Kevin Young

And, you know, it's one reason why, as the poetry of the New Yorker, I'm always thankful that one of the things the New Yorker does is they often include, if they can, always include the poet reading the poem, you know, and sometimes when the poet's no longer with us, we will have someone else do it.

And I think that's really important to the way that you ingest poetry.

You know, to me, it's kind of the...

end point of a poem is to hear it.

Doesn't mean that I read poems out loud all the time.

In fact, I probably don't.

I have this inner ear, inner voice that I hear a lot and not all the time, mind you.

But, you know, when I'm reading poems, I can hear them audibly.

And I think the trick is to as a writer or a reader to sort of carry that with you and also get that down.

You know, I find that when you're trying to write a poem, the hardest thing is getting that music right.

then I think as a reader in all senses, you know, the one who reads your poem on the page, but also maybe hears it, I think those are really crucial tools, you know, and after a while, I think the visual and the oral are the same.

And so you're really trying to capture that on the page, and then in the reading itself, try to kind of convey what a poem looks like.

And

You know, sometimes it's great when someone says, you know, I didn't think your poem would look like that.

But sometimes you want them to hear how it looks and have it look like it's supposed to sound.

And so I don't have a preference.

I just think that the way that one encounters a poem, there's no wrong way to do it.

And the more the better.

Yeah, no, probably not.

That's how I heard it.