, “Oh, right.” You know?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. The end was the beginning.

Kevin Young: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So, has working with Dante's work helped you with structuring? When you're thinking about these new poems, is it more helpful to have that purgatory section and to know that there are these different realms?

Kevin Young: Yeah, I think it helped a lot. You know, I think the poems were in different states. And then the Museum of Modern Art was doing a show about Rauschenberg. And they asked me to write you know, this response to Rauschenberg who wrote, did these drawings based on, and artworks based on the Inferno. And it just so happened to be the translation that I grew up with the Ciardi translation. So I was like eager to do it. And then I did it with Robin Coste Lewis, which was such a pleasure to split up hell with Robin. (LAUGHS) And you know, also Dante 'cause she be good you know, she's like, you're like, oh my God, why did I agree to, you know? And she had such a different method, but there was a kind of beauty I think we ended up both separately aiming for. And I never told her or anyone or Leah who asked me from MoMA. I just you know, started, kept going. And I think that structure really helped me because you're not writing endless poems. We're all Dante in a way, writing in the West. So how do you kind of make it your own? And Rauschenberg was one example for me, but a lot of the writers I love, whether it's you know, Baraka's System of Dante's Hell or other people encounter Dante directly.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And to encounter it directly is in a way, a way to undo what is unconscious about it. Like you mentioned you know, it's impossible not to be influenced.

Kevin Young: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So to do it directly makes it more, maybe gives the writer more agency and to do it as a collaboration is so interesting. I didn't realize that it came from that work with Robin Coste Lewis as well. But speaking of twos, maybe we could hear this very gorgeous poem called “Diptych,” which for those unfamiliar often refers to a painting and to literally or figuratively hinging or adjacent pieces. Kevin, maybe you have a better definition.

Kevin Young: (LAUGHS) It's just a two-part painting, and you know, sometimes it's two panels next to each other.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. And is there anything else you want us to know about the poem?

Kevin Young: No.

(READS POEM)

NIGHT WATCH

You can fall in love
in a museum, but only

with the art
or its silence—or the stranger

you don’t mean to follow
suffering past the Old Masters

& the unnamed
servants. Rembrandt’s face

half in shadow—
you can fall for what

isn’t there already, or
with the 13th century—the swan

raising up, roosters hung
upside down to die on a cross—

Even the tourists gathered
round the docent, the same

jokes & half-truths,
loom beautiful—

the children crying hurried
out of sight. Forget

The Night Watch, the crowds,
instead follow the quiet

to the portraits of light
entering a room. These walls,

few windows, hold
the world—what the world

couldn’t say till someone
saw it first—and now

it’s everywhere. The braids
    of that woman’s hair.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH FELT HAT

One should never be in love

when in a museum—
    better to be alone, if not
utterly, then practically—

tired of feet, & routine,
    forge ahead beyond
the bounds of audio-tours

& family, isolate, avoid
    this couple oblivious
to it all, the captions & arrows,

kissing like no tomorrow
    beside Van Gogh’s sunflowers—
bruised, chartreuse, brilliant

& wilting for years, yet never
    managing to. Skip
holding hands & Gauguin’s

portrait of Van Gogh
    painting what he saw. The crows
gather like clouds, black—

or the crowds—that the couple
    doesn’t care about—
numb to all else. Best

    believe in the world
more than yourself.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I love, again these two beginnings. You can fall in love in a museum versus one should never be in love in a museum. And how you read it too, the kind of improvy vibe in a museum. (KEVIN YOUNG LAUGHS) It's you know, isn't a diptych always two sides of the same canvas, right? Like this kind of negation, the refusal, questioning of the other half. And that's what makes it whole. That's what makes it one work.

Kevin Young: Sure.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And it's related to how we see this shadow and light comes up. Are there other diptychs in your life that might relate to or reflect on this poem, ones you've seen or ones you've, things you think of as diptychs?

Kevin Young: That's a great question. I mean, I think doubleness floats through different...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Twin tongue.

Kevin Young: (LAUGHS) But you know, these poems are interesting in how you can kind of posit a thing that might be true for the moment, but maybe later you're like oh, actually. But also about you know, you couldn't name this light until the art described it. And how seeing that you can't unsee it. And I love that about art or poetry or things that move us as, as they transform us. History can do that. And then the way that, for me, the braids of that woman's hair are part of that sophistication and complication and rendering the world. I think you used the word fractal earlier in a way that is kind of also like that every little part of it is a piece of the whole, but also contains the whole. You know, in some ways I'm also just interested in that relationship of what it means to be in a space with other people and negotiate it, which I think has changed in a weird ways. Like this poem, I think started before COVID, but it's such a funny thing now. I think people are both unaware you know, they're craving these connections, but also they behave so badly in public. You know, like blaring music, (LAUGHS) like you know, the phones. I mean, it's just like a strange time in a way. And I think that this impulse exists always to forge ahead beyond the audio tours and family to be alone. And there's something about that aloneness, that aloneness in public, and that's like the poet's dream or (LAUGHS) perfect medium.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's hard now because everyone's always videotaping. (LAUGHS) So there's this always sense you know, the surveillance is.

Kevin Young: Yeah. I think the videotaping bothers me less than like, I'm gonna play two seconds of a TikTok out loud, and then I'm gonna play another two seconds. And then you can't like, escape that. You have to have headphones to be silent. I mean, that's strange you know?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, I actually have these construction headphones that I use, especially like on planes, (KEVIN YOUNG LAUGHS) they're really like, they don't...

Kevin Young: Really!

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Nothing comes out of them. They're just for people who do construction work because...

Kevin Young: Yeah. Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Noise-cancelling headphones you know, ultimately only cancel certain kind of noises.

Kevin Young: Wow!

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) Silence is so important.

Kevin Young: (LAUGHS) You're hardcore. I thought I was hardcore, but you're, I gotta take lessons from you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kevin Young: I think I was also interested in the ways that that end, I think they end in similar places in a weird way. Those parts of the diptych, like. Ending in the world as opposed to with just you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And naming it.

Kevin Young: And even being in love, I think does that you know, you have to give over to some other thing. And the couple, I think they're almost too... (LAUGHS) They're almost too in love or something. They're too caught up in themselves and they don't...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. (LAUGHS)

Kevin Young: They miss Van Gogh who's telling you something really urgent.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kevin Young: Noticed you know, this. And the reason you know, those sunflowers are so wild. And you know, grew up in Kansas, there's that sort of sunflower state and this kind of notion of them as being there. But to see this kind of always wilting, never quite, is beautiful you know, and you're missing that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The world fades (KEVIN LAUGHS) because of this intensity. But I think also the line you just said, you couldn't name this light until the art described it. And that's such a great way to think about how we write about art. You know, you have that line, I think, in Brown, “language feeds on need.” And that's sort of true about this, what you're talking about here, what language is available, and what language is made to describe something. You referenced the painting The Night Watch, which is Rembrandt's painting. But his original title was very long, very particular, “Militia company of dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and the command of this captain,” and the later, the nickname became its name. And of course, you love nicknames I know. (KEVIN YOUNG LAUGHS) But it was like this very common thing. No one calls it anything else besides “The Night Watch.” And it's this title of the first half of the diptych. So you have all these like titles that are very flexible and multivalent. And I'm curious if you've had these experiences with titles where titles change or you kind of have your own versions. Anything that comes up for you about titling your work, your other art objects?

Kevin Young: Yeah. I mean, looking back, it feels like every other book, the title was always the title, and then the other books (INAUDIBLE) struggle and struggle, and I love titles. I think they're so important. But it was, for instance, only when the book got, it had some other terrible name, which I won't. I'll pretend I don't remember, but...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Keep it, keep it quiet.

Kevin Young: But when I realized it was called The Grey Album and I knew Danger Mouse, who did The Gray Album, a little bit in Athens, changed the book, you know, because in one phrase it says the, all the stuff that is part of the whole book about race and mixing and transforming and the centrality of Blackness. I think Bunk was the same, but I feel like it happened early enough that, like, it didn't have this other kind of questioning life. But for instance, Jelly Roll was always called Jelly Roll: A Blues. There was never a moment when it wasn't called that. And this next book, which because you're nice, I'll tell you, is called Night Watch is, you know, I think I cast around with a few different titles actually. And then when it became that, you know, I'm glad you guys ran the title poem.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, that's beautiful. I also like that it's called Night Watch and not “The Night Watch” because there's this kind of riffing on it, which I think happens a lot with poetry.

Kevin Young: Yeah, well, and interestingly, earlier we were talking about Book of Hours, which doesn't have a “the” in it, but everyone calls it The Book of Hours. Which I actually...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Oh, I think I did too.

Kevin Young: I love that. That is amazing. It's to me like, you know, it becomes, like there's a few Book of Hours. So you know, I like that it's not a.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kevin Young: It's better that, like, and I think that for me, it's like I would probably call it now the Book of Hours, lowercase “the,” you know, like, that it feels like that to me now because, but I purposely had it just sort of shorn of the. And Night Watch is similar.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, there's a line from Dear Darkness: “The small book of hours.” And then, of course, it becomes Book of Hours, and Stones, of course, comes up. Like there are all these kind of recursions and repetitions. And I wondered.

Kevin Young: I know I can't get away from it. Can you help me?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, but they're like jazz standards.

Kevin Young: Can you help me stop?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It feels purposeful. It feels like they're all referencing each other and they all, you know, that time isn't regulating them, that they're all kind of coming together.

Kevin Young: I hope so. I mean, I feel like, you know, I think Stones there's this great Richard Hugo quote in The Triggering Town where like people notice that there's a lot of gray and stone in my book. And he's like, yeah, I was obsessed with, you know, like, what are you talking about? Like, that's not a critique, like my obsessions are… And I think you just have to find a form for them. And that's what those books are trying to do. And, you know, I think they're finding different forms.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it's much more something that makes things cohesive in my mind. There's a way that everything is connected and also the way that the titles always mean multiple things. There's never a title that it just means one way and the noun is only a noun and never a verb, you know?

Kevin Young: Yeah, No, I'm not good at the, they're all triptychs. If not multi-tychs..

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes, if not more.

Kevin Young: Takes.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Like even Stones, I think has that, right? It has the stone, the tombstones. But then there's also there's small stones being picked up. There's, you know, being skipped. So there's all these associations that are made from it.

Kevin Young: Sure.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kevin Young: And I the thing I wanted more than anything is to have not a stone on the cover, you know, like that was the achievement there was to like it's called Stones but it can't be only literal.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. It can't be too cutesy. It's, there's a lot of different kinds of stones. And the way that you talk about ritual too, there are stones of our rituals. Like there are ways that we kind of create doublings of tombstones.

Kevin Young: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: There's a moment where you bow to the great, the matriarch figure and sort of say that we're all here, you know, the gratitude that we're all here. And I really loved that moment because there's so much about visiting cemeteries, visiting gravestones that is about that bowing action.

Kevin Young: Well, and that's what's wild is that I think is about her 85th birthday. And she just turned 100, Mama Annie.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow.

Kevin Young: Who that poem is about. Yeah. So, you know those circles, I think also, whether it's a circle the stone makes or the roundness of a circle that feels like it's part of what I'm trying to write about.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. In my family, we bring food and we bring drinks and we water it and things like that.

Kevin Young: Yeah, yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And there's a circle, you know, you go around and you water it. And we also, I have one grandfather who was, drank every day and every, every time of day. And so he has this favorite drink, makgeolli, which is like a rice wine. So we bring it and we bring it. And every single time someone has to make the same joke, like, oh, be careful, you're gonna get too drunk, you're drinking too fast, you know? But it's all a part of that circle, that ritual.

Kevin Young: Sure. I love that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kevin Young: Well, and there's the tradition of bringing a stone too and setting it on top of the gravestone. And which often in the south happens around Memorial Day now. And it comes from this tradition, Memorial Day of Decoration Day. This day of, that comes from Black soldiers remembering the dead. And more broadly, I think these Black funerary traditions, which unfortunately I've had to think about a lot lately and, you know, how do we remember and this is a broader American question, I think. And we're in a moment of like, how do we remember, you know, how, are we able to or are we able to take that complicated question seriously and answer it as complicatedly as it is? And I think so. I think we can. And for me, it's just, you know, it's a personal question, too. And I think it is for all of us in different ways.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And I think that to have access to poetry and to art and to music that engages with those ideas and feelings always feels like a relief, an offering, especially when it's a family and when it's, you know, mournings kind of can multiply, right? When someone dies, it's that person and also the people that they were all connected to that have died.

Kevin Young: Well, it's not addition, you know, I think it took me a long time or I had to learn very quickly, I should say that is exponential, you know. And you don't, I don't wanna get good at it, but you never do get good at it. It's not like a thing you can outthink.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Or prepare for.

Kevin Young: Right. Even if, unfortunately, most of the people who've died in my life have been very sudden. There's no easy way out, though, you know? And I think that some of the hardest things I've seen people go through are people who were long-time suffering or soon to die. And, you know, either it, there's no way to prepare yourself for actually that silence. And, you know, I think when different people passed away, like when my dad died, I think I write about this in the Book of Hours, I thought like, you know, OK, maybe I'll see him in a vision or he'll come to me in a dream or whatever tradition you sort of how you name it. And he never did. And that was really haunting for me in ways that I know people who've had visitation that was haunting, too. So you find your reassurance where you can and, you know, it's always evolving.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And it's a different kind of silence than the silence that we seek. Right? It's a silence that we're given, that we're burdened with.

Kevin Young: Yeah, it ain't headphones, you know? It ain't your construction worker. It's like this strange, oh, you know, and hopefully you get it said, I mean, it's a reminder to say it when you can. You know, my godfather who just passed away very suddenly, he came to a reading of mine, and I was like, what? I didn't know you were coming. And then I hug him. And luckily I took like three or four pictures and that's like it, you know, and I.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: But you had that moment. I mean, it's similar to the Easter that the, with your dad having the moment to say, “I love you,” and have those words.

Kevin Young: Yeah. Once thankful later you know.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, exactly like you realize later. But maybe also if there's this pattern, you live your life in a way with your loved ones where you're often having that last interaction. Be meaningful.

Kevin Young: Sure.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kevin Young: Sure.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, I thought we could end with a question into the void, which is our segment where a question...

Kevin Young: These haven't been questions into the void 'cause they're feeling very void questions.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, well we’re …

Kevin Young: I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: We have many voids and we love many voids. And you've certainly written into and through them for us as well. But a poet we interviewed, Richie Hofmann, who didn't know that you would be the one answering, shared a question. Today's relates intensively to your work. I'm a little worried. It's maybe a little too on the nose, but we'll see.

Kevin Young: OK. We'll see.

Richie Hofmann: Hi, it's me, Richie Hofmann, speaking to you from the past with a question for the void. If your poems were translated into music, what would the music sound like?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You see what I mean though, right? It's almost like a hat on a hat because your poems are already music.

Kevin Young: I like that. A hat on a hat. I will tell you even more 'cause Richie was like a grad student of mine, so and worked for me in the archives. So there's that wonderful connection. And it's so good to hear his voice. Let's see. What would that music sound like? You know, it's also so much of it is about music. I almost hesitate to nail it down because it's so many things at once, but I'm as interested in the kind of fragmented hip hop taking from anywhere as I am in the jazz fragmented, melodic, turning half notes into whole notes and into broader musics as I am kind of, silence as we've talked about a little. When someone asks me what my themes were, I say music, silence, and noise, you know? And so I'm as interested in the kind of non-musical parts that become music. And I think there was a moment when I was writing that I could have had the surfaces be a bit more smooth, like writing about Basquiat. God, it was like 30 years ago now, was really a way to stop me from doing that. To say like, there is a unity in making the surface rough or in layering and layering and layering. And there is a quality of that in these new poems because the music is whatever it is. But then there's also this sort of Dante structure, but also sometimes, you know, phrases or moments that interrupt and that layer in. And I'm always interested in that kind of layered sound, the sheets of sound of Coltrane. How can you not wanna write like that?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: If there really. Was that translation, do you think it's music that you would listen to for fun, for study?

Kevin Young: I don't know I...

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Is it music you would work out to?

Kevin Young: Yeah. It's funny. Music is. I don't as much anymore. But actually but I used to only write to music and especially if I'm writing prose or something now, I mostly write to the television, you know, like the TV will be on.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's background.

Kevin Young: Right? Yeah. Yeah. A movie I've seen a hundred times or a terrible reality TV is very good for prose editing, in case you're wondering. But the truth is, it's often a music that isn't in the poem. I actually think there's a kind of tension in the music, so I don't know.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Maybe we need all three. The music, the silence, the noise. It's all a part of it.

Kevin Young: Yeah, they're all part of, say, jazz. I mean, can you imagine hip hop without noise?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kevin Young: We're in the 50th anniversary of it. What I'm struck by is how prescient it was and how much it's able to be memorable and playful and fun and serious and messed up and just exactly right. And sometimes simultaneously, one could hope for that. But I think I also just want it to be the music in my head. And so the idea of it playing outside of my head, the poetry, that's enough for me right now.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, thank you for the music and thank you for the silence as well today and always on the book page, on museum walls. I really appreciate you chatting with us and learning more about this project, this book.

Kevin Young: Thanks, Cindy.

(RECORDING OF POEM PLAYS)

                                  Forget

The Night Watch, the crowds,
instead follow the quiet

to the portraits of light
entering a room. These walls,

few windows, hold
the world

Cindy Juyoung Ok: A hoardful heart of gratitude for Kevin Young. Kevin is the author of 15 books of poetry and prose. His most recent poetry collections include Stones and Brown, both from Knopf. While his most recent nonfiction book is Bunk from Graywolf Press. You can read three poems by Kevin in the July/August 2023 issue of Poetry in print and online. If you're not yet a subscriber to the magazine, there's a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. Ten book-length issues for just $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe, poetrymagazine.org/podcastsoffer. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster dePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Until next time with a PSA to wear headphones when you watch TikToks in public. Thanks for listening.