Kevin Young

break bread and can't connect and can't have – it's very hard to hate someone who you say pass the bread to.

And I believe strongly that that kind of point of segregation and keeping people apart in these primal things were to continue to keep us apart in bigger ways, right?

They weren't just like I refuse to eat with you.

It's also I refuse to admit you're a person who needs to eat.

And so there's this kind of quality of –

horror that you're invoking, but then also the O'Hara, and then, you know, that poem, if we know it, the Meditations, an emergency poem, not just the book, is such a, like, playful poem of sort of heartbreak, and, you know, the ironies are in the title.

How do you see that playing further in the end?

Like, is this not a...

Is it he's nodding gravely toward O'Hara?

Are they exchanging something there?

So this is O'Hara, Cook, and the self?

That's right.

You know.

Well, I love that part because I do think, you know, talking about the poem isn't the same as the experience of the poem.

And the experience which starts with this they, they, they, which we've talked about a lot, which can seem like far from the self, like it's them.

But someone once said to me smartly, we should turn all these into we.

And, you know, if it started with we, you wouldn't have this switch into the I. So in a weird way, by having this, let's call it distance,

The self becomes all the more inhabited and all the more part of this, I'm going to call it a we, at the end of the poem.

And I think it's something that, you know, Seamus did as he would talk about not complicity but being a witness to the thing and not just being far away and, you know, like pointing a finger.

There's something about the self being there and if you looked nothing at all like me.