Beth Golay

I'm Beth Golay, and this is Marginalia.

Kevin Young is a poet, professor, essayist, and editor.

He's the former director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture, and he's currently the poetry editor for The New Yorker.

His new collection of poetry titled Nightwatch was written over the course of 20 years and collectively examines loss and memory.

From KMUW Studios, part of the NPR Network, this is Marginalia.

I'm Beth Golay, and here's my conversation with Kevin Young.

How would you describe the theme of this collection?

You know, at the back of the collection is a list of dates, years along with a month or a season or a place.

You know, my assumption is that these are the times and places, the when and where you wrote the poems.

Did you have a theme in mind as you wrote or does it present itself after you've accumulated a body of work?

You just mentioned this, but one of the sections, Darkling, is divided into subsections.

And the first subsection, The Dark Wood, has an epigraph from Canto I of Dante's Inferno.

And the following poems refer to the descent and to the various circles of hell.

Can you talk to me about the inspiration for these poems?

I feel like I have a few questions about craft.

Most of the poems in the collection are made up of three-line stanzas, many with the first and third line of each stanza left justified and the second line indented, although there were some like Yellow Jacket and Altarpiece where this is sometimes reversed.

Sometimes they're tercets, sometimes couplets.

Can you talk about this form?

Well, many of the poems follow this form.

When one breaks form, it tends to stand out to me.