Kevin Young

I think they're both there for me, but I also think she's interested in a little like Seamus.

Yes.

And delicate fury, if that's possible.

And I think you called buried violence, you talked about.

And I think of Seamus as unburying this violence in his bog poems and in the ways he's interested in seeing and showing the bog as this kind of place of holding history and preserving history, but also preserving the history of violence.

And she has to be aware, being an Ireland poet, that this is there.

And so I'm really interested in the way she's talking to him across time as well.

Wow.

That's so well said about the Latinate versus the Anglo-Saxon and Heaney's influence there.

She's also someone who, you know, I don't know how much you experienced her love of the blues, but she certainly loved the idea of the blues.

Wow.

I don't know if she –

I like the blues the way I came to love them, but she certainly thought about them.

And that blueness that's in the beginning, I think there's something about that too.

And if we wanted to read through the poem again, thinking through that, there's something in the blues at least that for me,

is very clear-eyed about death.

Totally.

It sings about death in ways that pop music, for instance, before then, never did.

European popular music or European-American popular music hadn't, you know, confronted.

And yet, you know, there was no choice in African-American culture and the way they thought about it, both the way they thought about death, but also the way they sang through it.