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 Night Watch. 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 further than that book. It's an extraordinary book.

Kevin Young: Thank you.

David Remnick: You've written about the blues and African American experience in general. You've also published books of prose, too. 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.

Kevin Young: I think this book, Night Watch, exemplifies a lot of them. It thinks about loss, but it also thinks about music. I think the music in this book is a slightly different music. It isn't necessarily blues or jazz, but it's rooted in the spirituals in some sense. 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. It begins there, but then extends really into the realm of lots of other things, including the 19th century, all the way to Dante.

David Remnick: Now, with this new book, it is also a ballsy thing to invite comparison to Dante.

Kevin Young: I guess. We all have our own Dante, and this is the moment that I wanted to try to-- 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 dark that I was trying to contend with. He gave a framework for me to-- You can't write about hell and be only cheerful. How do you write about it and frame it as a journey rather than a morass? I think Dante's-- He himself incorporates Virgil, of course, as his guide through hell, and so Dante is my guide through it in that way. I didn't think of him as someone I'm rivaling or following, but more like a guide, someone who's the greater master that I'm trying to get across and get through.

David Remnick: Dante's poem is supposed to lead us back toward another text. It's supposed to lead us toward reading the Bible again. That's at least the stated thing, but I think he was up to more mischief than that.

Kevin Young: He's getting revenge in some of them. There's a lot of strife in Florence at the time. He's trying to write about now through eternity. I was just always struck by things that I still wrestle with in the poem, like he has the devil eating Judas face first, and I was like, "Is that worse to be face first for eternity?" That's in the poem. "Is that what's worse? What is punishment, and what is the crux of belief?" Those things are all around us. I pulled out the book, which I 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 this is a journey through that."

David Remnick: Kevin, would you read us the section of Darkling that's titled Ledge?

Kevin Young: Yes. This is from the poem, based on Dante, called Darkling. This is from the Purgatory section. 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,

Beauty 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, '

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.

David Remnick: 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. "Beauty 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."

Kevin Young: Bit true that. [laughter] Juan, I feel like there's a humor in Dante, and certainly there's a humor in the blues or in the traditions I inherited. I think my poetry became mine when I admitted that sometimes I want to make you laugh in the midst.

David Remnick: Were you too solemn as a young poet?

Kevin Young: Oh, yes. In Juvenilia, yes, and pulling your hair out. I think it's a classic thing. You sit down to write, you pull out your quill, you dip it in the ink.

David Remnick: Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote or the first attempts?

Kevin Young: Oh, yes, of course.

David Remnick: What were they like?

Kevin Young: I still have them. They were moody, and they were about the sea, but I was in Kansas, where I went to high school. They were not about what was right around me, and then I think when I realized that I could write about how my parents told stories, how my family in Louisiana looked at the world, and the sound of that talk, which I've been trying to capture and write about all these years, I think that was part of it. Also, 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? How do you look for redemption in a world that can feel against you? It literally often is.

David Remnick: Now you're talking about history, and a large portion of this new book, Night Watch, is about Millie and Christine McKoy. It's a story that seems like something from fiction, but these are historical figures. Give us a little orientation here. Who were the McKoys?

Kevin Young: They were conjoined twins born into slavery, and then they were stolen and exhibited around the country. 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 won the suit, which is just unprecedented. I was interested in the ways that they both were enslaved and then 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.

I've written about Barnum before, so I had always been interested in them. The images of them are quite striking. I think even in the images, which are probably early, you see them as young girls with this prepossessed stature, and they're facing the camera as much as they can to get them both. I think that they were a little bit looking askance at you, but I think there's something about that that's really powerful. They also have sometimes lutes or instruments. They were wonderful singers.

Then, upon their freedom, they sang and toured Europe, and their harmonies were incredibly close, as you can imagine, and were reportedly just incredible. Then they bought the property of where they were enslaved, and died there.

David Remnick: After the war.

Kevin Young: Yes. Their family ended up back in the Carolinas in that same property. They also refer to themselves as singular often, as I, and sometimes as we. They thought of themselves as one being in many instances.

David Remnick: What was your source material for this? Is there a famous biography?

Kevin Young: There are some biographies, but I actually tracked down-- You know me, I'm a bit of a collector person. I tracked down a lot of their early pamphlets from the 19th century and the late 1860s, '70s.

David Remnick: This is now archived in various places.

Kevin Young: Yes, but I tracked them down for me. I want to hold them and own the papers because these are how they describe themselves. I wanted to get as close to that as possible, to think about how they wrote themselves into existence. It has their songs in there and various things, and some of that made their way into the poem.

David Remnick: Kevin, would you read an excerpt from the poem about them for us?

Kevin Young: 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 peak, 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.

Each 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.

David Remnick: Kevin, I noticed that on the page, this second part is in italics.

Kevin Young: Yes. This part I just read is in italics. That's a doctor's report, but these doctors were self-appointed doctors, and a little bit, let's say, I think disingenuous at best and abusive at worst. I wanted some example of that, but this idea of their identical dreams I think transcends even this doctor's because that's not something he can examine, that's something they have reported. Then there's this last part, if I may, where she speaks again. "It is our mind, Doctors 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."

David Remnick: Kevin, you, in addition to being a great individual artist, are also an institutionalist of a kind. 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. Now we're in 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?

Kevin Young: History is all over my work. Especially when I was writing nonfiction books, I think there was a moment-- 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 which is sometimes what you lose in 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, and 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.

David Remnick: Now it's the dominant theme.

Kevin Young: Then it came out in 2017, I think it was. I hate to say, for me, that things have gotten worse. I thought we were in that worst patch and that we'd be getting better, but to me, that thing is a bit cyclical. How do we get past it?

David Remnick: 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?

Kevin Young: I think so. I think there's that mix of it's unprecedented, which I always find overused, because I think in many ways it's precedented, and how do we talk about that? I also was here as the poetry editor during pandemic, too, and to see how people were starting to wrestle with this century-in-the-making event was so powerful to see, and to see how poets offered testimony and putting together the anthology really showed me that.

David Remnick: You're talking about the recent centennial anthology that you edited.

Kevin Young: Yes, 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. 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.

David Remnick: Are you finding the poems that you get as an editor-- 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?

Kevin Young: I think since pandemic, people have been wrestling with these questions, perhaps before even, but I see them wrestling more successfully now.

David Remnick: Why would that be?

Kevin Young: I think because some of the lessons of poetry's-- Poetry for a long time, you would go to these conferences and people would say things like, "Can poetry be political?" I'd be like, "What are you talking about?"

David Remnick: "Like Mr. Dante, that's a very political poem."

Kevin Young: Exactly. 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. I think some of that's reflected in the pages, a lot of that, but reflected in the strategies. You 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 loss and hope and all the things that I think poetry can be made up of.

David Remnick: Kevin Young, thanks so much.

Kevin Young: Thanks, David.

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David Remnick: Kevin 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.

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