Kevin Young on His Book “Night Watch,” Inspired by Death and Dante

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2:36This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Kevin Young is the poetry editor of The New Yorker and the author of many books of his own poems. His newest is called Nightwatch. The poems draw on Kevin's very wide view of history from the end of the slavery era back to Dante's 700-year-old poem, The Divine Comedy, and much more. I sat down recently with Kevin Young. Kevin, you are the poetry editor of The New Yorker. Thank God. And I believe this is your 16th book. You're a great anthologist as well. I love that anthology you've done about grief. No memorial service needs to look any farther than that book.

3:17It's an extraordinary book. And you've written about the blues and African-American experience in general. And you've also published books of prose, too. So all to say that you're an extraordinary, prolific writer and editor. I wonder what themes you see at this point in your life that are running throughout everything. You know, I think this book, Nightwatch, kind of exemplifies a lot of them. It thinks about loss, but it also thinks about music. And I think the music in this book is a slightly different music. It isn't necessarily blues or jazz, but it's sort of rooted in the spirituals in some sense.

3:55And it starts in Louisiana, which is definitely a theme in my book. Both my parents are from there, and it's a place I returned to a lot as a child, but also I returned to in my writing. And it begins there, but then extends really into the realm of lots of other things, including the 19th century, all the way to Dante. Now, with this new book, it is also kind of a ballsy thing to invite comparison to Dante. I guess, you know, we all have our own Dante, right? And this is the moment that I wanted to try to, you know, he helped me so much in a weird way because this is a book that I think without him I would have kept in a drawer because the subjects were kind of dark that I was trying to contend with.

4:42And he gave a framework for me to, you know, you can't write about hell and be only cheerful. So how do you write about it and frame it as a journey rather than a morass, you know? And I think Dante's, you know, he himself incorporates Virgil, of course, as his guide through hell. And so Dante is kind of my guide through it in that way. And so I didn't think of him as someone I'm like rivaling or following, but more like a guide, someone who's the greater master that I'm trying to get across and get through. Dante's poem is supposed to lead us back toward another text. It's supposed to lead us toward reading the Bible again.

5:21And that's at least the stated thing. But I think he was up to more mischief than that. Well, and he's getting revenge in some of them. There's a lot of strife in Florence at the time. You know, he's trying to write about now through eternity. And I was just always struck by, you know, things that I still wrestle with in the poem. Like, you know, he has the devil eating Judas face first. And I was like, is that worse to be face first for eternity? or, you know, like, and that's in the poem. Like, is that what's worse? Like, what is punishment, you know? And what is the kind of crux of belief? And those kind of things are all around us.

6:03And, you know, I pulled out the book, which I kind of put it in a drawer, set it aside. And then during pandemic, I pulled it out. And I was like, this is exactly how it feels right now. It feels really dark. And, you know, this is a journey through that. Kevin, would you read us the section of Darkling that's titled Ledge? Yes. So this is from the poem based on Dante called Darkling. And this is from the purgatory section. So this is Ledge. No use telling the dead what you've learned since they've learned it too. How to go on without you, the mercy of mourning or moving, the light that persists even if.

6:46Beauty is as beauty does, my mother says, who is beautiful and speaks loud so she can be understood Unlike poets who can't talk to save their lives, so they write It's like a language, loss can be learnt only by living there What anchors us to this thirst and earth? with its threats and thinnesses, its ways of waning and making the most of, of worse and much worse, if not this light lifting up over the ridge. Kevin, you are always in your poems, not always, but when you want to be, even in the midst of real darkness and philosophical writing, extremely funny.

7:43beauty is as beauty does my mother says who is beautiful and speaks loud so she can be understood unlike poets who can't talk to save their lives so they write um bit true that one humor is i feel like there's a humor in dante you know and um certainly there's a humor in the blues or in in the traditions i inherited and i think you know my poetry became mine when i I admitted that sometimes I wanted to make you laugh in the midst. Were you too solemn as a young poet? Oh, yeah. So, you know, in juvenilia, yes. You know, and pulling your hair out. And I think it's a classic thing. You sit down to write.

8:22You pull out your quill. You know, you dip it in the ink. Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote or the first attempts? Oh, yeah, of course. Who were they like? I still had them. They were moody and, you know, they were about to see, but I was in Kansas where I went to high school. So, you know, they were kind of not about what was right around me. And then I think when I realized that I could write about, you know, how my parents told stories, how my family in Louisiana, you know, looked at the world and the sound of that talk, which I've been trying to capture and write about all these years, you know, I think that was part of it.

8:55But also, you know, the way that they were philosophers and that African-American tradition of the church, in my case, was really crucial to thinking about how do you seek justice? You know, how do you look for redemption in a world that can feel against you? It literally often is. Now, you're talking about history and a large portion of this new book, Nightwatch. is about Millie and Christine McCoy. It's a story that seems like something from fiction, but these are historical figures. So give us a little orientation here. Who were the McCoys? Well, there were conjoined twins born into slavery, and then they were stolen and exhibited around the country.

9:42And their parents actually searched for them, hunted for them, and then finally retrieved them and then sued for their having been stolen. And it turns out, one, the suit, which is just kind of unprecedented. I was interested in the ways that they both were enslaved and then, you know, sort of forced to do a lot of things, including perform and be exhibited. Barnum was one of the places they ended up in Barnum's hands. And, you know, I've written about Barnum before, so I had always been interested in them. And, you know, the images of them are quite striking. And I think even in the images, which are probably early, you see them as young girls with this prepossessed stature, you know, and they're facing the camera as much as they can, you know, to get them both.

10:29I think that they were kind of a little bit looking askance at you, but I think there's something about that that's really powerful. And they also have sometimes lutes or instruments and they were wonderful singers. And then upon their freedom, they sang and toured Europe and were, you know, their harmonies were incredibly close, as you can imagine and were reportedly just incredible. And then they bought the property of where they were enslaved and died there. After the war. Yes, yes. Their family, you know, ended up back in the Carolinas, you know, in that same property. And they also refer to themselves as singular often, as I, you know, and sometimes as we.

11:08But they thought of themselves as one being in many instances. What was your source material for this? Is there a famous biography? There's some biographies, but I actually track down, you know me, I'm a bit of a collector person. So I tracked down a lot of their early pamphlets, you know, from, you know, the 19th century and late 1860s, 70s. This is now archives in various places. Yeah, but I mean, I tracked them down for me. Like I want to like hold them and own the pamphlets because these are how they describe themselves, you know. and I wanted to get as close to that as possible to think about how they wrote themselves into existence.

11:49And it has their songs in there and various things and some of that made their way into the poem. Kevin, would you read an excerpt from the poem about them for us? Sure. This is from The Two-Headed Nightingale. An octopus, the doctors, self-appointed and taught, think us, a circus. Our eight limbs they always want town to town to peer under, to peek. The ocean is deep. For them we are specimen, a woman only in word. The Carolina twin, the milk of a man, wine of a woman. Two-headed nightingale sings duets exquisitely. One trunk, one vertebral column, a marvelous being, a female at 34 years of age, mother living.

12:45Each have sensitive of lower parts, but only sensitive of each upper part. I conversed with this, these persons, and found her quick and of pleasant manners. Both, at times, have identical dreams.

13:05Kevin, I noticed that on the page, you have this second part is in italics. Yes, so this part I just read is in italics. That's a doctor's kind of report. But these doctors were self-appointed doctors and a little bit, let's say, you know, I think disingenuous at best and abusive at worst, you know. And so I wanted some example of that. But this idea of their identical dreams, I think, kind of transcends even this doctor's, you know, because that's not something he can examine. That's something they have reported. And then there's this last part, if I may, where she speaks again. It is our mind.

13:47Doctors without schooling fail to mention. They grant themselves degrees like freedom. Each of our hands a language. Eight-limbed, two-headed, we own many tongues.

14:06I'm talking with poet Kevin Young. More in a moment.

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19:00Kevin, you are, in addition to being a great individual artist, are also an institutionalist of a kind. You know, not only are you attached to The New Yorker, which, of course, is the most important thing in the whole wide world, but you ran the Schomburg Library. You were running an extraordinary museum of African-American history and culture in Washington. And now we're in a period, a political period, where the president of the United States and the administration are taking an outsized interest in the way history is presented, talked about, and there's even talk about censorship. How do you feel about that, and how does it ease into your work at all, do you think?

19:45Well, history is all over my work, you know, and I think especially when I was writing nonfiction books, I think there was a moment, you know, like it's almost easier in poetry to talk about history because you're bringing, I think, history to life. You're trying to illuminate it often with a voice, you know, which is sometimes what you lose in, you know, a history book. No offense to some of my favorite people who are historians. But I also think when I was writing these nonfiction books, especially Bunk, a book about fakery in American life, I thought when I was starting to write Bunk that no one would care about fakery in American life.

20:23Then it came out. Now it's the dominant theme. Then it came out, you know, in 2017, I think it was. So, you know, I hate to say that for me that things have gotten worse, you know. I thought we were in that worst patch and that we'd be getting better. But, you know, to me, that kind of thing is a bit cyclical. How do we get past it? Do you find that among your fellow writers, particularly poets, there's a sense of historical pressure now on them, even though they're not necessarily the dominant, loudest voices in the culture? I think so. I think there's that mix of it's unprecedented, you know, which I always find overused because I think in many ways it's precedented.

21:09And how do we talk about that? But I also, you know, was here as the poetry editor during pandemic too. And to see how people were starting to wrestle with this, you know, century in the making kind of event was so powerful to see. And to see how poets offered testimony and putting together the anthology really showed me that. You're talking about the recent centennial anthology that you edited. Yeah. This New Yorker century from 1925 to 2025 exemplifies the ways that even in these early decades, you saw poets writing about it, Hughes being one of them, and writing through and thinking through these kinds of questions all along.

21:52And so to see that more, I think, dramatic and more direct, say, in the 60s in Vietnam, but also I think since then in the ways that poets tried to address the issues of the day. Are you finding the poems that you get as an editor? Yeah. So you're getting this enormous influx of poems. You and your colleague Hannah Eisenman, God knows how many poems come in each week. Are you finding the work is more political now or less political than it might have been a few years ago? I think since pandemic, there's been people have been wrestling with these questions, perhaps before even. But I see them wrestling more successfully now.

22:29Why would that be? I think because some of the lessons of poetry's kind of, you know, poetry for a long time, you would go to these conferences and people would say things like, can poetry be political? Like, is there, you know, is there, I'd be like, what are you talking about? Like Mr. Dante. That's a very political poem. Exactly. So, you know, it was a silly stance, I think, but it was one that was, I think, also about some of the things that have changed in American poetry, which has broadened and deepened. And I think that some of that's reflected in the pages, a lot of that, but reflected in the sort of strategies.

23:06You couldn't, for instance, have an African-American poetry book that didn't think about history, that didn't think about these questions of justice and, you know, loss and hope and all the things that I think poetry can be made up of. Kevin Young, thanks so much. Thanks, David.

23:25Kevin Young's new book is called Night Watch. He's also the poetry editor of The New Yorker, and he hosts our poetry podcast every month. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.