Kevin Young

And it's this kind of dismissal, I think,

And what I hear there when she's saying, make me miss her, is almost this kind of yearning that the child has, certainly, but even the adult, wishing they could kind of go back and if not repeat the process, change it somehow.

And there's something about memory in the poem and this copying versus this sort of writing of the poem that I think is really interesting to me.

Yeah.

Well, I want to return real quick to that line you mentioned already.

Somehow it happens the way things seem to happen when we're not really looking or we are looking just not the right way.

That's such a big statement there.

But you were saying maybe that's not exactly accurate or maybe she's slightly, you know, how do we hear that?

Well, it's a little like, you know, all the myths of our childhood that like you couldn't swim right after you ate or, you know, these really like terrifying things or turning on the light in a car while you're driving, the overhead light, you thought you'd get arrested or cause an accident.

And there is a kind of naivete that she manages to convey in those kind of statements.

But then I return to that end.

I hear her every time I fail.

And you hate to think that this failure is actual.

I almost start to feel like that, too, is overstated somehow, that is it the failing that causes the hearing, or is it having this said that causes one to think of things as failure, to think of one as never quite keeping guard enough?

You know, there's a kind of guardedness at the end.

Well, and it's a classroom of, as you point out, sort of life, not just this second floor of this knitting mill, which I love how you highlight that kind of labor history, which is so important, especially in that part of Massachusetts.

And I think so much about the sort of histories that are lurking here and that also history is full of these kind of moments of triumph and failure and lessen some quite hard moments.

And so is life.

And there's a beautiful, as you put it, kind of simplicity to it, but she's getting us to think and look, even almost despite the young speaker, at least.

The older speaker, I think, knows better in some ways, but also is immersing us into this memory, which I think is really beautiful.