Revisiting: Poet Kevin Young on his collection, 'Night Watch'
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Beth Golay, and this is Marginalia. Kevin Young is a poet, professor, essayist, and editor. He's the former director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture, and he's currently the poetry editor for The New Yorker. His new collection of poetry titled Nightwatch was written over the course of 20 years and collectively examines loss and memory. From KMUW Studios, part of the NPR Network, this is Marginalia. I'm Beth Golay, and here's my conversation with Kevin Young. How would you describe the theme of this collection?
Well, I think the theme varies in some ways, but it really is centered around loss, but also forms of remembering. And for me, place is a big part of the book in a weird way, even though places aren't always named, though it starts with a poem, Cormorant, which is about that. fascinating bird that's all over southern Louisiana where my father's family's from. And it's a poem very much remembering him remembering. And one of the takeoff points of it is the ways that the cormorant is kind of like this considered lesser bird, you know, and treated poorly in some ways, but has this regal nature. And I always found it fascinating, and it had something to do for me about that landscape. And then the other sections sort of get progressively longer.
All Souls is a poem, I think, that's wrestling with Issues of remembering, but also loss. There's a coyote in there, you know, you got to have a coyote in the poem.
What themes are explored in Kevin Young's poetry collection 'Night Watch'?
And then you have a poem like Two-Headed Nightingale, which is longer still, and it's really returning to this idea of these two enslaved people, Millie and Christine McCoy, who were sisters, but they were also conjoined twins. What I was fascinated about them is they often refer to themselves as singular and they say, I. And so the poem really is a philosophical meditation on what it means to be singular and plural at the same time. And along the way, because she was born enslaved and stolen then and displayed as this sort of miracle of nature or a freak of nature, depending on how you viewed it. And she viewed herself as a miracle. And after she gets her freedom, she sings and tours Europe and is really fetid.
And I was really curious about this person who had this doubleness, especially at a time during the Civil War when the nation was divided and in some ways feels a little bit like now in the kinds of divisions. And lastly, the last section is a long poem called Darkling and it really riffs off Dante and some of those same themes come to bear of loss and the dead and how the dead sort of animate our lives and are around us all the time.
You know, at the back of the collection is a list of dates, years along with a month or a season or a place. You know, my assumption is that these are the times and places, the when and where you wrote the poems. Did you have a theme in mind as you wrote or does it present itself after you've accumulated a body of work?
Yeah, that's a great question. It's more a process of accumulation or maybe of bursts. You know, they kind of bloom again and again. And, you know, this book was started almost 20 years ago. So it wasn't a book then, of course, it was a bunch of poems. And there's a real big difference between a bunch of poems and a book. finding its true form is the hardest thing about a book. And I like books to feel sort of differently. But a few years ago, I started adding in those composition dates because they felt like kind of date lines in a story or some part of the poem that needed to be told. uh looking back because i don't always remember i looking back you know i started this book really right after my father died and i published other books that deal more directly with his death but this kind of is in the spirit of that and in a way it was felt kind of dark and so i put it in a drawer and only during covid and pandemic when i was uh in harlem i pulled it out and it felt just like you know ready to go like it felt like the moment we were in
And it kind of still does, which is perhaps as much about the moment as anything else.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:41
2
What themes are explored in Kevin Young's poetry collection 'Night Watch'?
1:41–19:40
3
How does Kevin Young describe the process of writing his poetry?
19:40–24:37
4
What role do personal experiences play in Young's poetry?
24:37–29:08
5
What is the significance of the poem 'Darkling' in Young's collection?
29:08–29:21