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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and the stones hope to remember. That's the epigraph from Kevin Young's new collection of poems called Stones. It's a collection about loss, looking back, and ways we try to remember the dead through stories, tradition, and also through physical markers like gravestones. Kevin Young has more than a dozen poetry books in his name. He is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, as some of you know. Big Kevin Young news, he was recently named director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Kevin Young, welcome back to WNYC. It's always great to have you.

Kevin Young: Thanks for having me again.

Brian Lehrer: I should say, this is not a book of poetry set in the past year, but I wonder if the pandemic inspired you to write about remembrance and death in such a central way?

Kevin Young: Oh, yes. I had written the book over a number of years, really about pilgrimages I made to Louisiana to visit my father's headstone and also just visit family. I really finished it and sent it off last spring, so it definitely has that echo for me of thinking about this time we're in, and poetry I hope does that always, it thinks about the past, even when it's distant history, but brings it into the present. Hopefully, good poems are timely and also timeless at the same time.

Brian Lehrer: There's one poem, Fog, where you're in a graveyard and the heat is fogging up your glasses. Made me think of walking around the empty early pandemic city wearing a mask. Anyone with glasses knows that torment, every breath fogs up your glasses unless you get the mask just right, but that's not the setting of your poems, they're mostly set in Louisiana, where your parents are from. Tell us about that setting?

Kevin Young: It's a beautiful part of the world. It's one that my family, we call it home. We're going home meant going to Louisiana. There's also this African American tradition of homegoing, which is what we often call people who transitioned or died. That's there too. I think this notion of these two, in my case, graveyards which are filled with relatives, with ancestors, with cousins of mine, and in my father's case, we've been in that patch of land down there about 200 years. In a way, that's, I think, rare for Americans, rare for certain Americans, I should say, especially African Americans aren't always able to trace their roots.

It's a book about rootedness, but also recovery and remembrance. For me, that remembrance was more immediate in terms of my father, but being there, you also see people who have your name but you don't know. My son was with me, and his sharing that experience, he's a little kid, and being named for ancestors was also part of the power of place in the book.

Brian Lehrer: At least a few poems are set in a graveyard. I understand you've agreed to read a poem from that section titled Boneyard. That's the section title, Boneyard, and the poem is called Dog Tags. You want to set it up?

Kevin Young: Yes. It's about memory, but also, a cousin who died and doesn't have a stone yet and how she passed away, somewhat early. The poem's wrestling with what that means.

Dog Tags.

Of us there is always less

The days hammer passed artificial daisies at the grave

Words I didn't choose for my father's headstone

And those that came instead to live around my neck

Dog tags, a tin pendulum on my chest.

On my mother's side, my cousin too young

Dirt, a pile above her, but no stone

Nothing but the tin foil name from the funeral home

The fresh plastic flowers that still wilt in this heat and the blackjacks

She lost everything my great aunt and uncle had saved

Even their low ranch where I first knew blue grass

Plastic covering the rug and the good couch in the sitting room no one dared sit

The prickly underside of the clear runner

A cactus you couldn't help the touch

Uncle Wilmer's pickup long paid off now stares empty under somebody else's tree

The liars and book cookers came with their knives offering her seconds and she sat and ate

Once you've tasted the stone-filled fruit of the underworld, you may never return

They took everything from her, my mother says

Both of us shaking our heads of disbelieving how exacting death is

How deep the shade, [unintelligible 00:05:27]

She was in debt and dead within a year

Went through money like water

And that didn't last long either.

Brian Lehrer: Sad, but lovely. That's your father's dog tag in the poem, that tin pendulum around your neck?

Kevin Young: Yes, absolutely. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: I was interested-- No, go ahead. What do you want to say?

Kevin Young: No. There's also that image of that couch that I think a lot of us experienced the couch and couldn't sit, the living room which no one lived in, that quality versus the living and the dead are circling in the poem.

Brian Lehrer: That couch is for company, don't you know? [laughs] I was interested in that poem also because you talk about what's written on a gravestone and you're not being able to choose your father's epitaph and your cousin not being able to afford one. I know there's a long tradition of poets writing and thinking about epitaphs for words there was truth hallowed out by love. I wonder if you could meditate on the physical marker of gravestone from its shape to what's written on it?

Kevin Young: That's a fascinating question. For me, you're right, poets, we tend to dally in graveyards from tradition, but for me, it was really thinking of the heat, the moment of the physical landscape, which in the book I think is both restorative. In a broader sense, there's a lot of poems about the natural world and egrets and cows and the things that are there, but also, the way we try to either prevent nature or fight nature or dance with nature.

The gravestone, to me, is this thing that's a stone, of course, but there's poems and cases in my family where a lot of them are hand-carved. There were older, a hundred years old, and sometimes you can read them, sometimes you can't, and that wanting things to be permanent, but also knowing that words don't always last or can't always do the things we wish is part of, I think, in the poetry I'm trying to write in this book, but also in poetry in general and our awareness of the limits of language.

That's what we have and I think that's what's powerful for me about trying to remember, is you're trying to get it down, trying to make it permanent, but you also know that's all you have, is this try, this attempt.

Brian Lehrer: Credit to producer Zoe Azulay, by the way, for helping lead me to that thought and planting the Wordsworth quote. Let's move on to an other poem, and my guest, if you're just joining us, is Kevin Young, who among other things is the poetry editor of The New Yorker and the new director of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture in DC, which we'll also talk about, but he's also got a new poetry collection, his own work, called Stones. Let's move on to another poem from it. This one is much more in the present with lots of action. It's called Squall. Would you read it?

Kevin Young: Absolutely, thanks. Squall, and this is about driving north in Louisiana along the highway.

Today the sun rained down on us for hours

Before rain, it shown silver down into the already muddy ground

Each day a squall chases us indoors and sends the dogs beneath the house or dry dock cars for shelter

Tomorrow the muds will devour my grandmother's birthday flowers

For now, under thunder they cower

My young son's excited by every boom, says, "Wow" and claps along as we watch the monsoon from Mama Annie's tiny tidy rooms we fill and flood over

Without thought we draw her closer like the river

All morning light drowns our hatless heads

Till at noon, rain dances down and we try to beat it out of town

Park the car and gun it to outstrip the storm now all around

The radio struck silent and our son

Right after we pass a pickup with mattresses

Not lying down or tied, but raised upright paired in prayer

The beds begin to applaud

To clap together then fly into the road now in rear view

Headlights following those just ahead

We, nose forward like fog-bound ships The light house out wrapped and white trounced of rain.

Brian Lehrer: That image of mattresses unbound on the back of a pickup truck, praying through the storm that they don't get blown off, can you tell us about the setting for that? You're with your son at your grandmother's house?

Kevin Young: Yes, and his great grandma's house. My grandmother, Mama Annie is still alive. She's 98. At the moment, we had had a birthday party for her. I think that was one other reason we were down. This drive, I remember seeing these mattresses. It took me a number of years, actually, to try to be able to capture how strange that was to see them and knowing they weren't going to last. This upright carrying of mattresses in a pickup, and sure enough, there they go flying.

In the poem, of course, there are somewhat transformed, but it was this life or death thing, driving behind these applauding, praying mattresses. We were doing a lot of praying, I think, in that storm not to be affected. I think that's also a metaphor for this traveling, this journey, this pilgrimage, which is, in my case, life.

Brian Lehrer: Life is what we are going to say.

Kevin Young: It's life for all of us. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Let's move on to your new job as director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. You recently said your gift for metaphor as a poet could help you in that job. How so?

Kevin Young: Well, I think poets draw connections. They make things like mattresses into praying hands. They see how things are related. I think very much the museum does that. One of our jobs is to connect people with objects and to see objects, to see themselves in them, to see each other. The museum's done a wonderful job, I think, of centering African American story in the American story, which I think it is central to. Seeing that American story through an African American lens, in the richness of the collections, whether it's Harriet Tubman's handkerchief, her hymnal with her inscription in it, all the way to some of our more recent acquisitions and exhibition.

We just had one open up around Breonna Taylor and the portrait that Amy Sherald did of her, which we co-own with the Speed Museum in Louisville. To see those connections, to see Tubman's handkerchief and to see this current moment, that's the kind of connections I think a museum can make. Poets try to make those all the time, but there's nothing like physically seeing these objects and space and seeing how they are connected. How these issues of selfhood and nationhood and questions of survival are still with us. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: I think you put it in another conversation about putting Harriet Tubman and Breonna Taylor's portraits in conversation. I don't know if that's set up like that yet, but do you think goers to the museum would have that experience, would see that as an implied conversation?

Kevin Young: Oh, absolutely. In the new show where we have Reckoning, which just opened a couple of weeks ago, it has and feature is very much the Breonna Taylor portrait by Amy Sherald and people will remember her for doing the portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, but it's facing a wonderful textile quilt done by Bisa Butler of Harriet Tubman that we commissioned. That portrait is looking directly at Breonna Taylor portrait. They're having this conversation across centuries, even though the Harriet Tubman portrait that Bisa Butler created is new.

Both of these new pieces of art are also talking about generations, they're talking about women's lives and saying her name. They're also looking through and across to us. I've been in that space a number of times and just seeing people have that reaction in the force field that these two people, these two portraits, these two artists, women artists creating art about women are having, that whole conversation.

Brian Lehrer: Any other upcoming shows or exhibitions you're excited about and can people who aren't in DC or are going to be in DC see any of it virtually?

Kevin Young: Yes, two things. One, we have a show about reconstruction called Make Good the Promises. That's quite powerful. Just came out a couple of weeks ago. One of the more powerful parts I think is the legacy section. That really thinks about how the legacy of reconstruction, that period right after slavery is still with us. Everything from the Freedman's Bank, where you get to learn about the bank that [unintelligible 00:14:45] invested in and then was defaulted by corruption by some of the white grantors and board of trustees is really powerful, and you see the long-term effects of that.

Then you also see-- Online, we have a thing called the Searchable Museum, which is launching shortly, which will really bring that into people's living rooms on their phone, on their computer and you get to visit the museum and have that soaring feeling from afar.

Brian Lehrer: That's great. We've got about three minutes left. Since we do, I was thinking about your appearance here in 2017 for your book about the history of hoaxes in America called Bunk, the book that explored the connection between racism and hoaxing among other things, how from P. T. Barnum's fake exhibit of a woman he claimed to be George Washington slave to zoos that put caricatures of Native Americans and Africans on display, oh my God, that American hoaxes often work to deepen stereotypes and assign groups exotic or inferior characteristics.

I'm curious, with some more distance from Trump than when your book first came out in his first year in office, I wonder if you can talk about where you think Donald Trump falls into this American story of hoaxes. It's easy to compare him to P. T. Barnum, but the way he used racism to inflame his base went much further than a sideshow or maybe with more intentionality.

Kevin Young: Well, I think that's an interesting question. For me, I really was thinking a lot about the technology and how in the 19th century, it was penny papers that really took P. T. Barnum and his use of race and hoaxing to new heights. I think now we're seeing that with the internet. If anything, the past few years-- I've made that metaphor then and that connection, but I think now looking back, I could have done more about the technology and how it's--

We had Instagram and Facebook down for a few hours and everyone I knew was like, "What a weird moment not to have these constant connections," that I think really do contribute to hoaxes and aspects of paranoia and conspiracy theory. I think that technological quality can be overstated. I see it from every day and I see it from afar. I'm not on some of these platforms, but I think it's really powerful to see the ways that technology can be exploited by whomever it is to not only create a hoax, but also then to say that other things are hoaxes, things that happen to be true.

That's a really troubling thing, when people are able to launch against say climate change and say it's a hoax, and really, the hoax is saying that it's a hoax. We're in this weird world. I don't think it's about one person, I really think it's about this moment where technology and disconnection and these disconnects, the racial divisions among them, or most among them are exploitable. I think that's really a troubling place.

In my book, I trace it as having a long history in it. [unintelligible 00:18:03] and flowing and we're certainly in the flow of it right now. How do we get out of it? I think for me, people are really looking for solutions, for facts, and places like the museum are really establishing the way you can tell a story, the way you can provide evidence, the way you can provide up-close looks and things that we sometimes forget or purposely forget. Things like the Tulsa massacre are things that we've been talking about. Now I'm really happy to see this broader conversation about the things that we sometimes don't want to remember.

Brian Lehrer: Kevin Young, poet, New Yorker poetry editor, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, and now the author of a brand new poetry collection called Stones. Wonderful to have you with us, Kevin. Thank you so much for giving us the time.

Kevin Young: Thanks always.

Brian Lehrer: The Brian Lehrer Show is produced by Lisa Allison, Mary Croke, Zoe Azulay, Amina Srna, and Carl Boisrond. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen works on our daily podcast. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio. Juliana Fonda and Liora Noam-Kravitz at the audio controls. I'm Brian Lehrer.

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