Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. He studied under Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido at Harvard University and, while a student there, became a member of the Dark Room Collective, a community of African American writers. “I feel like a poem is made up of poetic and unpoetic language, or unexpected language,” Young said in a 2006 interview with Ploughshares. “I think there are many other vernaculars, whether it’s the vernacular of the blues, or the vernacular of visual art, the sort of living language of the everyday.” For roughly a decade, Young was the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. Young is the poetry editor of the New Yorker and the director of New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
More By This Poet
Diptych
night watch
You can fall in love
in a museum, but only
with the art
or its silence—or the stranger
you don’t mean to follow
suffering past the Old Masters
& the unnamed
servants. Rembrandt’s face
half in shadow—
you can fall for what
isn’t there already, or
with the 13th century—the...
I am Trying to Break Your Heart
I am hoping
to hang your head
on my wall
in shame—
the slightest taxidermy
thrills me. Fish
forever leaping
on the living-room wall—
paperweights made
from skulls
of small animals.
I want to wear
your smile on my sleeve
& break
your heart like a horse
or its leg. Weeks of being
bucked off, then
all...
Negative
Wake to find everything black
what was white, all the vice
versa—white maids on TV, black
sitcoms that star white dwarfs
cute as pearl buttons. Black Presidents,
Black Houses. White horse
candidates. All bleach burns
clothes black. Drive roads
white as you are, white songs
on the radio stolen...
Pietà
I hunted heaven
for him.
No dice.
Too uppity,
it was. Not enough
music, or dark dirt.
I begged the earth empty
of him. Death
believes in us whether
we believe
or not. For a long while
I watch the sound
of a boy bouncing a ball
down the block
take its time
to reach...
Eddie Priest’s Barbershop & Notary
is music is men
off early from work is waiting
for the chance at the chair
while the eagle claws holes
in your pockets keeping
time by the turning
of rusty fans steel flowers with
cold breezes is having nothing
better to do than guess at the years
of...
Cadillac Moon
Crashing
again—Basquiat
sends fenders
& letters headlong
into each other
the future. Fusion.
AAAAAAAAAAA.
Big Bang. The Big
Apple, Atom's
behind him—
no sirens
in sight. His career
of careening
since—at six—
playing stickball
a car stole
his spleen. Blind
sided. Move
along folks—nothing
to see here. Driven,
does two Caddys
colliding, biting
the dust he's begun
to snort. Hit
& run. Red
Cross—the pill-pale
ambulance,...
Ode to the Midwest
I want to be doused
in cheese
& fried. I want
to wander
the aisles, my heart's
supermarket stocked high
as cholesterol. I want to die
wearing a sweatsuit—
I want to live
forever in a Christmas sweater,
a teddy bear nursing
off the front. I want to write
a check in...