An epic of America
Kevin Young's "Night Watch" is a poetic journey through our messy history. Join us when we talk to him today at 12:30 Eastern
Today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, join us live for our final September Ink Book Club discussion with poet Kevin Young, author of Night Watch. Watch on desktop at The Ink or on a phone or tablet using the Substack app.
What is a poet’s task, now? And what is a poem supposed to do for readers? Does it tell the story of a community or a country? Does it communicate emotion on a level that escapes prose? Does it capture humanity? Are any of those tasks achievable, or are they forever elusive? Kevin Young writes in “Last Suppers”:
Holes in my hands.
Buckets,
what I cannot hold.You, water,
worlds away —
He’s been thinking about this question for a long time. In 1999, he wrote:
I have long been interested in poems that may be called “successful failures,” —those overreaching, underplanned, ill-conceived messy delights that do not enact a perfect marbleized form (nor wish to) but nevertheless delight with their sense of surprise, of sound–-their personality. They are poems you’ll sit and listen to for a while, their stories too wild to ignore; or maybe you’ll dial them up: long poems are nothing if not loyal.
“Night Watch” isn’t a single epic, but as a series of linked cycles, it’s a long work that demands to be reckoned with in the same way. And in its verses of seasons and change and the insect world, of poets from Dante and Blake to Berryman and Beckett, of faith and brokenness, of runaway slaves and Anne Frank, of Rembrandt’s paintings and ‘50s hot rods doing taxi duty in Havana, it tells a wild story of our world and our civilization and, ultimately, of America. It’s an alternative to the “National Anthem of Suffering” Young names in “Grace” — and a story that’s very much unfinished in its ambitious overreaching.
We’ll ask him about all of this, and what it means to be a poet now in an age of censorship, an age that’s turning against knowledge — one that demands wild stories of the future. What kind of story do you think Young is telling? Or making space for the reader to tell?
And a reminder. Our October Ink Book Club selection is We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution, by Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ‘41 Professor of American History at Harvard, professor of law at Harvard Law School, and staff writer at The New Yorker. Click on the cover below to order a copy.
