The poet's way

Join The Ink Book Club at 12:30 p.m. Eastern today for a live conversation with poet, editor, and curator Kevin Young, author of "Night Watch"

Join The Ink Book Club today, Wednesday, September 3, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, for a conversation with acclaimed poet Kevin Young. Tune in from your desktop at The Ink or from a phone or tablet with the Substack app. The Book Club is open to all supporting subscribers of The Ink.

What powers Kevin Young as a poet?

That’s what we’re eager to hear from the author of our September Ink Book Club selection, Night Watch, when we speak later today in the first of two live conversations we’re hosting with Young, one of the most important poets of his generation.

There isn’t a time Young remembers when he didn’t want to be a poet—it was all he ever wanted to do for a living. He studied poetry at Harvard under such legendary mentors as Irish poet Seamus Heaney, learning that “writing poetry can be an act of recovery—of remembrance…to save what we didn’t even know needed saving.”

“I’m really interested in how history shapes us, and how history is encountered by ordinary folks,” he has said.

In his latest volume, he contemplates the legacy of slavery; Dante’s journey through the nine circles of hell; conjoined twins Millie and Christine McCoy, born enslaved in 1851; and Young’s father’s death. Several of Night Watch’s poems, in the “All Souls” cycle, reflect on the arrival of fall, what it symbolizes, and how nature’s turn evokes a deeper, more complex, and very human story. Here’s an excerpt:

Go head on
without me.

For the journey,
jettison nothing.

Let autumn do that—

how it sheds
clothes like a runaway

heading steady north.

Young is the author of sixteen books of poetry and prose, including Stones, which was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2021. In addition to being the poetry editor of The New Yorker, he also hosts the publication’s Poetry Podcast. He’s the editor of eleven anthologies, including African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, and the former director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture and of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In other words, we’re fortunate to have him!

Thanks for reading, and see you later today, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, for the discussion! We’ve shared some of the questions we’re thinking of posing to Young for readers to chew on in advance, and we hope you’ll add your own in the comments below. We’ll get to as many as we can during the discussion.

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