Kevin Young

And sometimes the editor in me wants to go back and fix all those little blue notes.

But like Miles Davis says, it's not a mistake when I turn it into the music after it.

And so I think it's important to not smooth out all those rough edges in a poem.

One of the funnier things to those who've been in a poetry workshop or any kind of workshop is there was something where they had Emily Dickinson in a workshop and people correcting all her quirks and little things that are essential to understanding her, the dashes.

And if you see her actual draft, sometimes there's like plus signs and all these markations that I think are meant for us to understand that music she's hearing in her head.

I tried to let them in there and maybe they go far sometimes, but I also, you should understand that reading a poem, hearing a poem, it isn't the record of an event.

It's also an event.

And Robert Lowell who said that was having us think about this idea of the poem should do something on the page.

The occasion of the poem can't be something far from the poem.

It has to be part of it.

And for me, I always try to talk to my students or anyone who will listen, really, about the enacting that a poem should do.

And when a poem enacts a feeling, like grief, say, it's one of the most powerful things on earth.

And I really believe that, I treasure that.

And, you know, poetry has saved me in so many ways.

And I love to preach about its saving graces to others.

Yeah, you know, that in some poems, it's sections, you know, little sections.

But especially in the penultimate poem, which is called Hereafter, it really is interrupting this form that's otherwise flowing.

And I think it's because it's a poem that deals with a plane that's hit by lightning.

And to write a poem that's really smooth about that,

would seem kind of strange.