Kevin Young

And in Stones, I really sort of settled on this form of a tercets or three-line stanza.

with the indent and it was a way of kind of keeping that beat going and moving through, in that case, very much Louisiana landscape where both my parents are from Louisiana, but also, you know, it's where all my relatives are buried in these two cemeteries.

And so to sort of confront these two spaces in stones, it seemed like a great way to think about form in this book.

But I feel like it's a slightly different form in this one in terms of its ins and outs.

It allows itself to sometimes have a couplet.

single line and really break itself up a little bit in ways that Dante, I think, also does.

He's very strict in some sense in the numerical quality, which I always loved since I read Dante as a teenager.

But I also love the way that he gives you a little bit of freedom in there.

And, you know, I should say the cantos and the divine comedy I read was the Ciardi translation, which turned out to be the same translation that Rauschenberg had heard.

So some of those lines came into the poem, especially later as I was going into Paradise.

And so there was a way that I was trying to understand form.

not just through Dante, but through these kind of translations, if you will, from Rauschenberg, Ciardi, childhood, memory, and then a little bit of the future.

Well, that one's sort of a very stark poem, and it kind of interrupts itself on purpose.

I think that's how lamentation works, though perhaps not on purpose.

And unfortunately, I've had cause to write a number of elegies.

And you're always trying to get at the language of loss, which, as I say in one poem in Darkling, you know, you can only learn by living there, you know, like you can't learn it secondhand.

And so that kind of.

irony of learning the dead through the living is throughout the book.

And in that poem, River of Lamentation, it's sort of stark and stops and starts.

But in a lot of the poems, I find there's this kind of reaching toward