Poet Kevin Young teaches 'to liberate all the voices'
The award-winning poet, teacher, and curator says that a book of poetry can change one's life.
By Ethan Gilsdorffrom the April 17, 2007 edition
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Atlanta - When National Poetry Month rolls around each April, its advocates make their annual pitch as to why reading poetry ought to be as central to American life as seeing art, hearing live music, or, for that matter, watching sports on TV.
Poet, teacher, and curator Kevin Young offers an even loftier proposal.
"A book of poetry can change one's life," says Young, the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and Guggenheim-winning author of five collections of poetry. His collection of blues-based love poems, "Jelly Roll: A Blues," was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award for Poetry and his latest book, "For the Confederate Dead," was published this January by Knopf.
But growing up in Kansas and moving five times before age 10, Young did not see poetry as an obvious career path. His parents, natives of rural Louisiana, had "other interests": his father became a doctor and his mother a chemist. The Harvard- and Brown-educated writer discovered poetry more or less on his own, an experience that convinced him the craft might be accessible to anyone.
"I thought everyone could be a poet," he says. "I didn't think I had to have any special powers."
Wearing black-rimmed glasses, baggy jeans, and a black shirt, his face framed by wide sideburns and a protruding goatee, Young relaxes in a sitting room on the 10th floor of Emory University's Woodruff Library. From here, with a commanding view of the campus and downtown Atlanta, Young curates Emory's 70,000-volume Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, one of the largest privately held archives of 20th-century English language poetry anywhere.
Hired by Emory two years ago, Young divides his time between suburban Boston – home to his wife, 7-month-old son, and stepdaughter – and his academic duties in Atlanta.
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