Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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. But it also, for me, is about sort of that time that it takes to almost fulfill a prophecy to get something seen and seen well. And, you know, there were other stops along the way, but that's kind of the big journey the book took.
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Chapter 3: How does Kevin Young describe the process of writing his poetry?
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.
I did notice a device in your poetry, which, as you read the poem, for the most part served as a hard pause in the audio, except when it didn't. And that was an asterisk between the stanzas. Can you talk to me about this pause?
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.
Now it happens at a regular interval, so it's not as jagged as it might sound, but I really wanted it to have that quality and also provide a kind of coda both to the book, but also to that experience, which was, you know, quite strange. I talk about it in the poem and, you know, this idea that I think I say something like, you know, maybe I can read it really quick. Would you mind?
Oh, that would be great.
You should know that after you ready to meet the far stony shore, it is not hope but the strange fire of forgiveness that flares and fights there, not wanting to go, hoping only you'd said so long to all you knew, to the elms who also know what it means to be told you die and survive.
I wanted that kind of quality of the, you know, what does it mean to be faded and then not faded to feel like you are, you know, in limbo, quite literally up in the air. And at the same time, then, you know, I'm here with you talking about it. So clearly survived, but it was kind of a way of witnessing and the asterisks are just another way of highlighting that.
How should readers approach this collection? You know, one poem a day, all in one sitting, in the order that the poems are presented?
Well, it is a bit more ordered than some books of mine even, but I tend to open a book in the middle and read like front and back. I read like a poet. So however people want, you know, I do think there's something about hearing them aloud, which I love.
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Chapter 4: What role do personal experiences play in Young's poetry?
And for me, that's what poems do. That's what Nature does. There's a lot of nature in the book. But also this idea of the night watch, of keeping vigil, is important. And if there's something about that, about being vigilant, but not just against things, but toward what's possible and beauty, then I'd be happy.
Night Watch by Kevin Young was published by Knopf. And now book reviewer Suzanne Perez looks at a novel that follows the inner world of a mid-level marketing executive.
Early on in Beatriz Serrano's cutting and satirical debut novel Discontent, we learn that 30-something main character Marissa has already had it with corporate life. The truth is, I don't know how to do anything, and I don't know how I got here, she says. I suppose it was by perfecting the office game until everybody believed I was a great professional.
Marissa has risen through the ranks at a successful advertising agency, but she hates her job and everyone at it. She spends most of her working hours either locked in her office, hiding from coworkers, or racing around in an attempt to look busy.
What she really does, though, is pawn off any actual assignments to her personal assistant or the advertising students in her master's program class so she can watch YouTube videos in her office or escape to her favorite art museum. At the museum, in a drug-induced buzz, Marissa contemplates the meaning of life while staring at paintings by Hieronymus Bosch.
If this novel sounds a bit like Otessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, it's because it very much is. Both Moshfegh and Serrano explore the depths of millennial ennui, with characters who live lives of extreme privilege but battle relentless and, at times annoying, existential dread.
Both authors also master the art of dark humor with writing that deftly navigates the line between grim and hilarious. When mentors advise Marissa to fake it till you make it, she responds with her own version of the rule. Fake it until people leave you alone. Discontent was written in Spanish and translated for English audiences by Mara Faye Letham.
Nothing is lost in translation here because Serrano's cutting wit, like the cheesiness of those inspirational office posters, transcends the boundaries of culture. When Marissa gripes about TED Talks that implore you to follow your dreams, or that boss who treats employees like teenage kids, I believe in you. You can do hard things. I know you won't disappoint me.
We are all nodding and rolling our eyes, no matter the language. Woven amid the office space narrative are enjoyable side characters who underscore the humor, if not the actual plot. Marissa's middle-aged parents call once a week, even though they have nothing to say. And her friend Elena jokes that she's had so much work done, she's filled with plastic. I'm the Atlantic Ocean, she says.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the poem 'Darkling' in Young's collection?
For me, I was a little late, but red flags went up like, what is going on? This is really scary. At Planet Money, we get the story behind the money to explain how money works. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.