CANR
WORK TITLE: Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 11/8/1970
WEBSITE:
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 175, CANR 211
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Young_(poet) http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/416
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 8, 1970, in Lincoln, NE.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A., 1992; Brown University, M.F.A., 1996.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet and educator. University of Georgia, Athens, assistant professor; Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry; Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 2005—began as visiting lecturer, became Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, 2005-16; The New Yorker, poetry editor, 2017-.
AWARDS:Stegner fellowship in poetry, Stanford University, 1992-94; MacDowell Colony fellowships, 1993, 1995; National Poetry Series winner, 1995, and John C. Zacharis First Book Award, Ploughshares, 1996, both for Most Way Home; Patterson Poetry Prize, Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, 2004, for Jelly Roll: A Blues; National Endowment for the Arts literary fellowship, 2004; Quill Award for poetry, 2007, for For the Confederate Dead; PEN Open Book Award, 2013, and Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, both for The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; Lenore Marschall Poetry Prize for the year’s best collection, American Academy of Poets, 2015, for Book of Hours: Poems; inducted into American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2016.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poetry to numerous periodicals, including the New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Callaloo, and DoubleTake.
SIDELIGHTS
Poet Kevin Young earned significant accolades for his debut collection, Most Way Home. Divided into several sections, Most Way Home is an examination of what it was—and is—to be an African American, past and present. Young tackles issues of slavery, racism, and poverty. One of the book’s central themes is that of “home,” a term that Young uses as a metaphor for a collective African American retrospection. Many of the poems have a bittersweet, nostalgic tone, carrying the reader far into the deep South, where the relationship between black and white was often a difficult one.
In the collection’s first poem, Young writes about an advertisement that offers a reward for those who find and return escaped slaves. Several of the poems are told through the viewpoint of a boy whose father has died, leaving a family that is driven from their home with little hope for the future.
Patricia Monaghan, reviewing the book in Booklist, called the author and his debut book “marvelous.” Monaghan also noted: “First books rarely sing with such controlled music.” Labeling Most Way Home a “harsh volume,” Library Journal contributor Ellen Kaufman assessed the collection as “a promising first work.” F.D. Reeve responded favorably in Poetry to the expression of pain and subject matter in the volume. Reeve declared that, with his book, Young was “proving … how difficult it is for anyone to resolve the conflicts of an age.”
Young’s next collection of poems, To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor, features 117 poems primarily about the painter and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, but also touching upon such artists as rock legend Jimi Hendrix and jazz greats Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Charles Mingus. The collection is divided into five “albums,” and each poem is a “song.” A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that Young creates “an inspired bricolage of shiny borrowings.” In a review for the PopMatters Web site, John G. Nettles said that the poet “will spin off into side melodies” like jazz riffs. The critic added: “But Young inevitably returns to Basquiat, the whole thing resembling a marathon bebop session a la Monk or Coltrane.” Writing in Art in America, Raphael Rubinstein commented: “This is not only compelling, innovative contemporary poetry, it may be the best interpretive study yet of Basquiat’s art.”
Young received enormous praise once again for his collection of poems titled Jelly Roll: A Blues. This time, the author’s poems are written with a rhythm as homage to the traditional Southern blues. Writing on the African American Literature Book Club Web site, Rondall Brasher commented that the author “taps right into and dishes up the hypnotic lyrical rhythms of performers from the Mississippi and Louisiana Deltas.” The reviewer went on to note that the author “not only captures blues rhythms but he instills the essence of the blues.” A Publishers Weekly contributor observed that Young maintains “a unity of subject: like an old-fashioned sonnet sequence writ large, the book chronicles the star, progress, and catastrophic end of a love affair.” “Young’s achievement is … admirable,” concluded Library Journal reviewer Fred Muratori, “attesting to both the resilience of the blues and the skills of its talented practitioner.”
Young borrows from the lexicon of the detective genre for Black Maria: Being the Adventures of Delilah Redbone & A.K.A. Jones. The poems here revolve around the thoughts of Redbone, a singer, and Jones, a detective, as they encounter the characters who live in Shadowtown, including the Champ and the Snitch. As Howard Rambsy II pointed out in Black Issues Book Review: “The poems include witty put-downs and powerful boasts. For example, a character notes that ‘The Boss’ was so villainous that ‘even his walking / stick was crooked.’” Rambsy also wrote that the collection “reveals a poet with a gift for blues inflected storytelling.” Writing in Library Journal, Fred Muratori commented: “Young throws himself into the world of ‘fedoraed darkness’ and smoky nightclubs with enthusiasm and grace.” Booklist contributor Donna Seaman concluded that “Young turns cliché inside out in an ingenious celebration of improvisation in art and in life.”
Young has also edited several books, including Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, which features fiction, essays, and poetry covering such topics as slavery and poverty. As editor and selector for John Berryman: Selected Poems, Young presents a wide range of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s works. A Wisconsin Bookwatch contributor commented that this collection would “aptly serve to introduce a whole new generation” to Berryman.
While the main theme of For the Confederate Dead is Reconstruction-era black history, in this collection Young also pays tribute to poets Federico Garcia Lorca, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Phillis Wheatley, as well as to his friend, writer Philippe Wamba, and artist James Hampton. He writes of the hunger and spirituality of the Deep South and the aspirations, successes, and losses of the African American. The collection begins with a tribute to Brooks and ends with “Homage to Phillis Wheatley.” “The Ballad of Jim Crow” makes comparisons to Jesus Christ. The title of the volume is a reference to For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell.
Young includes poems that he adapted from the notebook writings of Booker T. Washington, as well as a series of poems about rural America. A Publishers Weekly contributor described Young’s sequence honoring Wamba and describing his visit to Tanzania to attend Wamba’s funeral the “emotional center” of the volume. Each segment of “African Elegy” is titled for a reggae song. Wamba was fond of reggae. The Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that “the sequence combines travelogue with inconsolable grief.”
“Influenced by blues and jazz, the poet here is a shape-shifter, with the technical prowess to venture just about anywhere,” wrote Rochelle Ratner in Library Journal. Seaman called this collection Young’s “most overtly beautiful poems to date,” and concluded that his “pairing of humor and deep feeling is bluesy and tonic.”
Dear Darkness: Poems is Young’s sixth, and most autobiographical, collection of more than one hundred poems. Young relives the illness, death, and funeral of his father, and reflects on the changes caused by the death of a parent. He also evokes the tastes of the food he enjoyed in his childhood Louisiana home. Okra, chitlins, grits, and crawfish provide the flavor of Young’s memories, which he expresses through blues humor. A Publishers Weekly critic wrote: “Young digs deepest and sounds most powerful when he returns to the unlucky, unlovely, generalized personae of blues.”
While some of the poems are poignant, others are quite funny, such as “On Being the Only Black Person at the Johnny Paycheck Concert” and “Ode to Pork.” Young writes of his aunties and uncles; his Afro haircut, which his mother trimmed in the bathroom; country and country-western music; and Las Vegas.
The title of the volume was inspired by the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Sounds of Silence” (1965), which itself was in part inspired by the death of President John F. Kennedy. Seaman wrote that “Young reaches for myth but can’t resist wit,” and commented that this collection, with its subjects of family, love, and childhood, should appeal to teens, especially those who view hip-hop as poetry. Library Journal contributor Diane Scharper concluded: “Ultimately, the collection effectively becomes an exercise in soul-searching even as it eulogizes Young’s father.”
As editor of The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing, Young oversees a collection of poems about suffering and overcoming loss by African-American poets inspired by the blues, jazz, and the work of John Berryman. “This latest anthology is his most topical, and, perhaps, his most useful,” according to a writer in Publishers Weekly, who added that the poems will keep the kind of company that only poetry can. In a review in Library Journal, Doris Lynch remarked that while the “poems are memorializing stillbirths or newborns, grandparents or parents, siblings or friends, loss is always paramount.” Donna Seaman said in Booklist: “Young offers an original and personal analysis of the modern elegy.”
Young’s poems in his 2012 Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels revisit the 1840 mutiny on board the slave ship Amistad. He creates various characters, invokes Negro spirituals, and acknowledges the violence and virtue of American history. “Here is this much-celebrated poet’s passion for music, teasing wordplay, life-raft irony, and plunging insights into African American resistance to tyranny,” noted Donna Seaman in Booklist. In Library Journal, Diane Scharper remarked: “Young expertly blends cultural and social history as well as religion to dramatize the lives of the rebels.” Writing in Publishers Weekly, a contributor said: “The book taken as a whole is more powerful than some of the individual poems. That whole is impressive indeed.”
Young’s 2015 Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, pays tribute to his father, who had died suddenly and left an enormous impact on Young. At the same time, Young welcomed the birth of his son. The poems in the book explore grief but also celebrate life’s passages. “The tension between death and creation, and the poet’s struggle to contain both, fuels these short-lined poems,” noted a writer in Publishers Weekly. Young is skilled at expressing “sensations of the moment and retrieving the spirit of the past in poems of monumental grief, stoicism, rapture, and sharp humor,” according to Donna Seaman in Booklist.
In a review in Library Journal, Fred Muratori commented that despite some repetition, “Young challenges his large themes with a master craftsman’s discipline and determination.” Robert P. Baird wrote in Esquire that Young’s critics say he is too much devoted to the past, “Yet nowhere is Young’s compulsion to arrest time more moving than in Book of Hours, from 2014, which includes poems he wrote after the death of his father and before the birth of his son. Young says he wanted ‘even the metaphors to be taken from the experience. I realize now that I was very much trying to document and record in a historic sense.’”
In 2016, Young published Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015, named a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” selection, and a Best Book of 2017 by the Los Angeles Times and the Atlantic. The book collects Young’s best poetry over the past two decades that engage the pleasures and pains of African-American lives. Writing in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer observed how Young “puts his characteristically succinct narrative lines on full display” and also “demonstrates a deft skill for persona.” The collection also incorporates outtakes and previously unseen blues found in family life, Southern food, loss, and personal sensibility.
In 2017, Young wrote the nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, a look back at historical fakers, from B.T. Barnum to Donald Trump. Delving into the curiously American phenomenon of hucksterism, Young examines why fakery is so pervasive and the depths some will go to perpetrate it. He covers side show hoaxers, séances and spiritualism, journalistic fakers, famous forgers, and made-up memoirs of James Frey. From colonialists who wore redface to confuse the British during the Boston Tea Party to Caucasian Rachel Dolezal passing herself off as black, to today’s reality television and the political acceptance of “truthiness,” Young examines the variety and, sadly, effectiveness of fakery in politics, literature, and everyday life.
In attempting to answer why we so easily believe nonsense, “Young astutely declares the hoax a frequent metaphor for a ‘deep-seated cultural wish’ that confirms prejudicial ideas and stereotypes,” noted a writer in Publishers Weekly. In Kirkus Reviews, a writer described the book “A little harsh here, a little overstated there, but all in all a fascinating, well-researched look at the many ways Americans hoodwink each other, often about race.” Moreover, “Like a joke that brings down the house, a hoax unites a cunning speaker with a crowd that wants to be fooled,” said Kelly Blewett in a review in BookPage. In Booklist, Vanessa Bush explained: “Young closes with an examination of today’s constant bombardment of intertwined facts and factoids” and said that each of us my try to suss out the truth.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
African American Review, fall, 2002, Keith Gilyard, review of To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor, p. 510.
Antioch Review, spring, 2009, Benjamin S. Grossberg, review of Dear Darkness: Poems, p. 399.
Art in America, February, 2002, Raphael Rubinstein, review of To Repel Ghosts, p. 41.
Black Issues Book Review, May, 2001, review of To Repel Ghosts, p. 37; March-April, 2005, Howard Rambsy II, review of Black Maria: Being the Adventures of Delilah Redbone & A.K.A. Jones, p. 34; March-April, 2005, Quraysh Ali Lansana, “NEA Awards Four Brothers in Verse,” p. 34.
Black Scholar, spring, 1995, review of Most Way Home, p. 74.
Booklist, January 1, 1995, Patricia Monaghan, review of Most Way Home, p. 796; May 15, 2001, review of To Repel Ghosts, p. 1724; February 1, 2005, Donna Seaman, review of Black Maria, p. 936; February 1, 2007, Donna Seaman, review of For the Confederate Dead, p. 28; September 1, 2008, Donna Seaman, review of Dear Darkness, p. 25; March 1, 2010, Donna Seaman, review of The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing, p. 42; February 1, 2011, Donna Seaman, review of Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, p. 24; March 15, 2014, Donna Seaman, review of Book of Hours, p. 42; Booklist, October 15, 2017, Vanessa Bush, review of Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News, p. 3.
.
BookPage, December 2017, Kelly Blewett, review of Bunk, p. 42.
Callaloo, winter, 1998, Charles H. Rowell, “An Interview with Kevin Young,” p. 43.
Christian Science Monitor, November 18, 2003, review of Jelly Roll: A Blues, p. 17.
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2017, review of Bunk.
Library Journal, February 15, 1995, Ellen Kaufman, review of Most Way Home, pp. 159-160; November 1, 1999, Ann Burns and Emily J. Jones, review of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, p. 106; January, 2003, Fred Muratori, review of Jelly Roll, p. 116; February 15, 2005, Fred Muratori, review of Black Maria, p. 135; October 15, 2006, Rochelle Ratner, review of For the Confederate Dead, p. 67; August 1, 2008, Diane Scharper, review of Dear Darkness, p. 90; March 15, 2010, Doris Lynch, review of The Art of Losing, p. 107; Library Journal, February 1, 2011, Diane Scharper, review of Ardency, p. 69.
New York Times Book Review, May 1, 2005, Joel Brouwer, review of Black Maria, p. 8.
North American Review, January-February, 2003, Vince Gotera, review of Jelly Roll, p. 53.
Poetry, April, 1997, F.D. Reeve, review of Most Way Home, p. 37; May, 2002, John Taylor, review of To Repel Ghosts, p. 96.
Publishers Weekly, April 16, 2001, review of To Repel Ghosts, p. 60; November 25, 2002, review of Jelly Roll, p. 58; December 20, 2004, review of Black Maria, p. 52; December 18, 2006, review of For the Confederate Dead, p. 46; July 21, 2008, review of Dear Darkness, p. 143; March 22, 2010, review of The Art of Losing, p. 55; January 17, 2011, review of Ardency, p. 31; February 24, 2014, review of Book of Hours, p. 157; February 15, 2016, review of Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, p. 41; August 14, 2017, review of Bunk, p. 63.
Wisconsin Bookwatch, November, 2004, review of John Berryman: Selected Poems.
ONLINE
Academy of American Poets Website, http://www.poets.org/ (March 23, 2010), profile.
African American Literature Book Club, http://www.aalbc.com/ (March 23, 2010), Rondall Brasher, review of Jelly Roll.
Bookpage Online http://www.bookpage.com/ (July 29, 2003), Kate Daniels, review of Jelly Roll.
Emory University Creative Writing Program, http://creativewriting.emory.edu/ (March 23, 2010), profile.
Esquire, http://www.esquire.com/ (November 6, 2017), Robert P. Baird, “Can Kevin Young Make Poetry Matter Again?”
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (January 1, 1995), John G. Nettles, review of To Repel Ghosts.
Kevin Young
1970- , Lincoln , NE
Kevin Young
Photo credit: Melanie Dunea
Related Schools & Movements:
Dark Room Collective
Tags: NEA Fellow
Texts by this Poet:
On Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues
It Don’t Mean A Thing: The Blues Mask of Modernism
browse all texts
Texts about this Poet:
Fall Conversation Series: Kevin Young and Gabrielle Hamilton (audio)
A Poetry Reading with Carolyn Forché and Kevin Young
From the Archive: Cave Canem
Kevin Young was born in 1970 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He received his BA from Harvard University in 1992, where he studied poetry with Lucie Brock-Broido and Seamus Heaney, and his MFA in creative writing from Brown University in 1996.
His poetry collections include Brown, forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf in April 2018; Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016); Book of Hours (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, given for the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States each year; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Dear Darkness: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); For the Confederate Dead (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Black Maria (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Jelly Roll: A Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books, 2001), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Most Way Home (Steerforth, 1995), selected for the National Poetry Series and winner of the Zacharis First Books Award from Ploughshares.
About Book of Hours, judge A. Van Jordan wrote:
“As if walking through a gallery of grief, reverie, and transcendence, Kevin Young’s Book of Hours exemplifies what poetry can do in the world when language works at its full power. The poems in this collection hold emotion taut on each line while allowing for the nimbleness of language to drape over them, bringing tension between the heart and the mind, as Young consistently surprises us with profound elegance. Kevin Young is a master poet who has offered us a transformative curation of life, death and the ways in which we deal with it all in Book of Hours.”
Young’s book of nonfiction Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017) was longlisted for the National Book Award. He has also edited several anthologies, including The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (Bloomsbury, 2010), Blues Poems (Everyman’s Library, 2003), and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000), as well as a selected volume of poems by John Berryman for the Library of America. He is also the author of The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012), winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Award.
About Young’s work, the poet Lucille Clifton said, “This poet’s gift of storytelling and understanding of the music inherent in the oral tradition of language re-creates for us an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American.”
Young’s awards and honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. He has taught at the University of Georgia, Indiana University, and Emory University, where he was the Charles Howard Candler professor of creative writing and English and curator of literary collections at the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. He is the director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the poetry editor of The New Yorker. He lives in New Jersey.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Brown (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018)
Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016)
Book of Hours (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)
Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)
Dear Darkness: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)
For the Confederate Dead (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)
Black Maria (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)
Jelly Roll: A Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003)
To Repel Ghosts (Zoland Books, 2001)
Most Way Home (Steerforth, 1995)
Prose
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, 2017)
The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012)
Kevin Young (poet)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other people with the same name, see Kevin Young (disambiguation).
Kevin Young
Headshot of Kevin Young. Young, with short hair and a beard, smiles at the camera; he wears a blue shirt and round glasses.
Young at the 2017 Texas Book Festival
Born Lincoln, Nebraska
Occupation Poet, professor, editor, literary critic
Language English
Nationality American
Alma mater Harvard College (AB);
Brown University (MFA)
Genre Poetry, literary criticism
Subject Blues
Notable awards Guggenheim Fellowship; finalist, National Book Award
Spouse Kate Tuttle
Website
kevinyoungpoetry.com
Kevin Young is an American poet and teacher of poetry. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others,[1] Young has been a winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his collection Jelly Roll: A Blues. Young has served as Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, as well as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. In March 2017, Young became poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Contents [hide]
1 Early life
2 Career
3 Personal life
4 Awards
5 Bibliography
5.1 Collections
6 References
7 External links
Early life[edit]
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young was the only child of two working parents, his father, Dr. Paul E. Young, an ophthalmologist and his mother, Dr. Azzie Young, a chemist.[2][3] Due to the careers of both of his parents, his family moved frequently throughout his youth. Young lived in six different places before he reached the age of ten,[2] but his family ultimately settled in Topeka, Kansas. He first began to pursue writing when he was thirteen years old, after he attended a summer writing class at Washburn University.[4]
Young attended Harvard College, where he studied with Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido[2] and became friends with writer Colson Whitehead.[5] He graduated in 1992, then held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University (1992–94), where he worked with Denise Levertov, and received his Master of Fine Arts from Brown University, where Michael S. Harper served as a significant influence.[6]
Career[edit]
While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group the Dark Room Collective.[2] He is heavily influenced by the poets Langston Hughes, John Berryman, and Emily Dickinson and by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Young wrote much of his debut collection, Most Way Home, while still an undergraduate.[7] Published by William Morrow in 1995,[5] Most Way Home was selected by Lucille Clifton for the National Poetry Series and won Ploughshares's John C. Zacharis First Book Award.[6] Writing in Ploughshares, Rob Arnold observes that in that first book Young "explores his own family's narratives, showing an uncanny awareness of voice and persona."[7]
Young has described his next three books To Repel Ghosts (named for a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting), Jelly Roll (a collection of love poems named for Jelly Roll Morton), and Black Maria as an "American trilogy", calling the series Devil's Music.[7]
Young's collection The Book of Hours (Knopf 2014)[8] won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
Young is also the author of For The Confederate Dead, Dear Darkness, Blues Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems 1995–2015 (2016)[9] and editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000), Blues Poems (2003), Jazz Poems (2006), and John Berryman's Selected Poems (2004).[7]
His poem "Black Cat Blues," originally published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, was included in The Best American Poetry 2005. Young's poetry has also appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. In 2007, he served as guest editor for an issue of Ploughshares.[7] He has written on art and artists for museums in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.
His 2003 book of poems Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award. Young was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2003, as well as an NEA Literature Fellow in Poetry.[10]
After stints at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, Young now teaches writing at Emory University, where he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, as well as the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a large collection of first and rare editions of poetry in English.[11][12]
In September 2016,[1] Young became the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.[13]
In March 2017, he was named poetry editor of The New Yorker,[2] to begin in November 2017.[1]
Young is working on two books, a non-fiction book called Bunk on the U.S. history of lies and hoaxes and a poetry collection he's described as being "about African American history and also personal history, growing up in Kansas, which has a long black history including Langston Hughes and others."[1]
Personal life[edit]
Young lives in New York.[1] He is married to Kate Tuttle, book columnist at The Boston Globe;[14] Tuttle and Young married in 2005.[3]
Awards[edit]
2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for The Book of Hours[8]
2013 PEN/Open Book for The Grey Album[15]
2013 Final, National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for The Grey Album[16]
2009 Fellow Award from United States Artists.[17]
2007 Quill Award
2007 Patterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement.
2003 Finalist for National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Award, Jelly Roll.
2003 Winner Patterson Poetry Prize[7]
1993 Most Way Home selected for National Poetry Series by Lucille Clifton; awarded John C. Zacharis First Book Prize from Ploughshares Magazine.
Guggenheim Fellowship[7]
Bibliography[edit]
Collections[edit]
Most Way Home: Poems. Zoland Books, 1998.
To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor. Zoland Books, 2002; To Repel Ghosts: Remixed from the Original Masters. Knopf. 2005. ISBN 978-0-375-71023-0.
Jelly Roll. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 1 February 2005. ISBN 978-0-375-70989-0.
Black Maria: Poems Produced and Directed by. Knopf, 2005. ISBN 9781400042098
For the Confederate Dead. ALFRED A KNOPF. September 2008. ISBN 978-0-375-71141-1.
Dear Darkness: Poems. Knopf, 2008. ISBN 9780307264343
Ardency. Random House, 2011
Book of Hours, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015, ISBN 9780375711886
Blues Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems 1995–2015, Knopf 2016
Editor
Blues Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets). Everyman's Library, 2003. (Editor)
John Berryman: Selected Poems. Library of America, 2004. (Editor)
Kevin Young, ed. (2006). Jazz Poems. Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 18–. ISBN 978-1-4000-4251-7.
Kevin Young, ed. (16 March 2010). The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 978-1-60819-033-1.
Kevin Young, ed. (28 October 2014). The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink. Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 978-1-60819-768-2.
Anthologies
H.L. Hix, ed. (2008). New Voices: Contemporary Poetry from the United States. Irish Pages. ISBN 978-0-9544257-9-1.
Kevin Young
b. 1970
http://www.kevinyoungpoetry.com
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. He was awarded a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and later earned an MFA from Brown University. He is the author of many books of poetry, including the recent collections Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 and Book of Hours (2014). Three of Kevin Young’s books form what he calls “an American trilogy”: To Repel Ghosts (2001), which explores the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat; Jelly Roll (2003), a collection of blues poems; and Black Maria (2005), a film noir. His first book of poetry, Most Way Home (1995), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Lucille Clifton, who describes the collection as re-creating “an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American.” Reviewing Young’s work in 2007, critic Amy Guth largely agrees with Clifton, and adds, “Perhaps the most noticeable characteristic of Young’s work ... is the musical quality so fundamentally ingrained and supplied to each piece.”
Young’s other collections of poetry include For the Confederate Dead (2007), which won the Quill Award in Poetry and the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Excellence; Dear Darkness (2008); Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (2011), which won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award; and Book of Hours (2014), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His nonfiction collection of essays, cultural criticism, and “lyrical chorus,” The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (2012) won the Greywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also shortlisted for the PEN Open Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Young is also the editor of the anthologies Jazz Poems (2006), John Berryman: Selected Poems (2004), Blues Poems (2003), and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers (2000).
“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.
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Biography
Kevin Young is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark. He is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, most recently Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011), winner of an American Book Award; and Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008). His collection Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Young's nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News (Graywolf Press, November 14, 2017), was longlisted for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book, an NPR "Best Book of 2017," and a Los Angeles Times "Best Book of 2017." Young's previous nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012), won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He is the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, 2012) and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012). Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
Young also serves as Poetry Editor of the New Yorker starting in November 2017.
CAN KEVIN YOUNG MAKE POETRY MATTER AGAIN?
He’s written poetry about Prince, has a new book about our love affair with fake news, and has just been named to one of the most powerful posts in American letters.
BY ROBERT P. BAIRD
NOV 6, 2017
775
On August 25, 1835, residents of New York City woke to the sound of newsboys howling about an astonishing discovery. According to The New York Sun, a British astronomer had discovered life on the moon. Using a giant telescope outfitted with an ingenious “hydro-oxygen” mechanism, the newspaper said, Sir John Herschel had “affirmatively settled” the question of whether the moon was inhabited.
The Sun narrated its account of Herschel’s discoveries over six days. Among the astronomer’s findings were “not less than thirty-eight species of forest trees,” horned bears, and beavers walking on two legs. On the fourth day, the paper reported the discovery of humanoid creatures with batlike wings and faces that were “a slight improvement upon that of the large orang outang.” On the sixth day, two more races of bat-men were described. One was larger than the first, “less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety.” The other was more attractive still, “scarcely less lovely than the general representations of angels by the more imaginative schools of painters.”
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Though Sir John Herschel was a real astronomer, the Sun’s account—published without his knowledge—was, of course, fake news. What came to be known as the Great Moon Hoax was intended as satire, but much like Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast a century later, the story was taken for truth. It was copied by other newspapers, translated into foreign languages, and debated by learned astronomical societies. Edgar Allan Poe called it “decidedly the greatest hit in the way of sensation—of merely popular sensation—ever made by any similar fiction either in America or in Europe.”
A lithograph of Herschel’s Flying Moon Animals from 1835.
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In his new book, Bunk, a cultural history of hoaxes in America, the poet Kevin Young argues that the popularity of the Sun’s story “owed much to its re-creating on the Moon what many white readers believed could be found at home.” With the hoax’s distinction of ethnic groupings among the bat-men, he says, “it is tempting to see the lunar humanoids as hierarchical in the ways white eugenicists characterized races on earth.” For Young, the implication of race at the center of what is sometimes described as America’s first great hoax is no accident. As he proposes near the end of Bunk, “You could go so far as to say that the hoax is racism’s native tongue.”
One afternoon this past summer, I met Young in the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, which he has directed since 2016. It was a cloudless day, hot enough that I was sweating under my sport coat. Young, more intelligently, was wearing a plaid shirt rolled up to the elbows. On one arm he wore an Apple Watch, on the other a leather cuff.
Like Bunk, which was longlisted for the National Book Award two months before its publication, next week, Young has had his share of precocious success. He won an award from the American Academy of Poets during his freshman year at Harvard, and the poems he wrote to satisfy his thesis requirement were selected for publication in the National Poetry Series. Now forty-seven, he possesses a résumé that reads like a passport stamped on a Grand Tour of institutional high culture, with stops at Harvard, Stanford (a Stegner Fellowship), Brown (an MFA), Emory (a named professorship), and the Schomburg. He has published ten collections of his own poems, edited eight volumes of others’, and, with Bunk, written two massive volumes of nonfiction. Capping off this run, he has just taken over as the poetry editor of The New Yorker.
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And yet while Young has accomplished enough, quickly enough, to suggest a man in a hurry, in person there is nothing rushed about his manner. As we headed out into the gentrified neighborhood around the Schomburg in search of a late lunch, he walked slowly, his weight on his heels, and took the time to point out local landmarks with the proprietary authority of an alderman.
After settling into a red banquette at a local African-French bistro, Young ordered a pork chop with haricots verts and a sweet fruit mocktail. He told me that he’d started thinking about Bunk before Donald Trump merited a joke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, let alone a desk in the Oval Office. He traces his interest in hoaxes to a boss he worked for in college who was later implicated in a number of scams. Back then, Young had shoulder-length dreadlocks and a goatee that traversed his upper chin in a narrow strip before unfurling in a rakish inverted plume. He maintained the dreads into his thirties—“It was important to have them and have them be a fact,” he said—but by 2001 they’d gotten “heavy on the head” and he lopped them off. (An inveterate collector, he still has them in a box somewhere.)
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Young is well aware that everyone from Plato on has accused poets of being purveyors of eloquent deceit—“liars by profession,” as David Hume put it. But he insists that the hoax is the enemy of art. “People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don’t think it’s a blurry line at all,” he said. Unlike hoaxers, artists promise their audience fair warning: “There’s a level of ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘In a galaxy far, far away’ that tells you I’m going to be telling you a story.” When that pact is broken, art stops and the hoax begins. “It means we’ve lost fiction,” he told me. “We’ve lost fruitful art.”
Coming soon after the election of a president who found his political footing with the help of a racist hoax about his predecessor, Bunk could hardly be more timely. But Young’s deeper argument is that we can’t escape race when we’re talking about hoaxes, because race itself—for all its implacable real-life effects—remains the most consequential hoax in American history. We cite this hoax explicitly every time we use the word Caucasian to mean “white”; the usage comes from a discredited eighteenth-century treatise that traced the palest and most beautiful of the world’s five races to the shores of the Black Sea. But we fall for it whenever we forget that at root, as Young writes, race is nothing other than “a fake thing pretending to be real.”
Frederick Douglass
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The race hoax was helped by a corollary that persisted in polite company even into the latter half of the twentieth century. As recently as 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a future Democratic senator, and Nathan Glazer, a distinguished sociologist, could write in their best-selling Beyond the Melting Pot that “the key to much in the Negro world” was that “the Negro is only an American and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect.” The notion of black culture as a nonentity, or at best an imitative agglomeration, is shocking now. But the so-called “myth of the Negro past” was an old and reliable accomplice for the long con of white supremacy. (In 1895, after the death of Frederick Douglass, The New York Times suggested that his exceptional accomplishments ought to be credited to the white race, since it was likely the “white blood” from his father—rumored to be a slave owner—that provided “the superior intelligence he manifested,” while his mother’s blackness “cost the world a genius.”)
With this myth squarely in his sights, Arturo Schomburg, a black historian from Puerto Rico, spent the early part of the twentieth century assembling what he called “vindicating evidences” to show its absurdity. He collected some ten thousand books, pamphlets, and art prints by black authors and artists, and in 1926 sold a substantial portion of that trove to the New York Public Library’s Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints in Harlem.
When Young showed me around the Schomburg, the center was nearing the end of a $22 million renovation. As we walked through an exhibition on Black Power, he took equal pride in the Black Panther posters and the center’s new video monitors. Like many poets, Young has an associative, allusive habit of mind, a frog-among-the-lily-pads tendency that has not always served his prose well. The New York Times complained that The Grey Album, his previous nonfiction book, was “wordy, hectoring and often glib.” But in conversation, his intellectual fluency, along with a talent for extemporaneous speech honed over twenty years of teaching at universities, projects an expansive inclusivity.
In a small room downstairs, Young and a curator unloaded a cart’s worth of artifacts from the James Baldwin Papers, whose custody the Schomburg assumed earlier this year. There were telexes in red ink, drafts of Baldwin’s essay on Martin Luther King Jr., and signed playbills from his work in the theater. There were also candid, heartbreaking photographs of Baldwin in Paris, where the poet went to live in 1948 with just forty dollars in his pocket.
"TO SEE ALL THE WAYS THAT PEOPLE GOT THEIR BALDWIN I THINK IS REALLY IMPORTANT."
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Watching Young handle the Baldwin materials, I could see that for all his enthusiasm about the Schomburg’s programming and outreach efforts, it was here, among the yellowing typescripts and handwritten notes tucked in clear plastic sleeves, that he was truly at home. Young often talks about “the dirt and the mud and the gunk” of life as the raw material of his poetry, and his fascination with the idiosyncratic manner by which words elbow a physical path into the world was evident. Baldwin, he noted at one point, “had books that were published in crazy editions. To see all the ways that people got their Baldwin I think is really important.”
Compared with Baldwin’s early career, which he once described in these pages as a “wild process” of “failure, elimination, and rejection,” Young’s looks like a golden road of unlimited devotion. And yet just as Baldwin’s exile to a cold-water garret in Paris came to seem, in retrospect, representative of the American writer at midcentury, so too does Young’s long march through the institutions seem exemplary of our time.
Paul Muldoon, Kevin Young, Jorie Graham and Robert Pinsky participate in a roundtable at the New York Public Library.
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He was born in 1970 to what he describes as “practical people”: His father was an opthalmologist and a former Army lieutenant; his mother was one of the first black women to earn a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Nebraska. Both had hefted themselves out of Jim Crow childhoods in rural Louisiana, the first in their families to go to college. His parents’ academic training kept the family on the move until he was ten, when they settled down in Topeka, Kansas. The overachieving only child of overachieving parents, Young discovered what he calls the “secret thrill” of poetry when a summer-school teacher mimeographed a poem he wrote and distributed it to the class. He arrived at Harvard determined to write, and his accomplishments—including helping to restart a literary magazine called Diaspora—eventually became fodder for campus folklore. Tracy K. Smith, the current poet laureate of the United States, was a few years behind Young in college. “The legend on campus,” she told me, “was that he wrote his thesis in a month.” (When I asked Young about this, he laughed and didn’t exactly deny it.)
Diaspora’s fiction editor was a would-be novelist listed on the masthead as Chipp Whitehead. Better known now as Colson, he is the author of the much-lauded novel The Underground Railroad. Whitehead told me that in contrast with his own published output at Harvard, Young was prolific. “People in college talk a lot about what they’re producing in their various pretentious ways. But he was actually already a poet when I met him at nineteen, not a poseur.”
During his junior year, Young started hanging around a Victorian house in Cambridge that hosted something called the Dark Room Collective. Founded shortly after Baldwin died in 1987, the collective sponsored a reading series that paired emerging and established writers. The group lasted about a decade, and its effects on American poetry would come to rival those of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain School. Two of the Dark Room’s alumnae, Smith and Natasha Trethewey, later won Pulitzer prizes, and Trethewey was named poet laureate in 2012, as Smith would be four years later.
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Those honors were important—only three black poets won the Pulitzer in the nine decades before Trethewey; in the ten years since, three more have—but the underlying shift they signified was even more consequential. Though poetry still has a race problem, it’s at least a generation ahead of Hollywood in addressing it. According to Jordan Davis, a poet and editor, “The incalculably good effect that the Dark Room Collective has had is that it’s a much more diverse field now.” Davis remembers hearing about the collective in the early nineties. “Poets are mostly vipers,” he said, and “to have a group of poets that were so supportive of each other was a great thing to see.”
The Dark Room Collective in 1989.
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Young insists that “there’s always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing.” But he acknowledges that the visibility of the Dark Room and groups like it spurred broad changes in the field.“I don’t think black poetry changed,” he told me. “Maybe poetry changed and black poets changed poetry.”
In college, Young told The Harvard Crimson that “being Harvard’s Young Black Poet is really frustrating.” Twenty-five years later, he says that it was the Dark Room Collective that freed him from what he once called “the burden of representation.” The collective’s motto was “Total life is what we want,” a phrase borrowed from the anthologist Clarence Major. “ ‘Total life’ means that there isn’t anything that you can write that isn’t black,” Young told me. “Black is huge, poetry is huge, they’re huge together.”
Not everyone felt that the collective always lived up to that tall order. Carl Phillips has suggested that he was ousted from the group because “I wasn’t writing the kind of poems that were correctly ‘black.’ ” But for Young, the freedom he found in the Dark Room made all the difference. In the years since, he has written about the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the rebellion on the slave ship Amistad, and his father, who died in a 2004 hunting accident. In Most Way Home, his first collection, he described:
. . . watching
the eleven o’clock footage of someone beaten
blue by the cops, over & over, knowing you could
do nothing about this, only watch, knowing
it already has all happened without you
& probably will keep on happening, steady
as snake poison traveling toward the heart
Two decades later, in “Oblivion,” first published in The New Yorker, he would paint a pastoral scene that takes a sudden ugly turn toward the antebellum:
Cows keep no cry, only
a slave’s low moan.
This slight rise
they must climb.
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Poems like these might give the impression, not entirely incorrect, that the lived experience of race is Young’s central theme. But to spend much time with his work—to spend much time with him, for that matter—is to recognize an organizing obsession that ties together Young’s poetry, his prose, the many anthologies he has edited, and his work at the Schomburg. In The Grey Album, he names this impulse precisely. “The willed recovery of what’s been lost, often forcibly, I suppose is what keeps me going,” he writes. “It is this reason I found myself a poet and a collector and now a curator: to save what we didn’t even know needed saving.” As he told me, “In African-American culture there’s often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.”
"POETRY WAS NOT THIS THING IN THE ATMOSPHERE. YOU HAVE TO LOOK IN YOUR BACKYARD. THAT'S THE STUFF TO WRITE ABOUT."
When Young came back from Stanford, where he took classes with Denise Levertov, he told Whitehead—by then a close friend—“I’m saving everything, every single document. Denise just retired and is selling her archives.” It says something about Young’s confidence that at twenty-four he was sure he’d one day have archives worth buying. But his mania for preservation runs far deeper than any conscious calculation, as I learned from his wife, Kate Tuttle. A white editor and book critic originally from Kansas, Tuttle told me, with a laugh, that Young’s completist tendencies can be a “vexed” subject at home. (They are awash, she said, in dishware by the midcentury designer Russel Wright.) But she also said that Young had impressed her early on by mentioning that he’d read all fourteen of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, a subject close to her Kansan heart. “When he gets one of something, he wants all of them.”
Young claims Lucille Clifton, Seamus Heaney, and Rita Dove as important influences, and says he sees music as the essence of his art. Though his poems do not lack for depth, they rarely scan as difficult, let alone forbidding. He likes puns, and freely borrows forms from other fields (the blues, fugitive-slave posters, film noir). In college, he told me, he realized that “poetry was not this thing in the atmosphere. You have to look in your backyard. That’s the stuff to write about.” At the time, he’d never read a poem that represented someone like his grandmother. “I remember thinking, If I can get her in a poem, then I’ll have done something.” Young began to look to poetry as a sort of archive, vindicating evidence of “family—blood, adopted, imagined,” to borrow the dedication of Most Way Home. In “Oblivion,” he writes what might be his motto, or maybe a fervent dream: “Nothing // stays lost forever.”
Young’s most severe critics have knocked him for imprecision, and some have suggested that he is too much in thrall to the past. John Palattella, at the time the literary editor of The Nation, wrote in 2005 that Young’s “language is often careless” and that his “preoccupation with looking back in reverence has become paralyzing instead of fructifying.” Yet nowhere is Young’s compulsion to arrest time more moving than in Book of Hours, from 2014, which includes poems he wrote after the death of his father and before the birth of his son. Young says he wanted “even the metaphors to be taken from the experience. I realize now that I was very much trying to document and record in a historic sense.” In “Near Miss,” he addresses his father:
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Old man, Sir—
who, alone, in the room
with your body lying
in state
I saluted—
it is forgetting, not watery
memory, that scares me.
Young’s most recent poem in The New Yorker, and his last as long as he is poetry editor, is an ode called “Little Red Corvette” that was published in 2016, a few weeks after Prince’s death. Like “Near Miss,” it is about loss, albeit in a very different register.
Nothing passed us by. Baby,
you’re much too fast. In 1990
we had us an early 80s party—
nostalgic already,
I dug out my best
OPs & two polos, fluorescent,
worn simultaneously—
collar up, pretend preppy.
That The New Yorker would publish something like this—not just a timely elegy but a timely elegy to a rock star, one whose setting is a sweaty college dance party—ought not have surprised anyone who had paid close attention to the sorts of poems the magazine has been publishing since Paul Muldoon took over in 2007. But it is likely news to everyone else—which is to say, roughly, everyone.
After all, for much of the twentieth century, the magazine couldn’t escape the rap leveled by Elizabeth Bishop, who complained in 1940 that its editors “want all New Yorker poetry to sound like New Yorker poetry.” Muldoon pushed the limit of what was palatable to the magazine’s million-plus subscribers, but even under his editorship The New Yorker was never a faithful barometer of the art. (I worked there for several years, but not in the poetry department.) If you wanted a broad but still incomplete overview of the field, you subscribed to Poetry. If you really wanted to know what was happening, you strapped on your shin guards and went scrabbling around in little magazines and on the Internet.
Kevin Young with Mayor Bill de Blasio at the Schomburg Center in Harlem.
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Nevertheless, most poets would walk four miles through flaming snot to appear in The New Yorker’s pages. The reason is simple: In a culture that remembers poetry only on its holiest occasions—weddings, funerals, Beyoncé concerts—The New Yorker remains one of the last places where civilians have a chance of running headlong into a previously unpublished stack of verse. Kenneth Koch joked that publishing in the magazine was the only way your psychiatrist would ever see your work.
Jordan Davis sees a natural fit between Young’s poetry and the role he’s just taken on. “He holds a sort of senatorial authority,” Davis told me. “He has really mastered the popular voice and speaking to enormous public concerns. It’s a kind of public-speaker role for poetry that has gone unoccupied pretty much since Allen Ginsberg died.”
Though the popularity of poetry in previous eras is often overstated, it’s nevertheless true that the great cultural “we” did once look to poets like Ginsberg to tell us something essential about ourselves and our world. When I asked David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, why the magazine still publishes poems, he held fast to that ideal. “Poetry is arguably, in some compressed and magical fashion, the highest form of expression, the greatest devotion we have to our most intricate invention, language itself,” he wrote in an email. “How can we publish a magazine that proposes to be literary, as well as journalistic, that does not publish poetry?”
Tuttle said that despite her husband’s allegiance to history, his tenure at The New Yorker could be “revolutionary” in at least one sense: “It’s significant that he’s the first black poetry editor there.” In 1992, Young told the Crimson, “Even if we were all published in The New Yorker, would that be the point? You’re missing the point if it’s a new driver driving the same old truck.” Now that he has the keys in hand, however, he is careful not to say anything that could be construed as criticism of his predecessors. He wants the work he chooses to “be a public thing,” he told me, “to really represent poetry” in all its breadth. In a world crowded with push notifications and tweets threatening nuclear war, poetry’s job, he said, “is to take us out of ourselves and bring us back a little bit different. That’s a lot to put on any one poem, but I think you can put it on poetry in general.”
Kevin Young is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark. He is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, most recently Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011), winner of an American Book Award; and Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008). His collection Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Young's nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, November 14, 2017), is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" selection, and a "Best Book of 2017" by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian, Vogue, the Atlantic, Nylon,BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature. Young's previous nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012), won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He is the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, 2012) and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012). Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
Young will also be serving as Poetry Editor of the New Yorker starting in November 2017.
Kevin Young is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation. Also an editor, essayist, and curator, Young's ten books of poetry include: Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014); Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011), winner of an American Book Award; Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008); For the Confederate Dead (Knopf, 2007); Black Maria (Knopf, 2005); To Repel Ghosts ("Remix," Knopf, 2005); Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Most Way Home (William Morrow, 1995), winner of the National Poetry Series and the Zacharis First Book Award.
Book of Hours was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets—a prize that recognizes the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year. In the Judges citation, A. Van Jordan wrote: "As if walking through a gallery of grief, reverie, and transcendence, Kevin Young's Book of Hours exemplifies what poetry can do in the world when language works at its full power. The poems in this collection hold emotion taut on each line while allowing for the nimbleness of language to drape over them, bringing tension between the heart and the mind, as Young consistently surprises us with profound elegance." Actor and author Mary-Louise Parker has described it as a memoir-in-verse and that "These glorious verses put me in some kind of trance."
Young's nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press November 14, 2017), is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" selection, and a "Best Book of 2017" by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Dallas Morning News, Smithsonian, Vogue, the Atlantic, Nylon, BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature. His previous nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (2012), won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The PEN judges said of the book: "Like Duke Ellington's fabled, Harlem-bound A Train, Kevin Young's The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness propels us across a panorama of African American history, creativity, and struggle with a lightning-brisk brilliance and purpose. Here's what happens when an acclaimed poet makes his first foray into nonfiction: madcap manifesto and rhapsodic reportage create a formidable blend of scholarship and memoir that tackles cultural and personal history in one breath. Young goes far beyond just being a documentarian of American Black identity—he shows us how Black identity is indispensable to American culture."
Young is the editor of eight volumes, including The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965 – 2010 (BOA Editions, 2012 and winner of the Hurston-Wright Prize); The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012); The Best American Poetry 2011; and The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing, one hundred and fifty devastatingly beautiful contemporary elegies that embrace the pain, heartbreak, and healing stages of mourning (Bloomsbury, 2010). Young's poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Callaloo.
From 2005-2016, Kevin Young served as Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library—a 75,000-volume collection of rare and modern poetry housed at Emory University. As curator, Young was responsible for growing the collection, running a reading series, and mounting exhibitions. In 2008, Young was also named Curator of Literary Collections, and continued to add to the outstanding growing collections at Emory's Rose Library, which holds the archives of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes; National Book Award–winner Lucille Clifton; influential iconoclasts Flannery O'Connor, Jack Kerouac, and Salman Rushdie; Pulitzer Prize–winners Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, and Alan Dugan; and current British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. His many other honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from Beloit College.
Young will also be serving as Poetry Editor of the New Yorker starting in November 2017.
BUNK
Kevin Young
BookPage. (Dec. 2017): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
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Full Text:
Poet and scholar Kevin Young offers a history of the hoax and a chilling indictment of our current moment in this ambitious book. Bunk opens in the 19th century--the days of P.T. Barnum, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe--as Young pulls back history's curtain to reveal hoaxes, humbug and circus tents with a sideshow of spiritualism and sensationalism. But Young is not content to remain in the sepia-toned past. "If all of this sounds familiar," he writes, "it is because the transformative advent of the penny press most resembles the current change demonstrated, if not caused, by the internet." Shifting effortlessly from the 19th century to the 21st, Young draws connections between words like swindler, diddling and confidence man and contemporary buzzwords like plagiarism, truthiness and fake news. In both eras, a disenfranchised racial other haunts the discourse.
"The exotic other, the dark double" is a key player in historical and contemporary hoaxes, from the colonialists who donned redface to confuse the British during the Boston Tea Party to Nasdijj, a white man who co-opted a Navajo identity in order to publish a variety of written work in 1999 and the early 2000s. Nasdijj was exposed the very month that James Frey admitted to grossly misrepresenting the facts of his life in his bestselling book A Million Little Pieces. More than simply recounting these incidents and dozens more, Young uses them to facilitate his larger goal: a theory of the hoax itself and the fantasies that it reveals. Like a joke that brings down the house, a hoax unites a cunning speaker with a crowd that wants to be fooled. And today the stakes are higher than ever. Young examines the effects of deception on American politics, literature and everyday life. Long-listed for the National Book Award in nonfiction, Bunk is a powerful, far-reaching read.
--KELLY BLEWETT
By Kevin Young
Graywolf
$30, 480 pages
ISBN 9781555977917
Audio, eBook available
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Young, Kevin. "BUNK." BookPage, Dec. 2017, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517626417/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=62ed2820. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517626417
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
Vanessa Bush
Booklist. 114.4 (Oct. 15, 2017): p3.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. By Kevin Young. Nov. 2017.576p. illus. Graywolf, $30 (9781555977917). 364.
As we adjust to life with a president who plays fast and loose with the truth and whose backstory arouses growing skepticism, this examination of the long and colorful history of hoaxes and cons is most welcome. Well before the Internet helped fuel and spread half-truths and outright deceptions, people have perpetrated frauds in various forms. Award-winning poet, scholar, and writer Young (Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015, 2016) examines the American roots of fraud and its particular ties to racial anxieties, from P. T. Barnum's display of Joice Heth, the alleged 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington; to Susan Smith's tale of a black man kidnapping and killing her children; to Rachel Dolezal's masquerade as a black woman. Young traces the history of freak shows, seances, spirit photography, fake memoirs, and reality TV, exploring the motives of hoaxers (fame, greed, thrill) and the anxieties of each era that led to believers' gullibility. Young presents a rogue's gallery, including Grey Owl, Bernie Madoff, and Lance Armstrong, paying particular attention to the especially heinous frauds of journalists, including Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair. Young closes with an examination of today's constant bombardment of intertwined facts and factoids and the need for each of us to try to suss out the truth. Compelling and eye-opening.--Vanessa Bush
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bush, Vanessa. "Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2017, p. 3. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A512776002/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5653c74e. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A512776002
Young, Kevin: BUNK
Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Young, Kevin BUNK Graywolf (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 11, 14 ISBN: 978-1-55597-791-7
Is flimflammery, like jazz, a pure product of America? So wonders New Yorker poetry editor Young (Blues Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, 2016, etc.), adding another Americanism to the mix: Jim Crow.For whatever reason, Americans have always thrilled at being conned: thus televangelists and bullshit artists. Thus Herman Melville's great novel The Confidence-Man, and thus the result of the most recent presidential election. By Young's vigorous, allusive account, the suckerdom whose numbers are added to every minute has no end of choices when it comes to shopping for bunkum. What makes this book a valuable addition to the literature--otherwise, it might just be an update to Daniel Boorstin's half-century-old study The Image--is Young's attention to the racial component: P.T. Barnum built his fortune, after all, on the backs of people like Joice Heth, billed as a supposed 161-year-old wet nurse to George Washington, and putative cannibals from the South Pacific, and the like. Much bunkum had to do with the clash of cultures and races, from the mundane to the fabulous. Young's wide-ranging text takes in not just circus sideshows, but also the literary/journalistic fabulations of JT LeRoy, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Lance Armstrong, and other exemplars of what Young calls the "Age of Euphemism." Oh, and Rachel Dolezal, too, who infamously tried to pass as black not so long ago: "Did Dolezal really fool those black folks around her? I have a strange feeling she didn't, that many simply humored her. You have to do this with white people, from time to time." If that doesn't stir up identity-politics conflict, then nothing will....A little harsh here, a little overstated there, but all in all a fascinating, well-researched look at the many ways Americans hoodwink each other, often about race.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Young, Kevin: BUNK." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364922/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2cb3e716. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364922
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News
Publishers Weekly. 264.33 (Aug. 14, 2017): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News
Kevin Young. Graywolf, $30 (576p) ISBN 978-1-55597-791-7
Poet and author Young (The Grey Album) chronicles a distinctly American brand of deception in this history of hoaxers, fabricators, liars, and imposters. Young traces the tradition of journalistic duplicity from an 1835 newspaper story reporting winged men on the moon to the fabrications by the New Republic's Stephen Glass in the late 1990s. He explores forgeries and falsifications in literature, including the exaggerated claims of James Frey in his memoir A Million Little Pieces and the wholesale creation of false identities, providing the example of J.T. LeRoy, allegedly a child prostitute turned novelist but later revealed to be the literary persona of writer Laura Albert. While many of these hoaxes will be familiar to those with a decent grasp of American history and current events, there are plenty of obscure examples as well, such as the 1941 emergence of the nine-year-old poet-prodigy Fern Gravel, charmingly declared "the lost Sappho of Iowa" by the New York Times, who was later revealed to be the brainchild of author James Norman Hall. Young explores the many instances where the hoax intersects with race and racism, notably P.T. Barnum's exploitation of the supposed centenarian Joice Heth, a black nursemaid of George Washington, and the more recent instance of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman pretending to be black, who led her local chapter of the NAACP. Using these examples, Young astutely declares the hoax a frequent metaphor for a "deep-seated cultural wish" that confirms prejudicial ideas and stereotypes. While the book suffers a bit from its glut of examples, Young's remarks on race and his comparison of Trump and Barnum, both of whom gained power from spectacle, in the book's coda are well worth sifting through the drier material. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News." Publishers Weekly, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 63. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501717142/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bec284ab. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501717142
Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015
Publishers Weekly. 263.7 (Feb. 15, 2016): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
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Full Text:
Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015
Kevin Young. Knopf, $30 (608p) ISBN 978-0-385-35150-8
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In this extensive and impressive selected volume that also includes a generous helping of unpublished poems, poet and critic Young, winner of the 2015 Lenore Marshall Prize for Book of Hours, puts his characteristically succinct narrative lines on full display as he crafts voices that speak to the pleasures and pains of African-American lives, including his own. Young demonstrates a deft skill for persona, taking on the voices of such historical figures as Jack Johnson, the great 20th-century boxer, and Cinque, the leader of the Amistad rebels. Music, especially blues, jazz, and hip-hop, moves as both an undertone and overtone throughout the book. Young shows his mastery of form throughout--particularly in "Urgent Telegram to Jean-Michel Basquiat"--while his love poems display a tremendous ear and the talent for turning stock images into moving metaphors: "Even a bird,/ a dog, got him a cage// he can bark/ all night in, or sing." Some poems feel more concerned with flexing their muscles than engaging the reader, and metaphors can seem redundant (not altogether surprising, given Young's prolific output), especially in a series of odes to foods. Yet Young also offers stunning confessional lines that will move the reader with their lyrical starkness, as in a heartrending series of elegies for his father: "The day will come// when you'll be dead longer/ than alive." (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015." Publishers Weekly, 15 Feb. 2016, p. 41. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A444206305/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=38415b3e. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A444206305
Book of Hours
Donna Seaman
Booklist. 110.14 (Mar. 15, 2014): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Book of Hours. By Kevin Young. Mar. 2014. 208p. Knopf, $26.95 (9780307272249). 811.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Young is adept at netting the sensations of the moment and retrieving the spirit of the past in poems of monumental grief, stoicism, rapture, and sharp humor. In his eighth collection, Young marks the tenth anniversary of his father's unexpected death, telling the story of the stunned aftermath with striking attunement to the utter transformation of what had been ordinary life. His tone is elegiac as he describes picking up his father's effects at the hospital. He marvels over the strange munificence of organ donation, and when he acknowledges the poignant kinship he feels with his father's dogs, he quips, "Brothers in paw." Young is a virtuoso of succinctness, which in this book has particularly deep resonance: "The grammar of grief / gets written each day / & lost--and learnt again / by stone, by small / sliver, hieroglyph." As he takes measure of paternal absence, he prepares to become a father, writing with awe of the astonishments of pregnancy and the revelations of ultrasound. From intimate reflections on the mysteries of the body, Young turns his penetrating attention to sky and land as though on a vision quest, tracking the sun and moon, desert and valley, wildflowers and geese in cosmic poems of life's essentials and the great wheel of existence. He concludes, "Why not sing."--Donna Seaman
Seaman, Donna
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Book of Hours." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2014, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A363381819/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=97c7b422. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A363381819
Book of Hours
Publishers Weekly. 261.8 (Feb. 24, 2014): p157.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Book of Hours
Kevin Young. Knopf, $26.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-307-27224-9
In his eighth poetry collection, Young (Ardency) offers an impressively musical exploration of grief and endurance. Drawing its title from the illuminated manuscripts that contained psalms and prayers, the book is divided into five symbolically headed chapters. The tension between death and creation, and the poet's struggle to contain both, fuels these short-lined poems whose delicate gears deploy insight with heartbreaking accuracy. The opener, "Domesday Book," acknowledges the passing of the poet's father: "Strange how you keep on/dying--not once/then over// & done with--" and treats grief with frank honesty and an alluring, yet almost unsettlingly steady, rhythm: "How terrible/ to have to pick up// the pen, helpless/ to it, your death/not yet// a habit." The subsequent sections, "The Book of Forgetting" and "Confirmation," move past the book's initial death into new sorrow, "What remains//besides pain?/ How to mourn what's just/ a growing want?" Though the poems are ripe with pain, they also contain moments of reverberating joy, as when the speaker in "Expecting" hears his son's heartbeat during a sonogram: "You are like hearing/hip-hop for the first time--power// hijacked from a lamppost--all promise." Young wrestles with loss and joy with enviable beauty and subtlety. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Book of Hours." Publishers Weekly, 24 Feb. 2014, p. 157. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A360119151/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d74f47c8. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A360119151
Young, Kevin. Book of Hours: Poems
Fred Muratori
Library Journal. 139.2 (Feb. 1, 2014): p79.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Young, Kevin. Book of Hours: Poems. Knopf. Mar. 2014. 208p. ISBN 9780307272249. $26.95. POETRY
As its title suggests, Young's eighth book of poems (after Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels) is a vigil in verse. Two vigils, in fact: one held in bereavement for his deceased father, the other in anxious anticipation of his son's birth. In thin, almost painfully paced lyric strands as bleak as "trees/ born bare," Young monitors every emotional nuance that accompanies deep, personal loss ("How terrible/ to have to pick up/the pen, helpless/to it, your death/ not yet/ a habit....") and the promise of regeneration ("Tonight/ I'll broom what/soon will be your nursery"). Rooted in pessimism ("This world is rigged/with ruin"), the poems nevertheless channel a universe of perceptive thought on both the end and the beginning of life through a deceptively narrow tonal range that largely avoids easy sentiment, a difficult accomplishment given the familiar subject matter. VERDICT At the risk of some repetitiveness, Young challenges his large themes with a master craftsman's discipline and determination, delivering proof that poetry, like birth, is "a lengthy process/meant to help us believe/in the impossible."--Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Muratori, Fred
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Muratori, Fred. "Young, Kevin. Book of Hours: Poems." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2014, p. 79. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A357262403/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f4ee7d47. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A357262403
The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness
Donna Seaman
Booklist. 108.11 (Feb. 1, 2012): p23.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness.
By Kevin Young.
Mar. 2012. 476p. illus. Graywolf, $25 (9781555976071). 306.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Young (Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, 2011) is an incandescently innovative poet and a self-described collector and curator profoundly inspired by music (from spirituals to the blues, bebop, funk, and hip-hop), African American history, popular culture, and literature (Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker). In his first prose book, an expansive and radiantly interpretive exploration of "black creativity," he proves to be an exceptionally fluent, evocative, deep-diving, and bracing critic.Young's intention is to spotlight "the centrality of black people to the American experience, to the dream of America," and his unifying theme is "the notion of lying--the artful dodge" and "storying," the "black codes" and fictions African Americans use to escape and deflect racist reality. From the black trickster tradition to comedian Bert Williams, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman (the "black Rimbaud"), Charlie Parker, James Brown, Danger Mouse (the source of the book's title), and many other artists, Young reads, listens, and observes with acute, questing attention, following "underground railroads of meaning" and tracing artistic lineages and bursts of fresh invention. As intricate and ingenious as his critiques are, Young is confiding, poignant, appreciative, witty, and poetic: "I don't mean to taxonomize but to rhapsodize. Take it from me--mean mean mean to be free."--Donna Seaman
Seaman, Donna
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2012, p. 23. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A280386948/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=98ad14d9. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A280386948
The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies
Publishers Weekly. 259.2 (Jan. 9, 2012): p43.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies
Kevin Young. Graywolf, $25 trade paper (476p) ISBN 978-1-55597-607-1
In this elegant and informative study, poet and English professor, Young weaves a saga of African-American culture, in particular literature and music. Young moves through slave narratives and spirituals and beatniks and funk in a multifaceted yet coherent work comprising history, analysis, and theory. Young offers fresh, incisive assessments of myriad writers and musicians, performers all of the storytelling and counterfeiting conventions and traditions. He focuses on George Moses Horton, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Langston Hughes before shifting the focus to music, where his attention encompasses, among other genres, be-bop and hip-hop, the blues, and soul music. He includes unlikely figures throughout in this "story of what I read, heard, and saw at the crossroads of African American and American culture": Eliot, Pound, Picasso; the cakewalk, the quilt; the Rolling Stones. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2012, p. 43. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A277520628/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a5f215dd. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A277520628
Young, Kevin: THE GREY ALBUM
Kirkus Reviews. (Jan. 1, 2012):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Young, Kevin THE GREY ALBUM Graywolf (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 3, 13 ISBN: 978-1-55597-607-1
African-American self-creation in literature and music receives a meandering study. Young, a National Book Award finalist in poetry (Jelly Roll, 2003, etc.) and academic (Atticus Haygood Professor/Emory Univ.), takes nearly 400 overstuffed pages to arrive at a two-page consideration of the titular Danger Mouse mashup of Jay-Z and the Beatles. Many readers may be enervated by then. Young uses "storying"--the "lies" spun by black artists to form their personal and artistic identities--as the purported foundation for his sprawling tome, which stretches from the post-slavery 19th century to the rap era. Writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and poets--especially Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Bob Kaufman--are the focus in the early going, though prewar blues and such performers as Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday also figure prominently. Young's shotgun methodology and his propensity for pointless riffing and overwrought observation obscure any thread that might keep readers in touch with his supposed theme. The writing becomes a farrago of unfocused research, leaden academic language, incongruous snippets of autobiography and excruciatingly contorted textual readings. Even his most personal and thoughtful chapter, about Beat master Kaufman, manages to dilute the poet's crackling musicality. In later chapters, the author makes a case for postwar African-American music--bebop, soul, the free-swinging rock of Jimi Hendrix, disco, hip-hop--as foundational postmodernism. Though he manages to drop sharp, highly personalized science about the import of rap artists like Run-DMC, Public Enemy and NWA, his explications are so fatiguing that readers will lose patience before Young closes his argument. Young strives for encyclopedic scope, but the narrative is ultimately shapeless. An imaginary textbook for a daunting Black Studies course that very few students would want to take for credit.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Young, Kevin: THE GREY ALBUM." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2012. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A275933002/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8a42f326. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A275933002
Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels
Donna Seaman
Booklist. 107.11 (Feb. 1, 2011): p24.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels.
By Kevin Young.
Feb. 2011. 256p. illus. Knopf, $27.95 (978030726764 I). 811.
Many elements converge in Young's depthless and transporting poetic inquiry into the signal story of the Amistad rebels. Here is this much-celebrated poet's passion for music, teasing wordplay, life-raft irony, and plunging insights into African American resistance to tyranny and oppression. In this tour de force, the fruit of 20 years of research and creative effort, Young looks to two helmsmen, Cinque, the leader of the slave-ship mutiny who tells his tale in a libretto titled "Witness," and, in a ravishing cycle of extended sonnets, James Covey, a fellow North African who served as translator for the jailed rebels once abolitionists rallied to their cause. Young writes with electrifying insight and ringing concision about the spiritual conundrums the rebels faced when they converted to Christianity, and the determination they mustered as they learned English and fought for their freedom. In lancing poems in the form of letters, spirituals, a minstrel show, reading primers, scripture, sermons, and prayers, Young empathizes with the captured men and women longing for home, illuminates the cultural context in which their now legendary drama unfolded and the clamorous exploitation of their struggle, and delves into the ways language conceals and coerces, reveals and liberates. Young's oceanic choral work calls for, and rewards, the reader's full and active involvement.--Donna Seaman
YA/M: The Amistad rebels are a draw, and so is Young's supple language, wry humor, and keen perspective. DS.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2011, p. 24. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A249057026/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=bb2873d3. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A249057026
Young, Kevin. Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels
Diane Scharper
Library Journal. 136.2 (Feb. 1, 2011): p69+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Young, Kevin. Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels. Knopf. Feb. 2011. c.256p. illus, maps. ISBN 9780307267641. $27.95. POETRY
Suffering, salvation, hope, despair: these motifs come alive in National Book Award finalist Young's latest collection, which chronicles the slave mutiny aboard the schooner Amistad in 1839. This three-part book focuses on the 53 Africans who rebelled against their would-be slave owners. Young expertly blends cultural and social history as well as religion to dramatize the lives of the rebels. His evocative use of language--punctuated with stunning metaphors--keeps the historical context clear while moving the gripping true story forward. The Africans planned to return home to Sierra Leone, but when their ship was secretly rerouted, they found themselves in a Connecticut prison with only a group of misguided abolitionists to help them. Young fuses the broken English of the captives with allusions to Scripture, Roman Catholic prayers, and rituals, as well as references to school subjects like reading, writing, and arithmetic. VERDICT Writing in blues rhythms, Young achieves a hypnotic effect with repetition, puns, shifts in syntax, ellipsis, and use of the vernacular. Ultimately, his retelling becomes an eloquent examination of slavery as it's felt in the human soul. Highly recommended.--Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD
Scharper, Diane
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Scharper, Diane. "Young, Kevin. Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2011, p. 69+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A247529367/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9b6ce588. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A247529367
Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels
Publishers Weekly. 258.3 (Jan. 17, 2011): p31+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels
Kevin Young. Knopf, $27.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-307-26764-1
The story of the Amistad is widely known: enslaved Africans on a Spanish ship sailing from Cuba in 1839 took over the schooner and sailed to the United States. Put in jail in New Haven, the Amistad rebels found assistance from American abolitionists when they faced trial: finally they were allowed to return to Sierra Leone. The prolific Young (Dear Darkness) has organized a big and varied book around that story. The strongest part, called a libretto, consists largely of short-lined, intense poems sung, spoken, or thought by the rebel leader Cinque, who muses often on Christian providence: "Our shroud a sail--/heaven our home--II we compass/our helpless bones." Stanzaic poems at the start and the end of the volume follow the Amistad Africans in America and after their return, giving voice to perhaps a dozen characters: "My calling is to vanish," says the free black translator James Covey, "finish/the thoughts others don't know/they own." The famous story becomes a microcosm of everything wrong with American, and Atlantic, history. As with Young's previous ambitious book-length projects (such as a verse life of Jean-Michel Basquiat), the book taken as a whole is more powerful than some of the individual poems. That whole is impressive indeed. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels." Publishers Weekly, 17 Jan. 2011, p. 31+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A247529501/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=61a31a3a. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A247529501
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing
Publishers Weekly. 257.12 (Mar. 22, 2010): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing
Edited by Kevin Young. Bloomsbury, $22 (336p) ISBN 978-1-60819-033-1
Young (Dear Darkness) is not only a prolific and acclaimed poet, but also the editor of several anthologies of poems, by African-American poets, inspired by the blues and jazz, and from the body of work by John Berryman. This latest anthology is his most topical, and, perhaps, his most useful, gathering poems about suffering and overcoming loss. Organized around subjects such as "Regret," "Remembrance," and "Ritual," this book includes poets both canonical and contemporary, with perhaps a refreshingly larger helping of the latter: poets like Marianne More, Philip Larkin, and Elizabeth Bishop join newer names like D.A. Powell, Matthew Dickman, and Meghan O'Rourke; there are also plenty of reigning masters, like Louise Gliick. "Death is nature's way/of telling you to be quiet," writes Franz Wright, somewhat harshly. With calmer acceptance, Theodore Roethke reminds us of the need to "wake to sleep, and take my waking slow." While these poems won't offer easy answers to grief, they will keep the kind of company that only poetry can, because only poetry can convincingly say, as Ruth Stone does in the Last poem of this book, "All things come to an end./No, they go on forever." (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing." Publishers Weekly, 22 Mar. 2010, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A222678101/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=82cd3d97. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A222678101
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing
Doris Lynch
Library Journal. 135.5 (Mar. 15, 2010): p107.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing. Bloomsbury, dist. by Macmillan. Mar. 2010. c.336p, ed. by Kevin Young. ISBN 978-160819-033-1. $27.50. POETRY
In this beautiful and practical book, experienced anthologist and poet Young (Jelly Roll: A Blues and Dear Darkness) has gathered poems of grief and praise. He includes selections from almost every well-known contemporary poet, including Kim Addonizio, John Ashbery, Mary Jo Bang, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, and Mark Doty--and that's just a few from the beginning of the alphabet. Despite the subject, almost all the poems celebrate life as well; as David Young reminds us, "It will all go on. Rime, frost, mist;/ at the cracked mirror the janitor/ will comb his hair and hum." But whether the poems are memorializing stillbirths or newborns, grandparents or parents, siblings or friends, loss is always paramount. A useful subject index with clear headings, such as "For a Funeral Service," "Mothers," "Fathers," "Spouses and Lovers," and "Siblings," helps in the selection of memorial poems. VERDICT This book will provide solace for the bereaved. Both clergy and family members will use it to create meaningful memorial services, and all poetry lovers will find much to celebrate and ponder here.--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., IL
Lynch, Doris
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lynch, Doris. "The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing." Library Journal, 15 Mar. 2010, p. 107. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A223225618/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ce2f26a7. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A223225618
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing
Donna Seaman
Booklist. 106.13 (Mar. 1, 2010): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing.
Ed. by Kevin Young.
Mar. 2010. 336p. Bloomsbury, $22 (9781608190331). 811.
Poet Young, author of six vividly imagined collections, puts on his editor's hat, one he wears well in previous anthologies dedicated to blues and jazz poems as well as here in this unique and invaluable gathering of contemporary poems of grief and healing. This effort stems from his memorializing his late father in Dear Darkness (2008), a loss that sharpened his perceptions of what Young cites as "a poetry of necessity." As he observes, "No one wants to write an elegy." But "we simply must." And in writing, reading, and listening to elegies, understanding, solidarity, and solace are found. Young offers an original and personal analysis of the modern elegy, and uses his own experience with the cycle of mourning to structure the book in sections titled "Reckoning," "Regret," "Remembrance," "Ritual," "Recovery," and "Redemption." And the poems are as diverse and universal as the emotions of loss. Poems by Dylan Thomas, Sharon Olds, Mary Jo Bang, Nick Flynn, Natasha Trethewey, Cornelius Eady, Gerald Stern, Lucille Clifton, and many others exquisitely and empathically translate pain into beauty, sorrow into catharsis.--Donna Seaman
Seaman, Donna
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2010, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A221202528/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5107c52a. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A221202528
Book of Hours: Poems
The Christian Century. 131.10 (May 14, 2014): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
Full Text:
Book of Hours: Poems
By Kevin Young
Knopf, 208 pp. $26.95
The sudden death of a parent and years of smoldering grief that follow, the breathless anticipation of the birth of a child and years of awkward wonder that follow--these experiences are among the subjects of an attractive book of poems by an award-winning poet. Many of these poems were written out of moments when his nerves were frayed and confidence shaken. "Pieta" begins "I hunted heaven / for him. / No dice" and ends "Father, / find me when / you want. I'll wait." There are poems titled "Pilgrimage," "City of God," "Limbo," "Annunciation," "Blessings," and "Nativity." The poet presents simple, elegant compositions that hold the grace of ordinary shadowy days. The poem "Sorrow" begins "The dogs ate what we did / only days / later. Like angels / they roam the countryside / belonging to no one. / And to everyone."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Book of Hours: Poems." The Christian Century, vol. 131, no. 10, 2014, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A371969740/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=89a2138e. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A371969740