Celebrated Poet Reads to Students and Faculty

Among Boston College’s most recent guests was acclaimed poet Kevin Young, a native of Lincoln, Nebraska. Having received his Bachelor of the Arts from Harvard University, where he learned from poetic heavyweights Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido, and his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brown University, Young has certainly studied the art of writing extensively and has proven himself a master of his literary talents.

Young has produced an impressive collection of books of his poetry: For the Confederate Dead, Black Maria, Jelly Roll: A Blues, To Repel Ghosts, Dear Darkness, and Most Way Home. Additionally, he has edited a few anthologies: Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, John Berryman’s Selected Poems, Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, and Art of Losing.

Thanks to his unique subjects, rhythmic style, and groundbreaking creations, Kevin Young has been repeatedly recognized as an exceptional poet. He has been awarded a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a NEA Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Moreover,his book To Repel Ghosts was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, and his book Most Way Home was chosen for the National Poetry Series and won the Zacharis First Books Award.

Once a professor at both the University of Georgia and Indiana University, he currently serves as the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. What’s more, he also curates the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory.

Upon entering Gasson 100 on Boston College’s main campus, Kevin Young was welcomed warmly with loud, excited applause. He began his reading by announcing that he would share mostly new poems with “some oldies” thrown in the mix.

A collection of “odes, elegies, and blues,” Dear Darkness was the first of Young’s books into which he delved. He read “Farm Team” first, which he regarded as a new, modern kind of blues. Afterwards, he shared “Black Cat Blues” and “Lime Light Blues,” both of which he characterized as “proper blues.” He closed Dear Darkness with an ode, more specifically “New England Ode,” joking that the audience “might recognize some of the things in it,” perhaps alluding to “rotary, not roundabout” and “soda, not pop.”

Young read next from Jelly Roll, noting, “the whole book is love poems.” Beginning with “Song of Smoking,” a blues poem, he afterwards added, “you can’t have blues without boasts,” and went on to read “Boasts,” a clever marriage of lighthearted, original statements and allusions.

Happily, Young treated the audience to “a few more odes,” reading the ingenious “Ode to Chicken,” “Ode to Greens,” and “Ode to Grits.” He explained the apparent pattern of the poems: after the death of his father, Young was unable to write for several months, and when his ability returned to him, these poems, all “about hunger,” came out in a natural “burst.”

Next, he shared some poems from the anthology Art of Losing, a collection he deemed “the book I wished I had when my father died.” One of the most powerful was a poem from the Redemption section, “The Trees” by Philip Larkin. According to Kevin Young, though trees seem an “unlikely source of redemption,” he believes “that’s where redemption is found.”

In conclusion, Young read “some new poems” that included “Elephant Funeral,” “Untitled,” “Bereavement,” “Gravity,” “Pilgrimage,” and “The Mission.” He added, chuckling, that, though “The Mission” takes place in San Francisco and also references Emily Dickinson, he knows very well that Dickinson did not live in San Francisco.

A master of beats, rhythm, and voice, Kevin Young harnesses and magnifies the musicality of poetry, creating works that transcend traditional meter and rhyme. As the audience clapped and Young stepped from the podium, it was clear that all people in attendance greatly appreciated the words and wisdom of such an influential poet.

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