Kevin Young

And lastly, the last section is a long poem called Darkling and it really riffs off Dante and some of those same themes come to bear of loss and the dead and how the dead sort of animate our lives and are around us all the time.

Yeah, that's a great question.

It's more a process of accumulation or maybe of bursts.

You know, they kind of bloom again and again.

And, you know, this book was started almost 20 years ago.

So it wasn't a book then, of course, it was a bunch of poems.

And there's a real big difference between a bunch of poems and a book.

finding its true form is the hardest thing about a book.

And I like books to feel sort of differently.

But a few years ago, I started adding in those composition dates because they felt like kind of date lines in a story or some part of the poem that needed to be told.

uh looking back because i don't always remember i looking back you know i started this book really right after my father died and i published other books that deal more directly with his death but this kind of is in the spirit of that and in a way it was felt kind of dark and so i put it in a drawer and only during covid and pandemic when i was uh in harlem i pulled it out and it felt just like you know ready to go like it felt like the moment we were in

And it kind of still does, which is perhaps as much about the moment as anything else.

But it also, for me, is about sort of that time that it takes to almost fulfill a prophecy to get something seen and seen well.

And, you know, there were other stops along the way, but that's kind of the big journey the book took.

Yeah, you know, I was circling this idea, like I said, after my father's death, but I really didn't have a form or I don't want to say a voice, but almost a voice.

And I believe it was 2017 when the Museum of Modern Art reached out to me to write poems in response to Robert Rauschenberg's illustrations for Dante's Inferno, which I didn't know he had done.

And he did them by hearing the poem read to him, much how the poem was intended, Dante's poem,

is an oral poem, you know, and to hear them aloud, and then he would make a illustration for each canto, which I think is such a beautiful kind of flow in the moment and improvisational way to work.

And so I set about kind of doing that myself, along with Robin Costa Lewis, another poet we divided hell in half.

And, you know,