A CONVERSATION WITH KEVIN YOUNG
by DAVID RODERICK
Kevin Young is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, including Night Watch, which recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry and is longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Stones, a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize. The editor of eleven other volumes, he is also the poetry editor of The New Yorker where he hosts the Poetry Podcast. He currently serves as the Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.
DR: You mention in the end notes of Night Watch that this book took 16 years to write. Could you elaborate on that? Was there something different or atypical about the way this project developed?
KY: Well, I’m often working on a few things at a time, and building a book, to me, happens organically. It has to have that kind of quality of growing out of something. With Night Watch, I had little bits and pieces of poems, but the book really gained momentum when MoMA asked me to work with the Rauschenberg drawings, the ones he made to accompany Dante’s Inferno. A lot of my work already circled Dante’s themes. I first read The Inferno when I was fifteen, and it certainly affected me; being a teenager in high school is a little like hell anyway. So Night Watch was an outgrowth of things I was already thinking through. The challenge with the book was figuring out how to join its four parts—they may seem disparate on their own, but together they speak to each other, ending with the long sequence, inspired by Rauschenberg and Dante, called “Darkling.”
DR: We should summarize how Night Watch is structured. The first section is titled “Cormorant,” and it’s a standalone poem. In it, you address the particular bird, but the poem also feels like an evocative memory from your childhood in Louisiana. “Cormorant” is followed by three sequences: “All Souls,” “The Two-Headed Nightingale,” and finally the ambitious “Darkling” cycle, which actually tackles all of the Divine Comedy—not only the journey through hell, but also purgatory and paradise. Can you remember which pieces fell into place first? Were you toggling between versions of these poems all along?
KY: Recently, while working on a manuscript, I began listing the dates of composition, just to remind myself how long I’d been working on things. And then I began leaving them in the finished books—at the end of Night Watch I’ve listed the periods during which these poems were originally written. I’ve since forgotten which parts came when. But as you can see, there were times I was working on these poems a lot, and then I’d let them sit for a few years. Patience is necessary when you’re playing the long game.
DR: The first sequence, “All Souls,” feels deeply elegiac, but maybe more philosophical and ethereal than elegies you’ve written in the past, especially the poems written about your father in books like Dear Darkness and Book of Hours. Is this a fair way to read “All Souls”? Do you think it’s connected in some residual way to those earlier poems?
KY: You know, one hopes the work is connected. And if you don’t think it is, you’re probably fooling yourself. For sure there are echoes of the title sequence that end Book of Hours, but “All Souls” has a different kind of starkness—one liners and short stanzas and utterances. The leaps between the poems have something to do with grief, but they’re more about life too. It’s centered around this autumnal feeling or moment. There are moons that kept cropping up. I also wanted to experiment with different figures of speech. Sometimes it’s very imperative, sometimes inquisitive.
DR: One of the last poems in “All Souls” is a couplet that reads “Let there / be night—” which signals a feeling of resignation, maybe, or acceptance. There’s also a touch of humor there, as if you’ve arrived at a new threshold or terminus, in terms of addressing your grief. Does that resonate?
KY: One has many griefs. The book is dedicated to three women in my family, to two of my aunts on my father’s side and my grandmother on my mother’s side, all who died fairly recently. So I think it’s all the things you said—mournful, playful, a little bit hopeful. And this theme of darkness? I think it is certainly as early as Black Maria, the film noir in verse from 2005, which was the first book I published after my father died; then there’s Dear Darkness from a few years later, which was where I first addressed his death in print. This book also has a quality of darkness, though it’s maybe less of a “dear” thing. A feeling that’s always close at hand. There’s also a resonance of Blackness that flows through Night Watch, and all the work for that matter.
DR: Yes, that darkness is subtle but present for sure. I think you said in an earlier interview that you write early drafts in notebooks. Has your writing changed a lot over the years?
KY: I don’t always write in notebooks anymore. I tend not to write poems directly onto the computer, but I actually like the Notes app on my phone because it has less interference, like autocorrect. A sequence can come from an accumulation of “notes” like that. Then I start typing up drafts.
DR: There’s probably a lot of editing, right? Arranging those poems into a coherent or pleasing sequence?
KY: I’m old fashioned from then on out. After typing them up, I print out and carry around paper copies and mark them up. I save every electronic draft, because I learned the hard way that I won’t lose anything or cover up an older and sometimes better thought. I do a lot of arranging and rearranging.
DR: In that list of dates you just mentioned, in which you share with your reader the periods during which you worked on these Night Watch poems, the earliest dates back to the spring and summer of 2007. That was a heck of a long time ago. This may be a silly analogy, but this information made me wonder if you’re like a chef whose ambition is to use every part of the animal. Do you remember any experiences when you discovered a new context for old drafts (or parts of old drafts) that weren’t heading somewhere promising? It seems like you’re extremely resourceful in this way.
KY: Well, having ancestors who cooked that way and saved and used everything, I’ve not only done that in cooking, but it comes naturally to writing too. But while I’m a saver, I do always jettison things—especially in this book. Following Dante, I wanted limits tied to numerology and length, not to mention stanza, that I followed.
DR: Your “Two-Headed Nightingale” sequence about Millie and Christine McCoy blew me away. In the back of Night Watch you share a very brief biography, informing the reader that the McCoys were “[c]onjoined twins born enslaved in 1851 and two years later, kidnapped from family to be displayed across the United States, including PT Barnum.” That note calls back to your prose book Bunk, in which you explored the art of the hoax in American culture.
Before moving forward with these questions, I should confess I’m not sure if I should call the McCoys “them” or “her.” In the sequence you artfully slide between using plural pronouns and then something you call “the royal I,” which is a smart way to approach their unique situation.
KY: It’s a great question because she often referred to herself as singular and, you know, they were two beings in one body. It’s how they thought of themselves. I have a few photographs of them, and they’re signed Millie-Christine. The poem was really trying to capture that slippage between “I” and “we.” I also think about this in terms of a broader African American culture in which the “I” is often a “we.” Like when Bessie Smith is singing. Or when someone’s taking a solo in a jazz combo, trying to do this dance between self and combo.
McCoy asked a question in the poem that still feels painfully relevant. Am I double or divided? You know, like the country that she was born into, divided in the Civil War, a conflict she actually lived through. So there’s this philosophy that I wanted her to have and saw in her writing and talking about herself. I had written most of the poem before consciously returning to all these pamphlets about her that I had started collecting years ago, alongside her cartes de visite and cabinet cards. I probably started collecting those in the late aughts? At some point I just started hearing this voice of hers, of theirs, and I tried to get it down.
DR: Do you remember your initial approach?
KY: I didn’t want to just copy out her actual songs. When I read through them again I was struck by how much they had the same flavor as my poem. They’re rhymed and different, but they have that sense of the “I” and “we” playing.
DR: The Millie/Christine tandem is also ready-made for some of the kinds of doubleness you’re interested in, not only I/we, but body/mind, voice/echo, husband/wife, speaker/audience. These pamphlets that you collected—did you borrow any language or lyrics directly from them, or was your inspiration more general?
KY: I purposefully didn’t borrow language. (I do quote her in one short passage.) But collecting their stories and songs was important in terms of thinking her through, understanding Millie and Christine or Millie-Christine as a historical figure. I had to think about that royal “I” as I call it and then allow her to speak on her own in the poems, if that makes sense, without relying on the pamphlets. The pamphlets were put together and sold at her shows, so that’s one version of her. In the poems, I try to capture her in a different mode, in which she can sing and talk about her life, even her death and burial. There were many creative leaps I had to take.
DR: I went back to some of your earlier work, including your breakthrough book, To Repel Ghosts, and it struck me how committed you’ve been to the elegy as a form and to lyricism in general. It seems to me that you’re chiefly a lyric poet, relying on the musical elements of language more than, say, a meditative or imagistic or even narrative approach. In “Darkling,” your multifaceted sequence inspired by The Divine Comedy, so many parts of the poem feel informed by blues gestures and riffs. Can you talk about lyric poetry, how you think about it at this stage of your writing life?
KY: To me the lyric is the mode I most admire. I mean, I think song is one of the highest forms, so when I’m working on poems or even essays I’m thinking about the lyric as this place of connection. I’ve been reading a lot of Larry Levis because his new collected poems, Swirl & Vortex, is out. At The New Yorker we were able to publish some of his recently-found unpublished poems, and I was struck by, especially in his late poems, his assuredness and his ability to connect all these surprising things, expanding this notion of elegy into a form that can encompass almost anything.
So for me, the lyric is the most capacious form. I tend not to think about genres of poetry. We’re all engaged with lyricism and with a sense of song and sound. The poets I admire, whether it’s Langston Hughes or Lucille Clifton or Lorca or parts of Berryman, Plath, or Bishop—even if they’re telling a story—they’re telling it like a poet does. Nowhere did that come to the fore for me until I started trying to write nonfiction. In nonfiction you have to explain the leaps and also the connections. Like we were talking about with Millie/Christine—things can be both in the lyric poem.
DR: That’s nice. I detect another interesting through-line in your work that’s more formal and may trace all the way back to To Repel Ghosts. The poems in “Darkling” feature short lines in the 1-6 syllable range that are packed with a lot of sonic energy—slant rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance. Here’s an example from the first Inferno section of “Darkling,” (“XV. Ninth Circle”):
The season stolen—
the cold comes
without a word.
I wish you would.
I save all the smallest
things, which, one day,
I’ll braid into a bloom
that tries to live
beyond these bare rooms.
This is a quality I’ve always loved in your work and is obviously essential to your style. I find it in the richness of alliteration in almost every line in this passage, as well as in the open vowel repetitions and half rhymes. It’s a kind of form that feels organic but crafted, like it can absorb almost any feeling or subject matter. Including something grand and casting a very long shadow, like The Divine Comedy. I was so impressed by how you were able to reformulate Dante’s into this bluesy, organic structure. Can you talk about crafting lines with these formal features?
KY: I think I just hear it that way. That’s why I gravitate toward those short lines and enjambments. Some of it comes from the traditions I’m from, whether it’s the blues or African American Vernacular or even gospel. Often I’m trying to find the right note and then trying to extend that note. As a Stegner Fellow way back when, I studied with Denise Levertov. She was a stickler about these things and would yell at you if you didn’t read a poem out loud in the same way it was written on the page. She believed and wrote beautifully about how “the page was a score” and the reader the conductor. I loved that, and still do.
DR: What about the lines and breaks? And the tercets?
KY: I’m not thinking about the shortness of my lines. I’m thinking about whether or not they sound exact. Recently I’ve moved toward this three line stanza with the indent in the middle. That’s much more the newer kind of part to it than line length. The recent poems are often in tercets, like in To Repel Ghosts, but now I can see that those earlier poems are purposely fragmented and layered. In my newer work, I want to be a bit more stark and sonically kind of vertical, as June Jordan might say, but I also want them to have that kind of music of the spheres that Dante creates in The Divine Comedy.
DR: What projects are you working on now?
KY: I have nonfiction and poetry that I’ve been thinking about, and it’s been great to focus these days on writing pretty much full time. The nonfiction project is a book that starts in Paris between the wars and then ends in Harlem. I also have poems that I’ve been working on for a while as well that are quite different. They feel maybe not as stark. Some of them are letters . . . I’m just trying to write new poems and don’t know what forms they’ll take in the end. Being back in the classroom has been great too.
DR: A couple of quick ones here. Do you draft your poems at night? To Repel Ghosts, Dear Darkness, Book of Hours, Night Watch—it’s hard to imagine writing these poems at 9am.
KY: Actually, I don’t write at night anymore. Sometimes I might jot down something, but it’s been a long time.
DR: Final question: Do you believe in ghosts?
KY: I believe in repelling them. With some blue glass to prevent them from coming close. So, yes, whether you believe or not, it’s best to avoid them.
