Kevin Young

I mean, I came to think...

That the poem was completed by the reader, not necessarily the writer.

But for me, it's also more that the poem is carried in the body.

And, you know, it isn't just mine.

It's this body of work, right?

That the reader, the listener, hears and takes in and sometimes carries with them, you hope.

And that's why poetry, I think, is so powerful, right?

transcendent uh also subversive in some ways and hard to pin down because it's yours once you memorize it once you hear it and take it in and you know it's the highest compliment dante is writing an oral poem for you to carry with you and someone like rauschenberg took it and made art from it and we've all done versions of that i think and for me

those changes those little moments partially that's improvisation and just you know we all grow and change and so do poems but i also love how a poem won't change any of its words and you come to it at the right moment suddenly and it's totally different there are poems that meant so much to me when i was younger and then there are poems i didn't quite wasn't ready for

And that's true in the writing too.

I don't think I could have written this book, even though I started it so long ago at another moment before I finished it, because I had to kind of see it as not just my losses, not personal in some way, though I think it's deeply personal.

It's not autobiographical necessarily, except for that first poem, which takes us on this journey into these other poems that I hope

expand the idea of the self, of loss, but also of that future that I think Dante was interested in, that I know that the enslaved were interested in, and that their descendants, like myself, sing of so beautifully.

And you know, one of the other influences we haven't mentioned is the African American spirituals, which

growing up hearing and imbibing and, and, you know, the gospel that springs out of them.

I just was always struck by the way that they re-imagined a world to be both a heaven on earth, but also a paradise just out of reach.

But that also was sometimes a guide to getting the heck out of Dodge and that kind of idea of

place and transcendence but also the afterlife that isn't kind of mythic but really about one's self being made whole in the moment in the song and anticipating a freedom that you kind of sing into being that's animated i think a lot of my work if not all of it but especially in this book i see the ways that that trajectory is is there in living color

Well, I love this idea.

It's wonderful that you did that.