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.
from the April 17, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Yet despite his time in New England and the Midwest, Young traces his origins to Louisiana, even though he has never actually lived there.
"My parents always referred to Louisiana as 'home' and I took them at their word," Young wrote in an e-mail. "I grew up thinking everyone was from Louisiana."
Young believes the state's almost mythical quality relates to the themes of exile, travel, and imagination in his new book "For the Confederate Dead." The Deep South also looms large. Its title is a play on "For the Union Dead," Robert Lowell's book of historical-personal poems that ponder a black Civil War Army regiment and the Negro children who pioneered school integration.
"The title turns that on its head," says Young. He describes "For the Confederate Dead" as a treatment of "place and history and blackness. The nexus of all three.... Invisible lines.... Issues that aren't solved."
In one poem sequence, "The Ballad of Jim Crow," Young's typically spare stanzas and short lines examine the South's legacy of Jim Crow – discriminatory and segregationist laws – but with a twist.
"What if Jim Crow was a real person, or legendary person, like Paul Bunyan?" asks Young, recalling what inspired the sequence. "It just started haunting me."
Other poems in the book look at Picasso's "Guernica" in light of a Texas lynching; invoke the presence of poet Gwendolyn Brooks and musician Lionel Hampton; and eulogize Philippe Wamba, a writer, editor, and close friend of Young's who died in an accident on the first anniversary of 9/11.
"[Those poems are] trying to get at grief, the mix of public and private grief," says Young of the "African Elegy" series about his friend. Young recited from "Redemption Song":
what's worse, the forgetting
or the thing
you can't forget.
Neither yet—
RSS feed