This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Kevin Young is the poetry editor of The New Yorker and the author of many books of his own poems.

His newest is called Nightwatch.

The poems draw on Kevin's very wide view of history from the end of the slavery era,

back to Dante's 700-year-old poem, The Divine Comedy, and much more.

I sat down recently with Kevin Young. Kevin, you are the poetry editor of the New Yorker.

Thank God. And I believe this is your 16th book. You're a great anthologist as well. I love that

anthology. You've done about grief. No memorial service needs to look any farther than that book. It's an

extraordinary book. And you've written about the blues and African-American experience in general.

And you've also published books of prose, too. So all to say that you're an extraordinary

prolific writer and editor. I wonder what themes you see at this point in your life that are

running throughout everything. You know, I think this book, Nightwatch, kind of exemplifies a lot of them.

It thinks about loss, but it also thinks about music. And I think the music in this book is a

slightly different music. It isn't

necessarily blues or jazz, but it's sort of rooted in the spirituals in some sense. And it

starts in Louisiana, which is definitely a theme of my book. Both my parents are from there, and it's a

place I return to a lot as a child, but also I return to in my writing. And it begins there, but then extends really into the realm of lots of other things, including the 19th century, all the way to Dante.

Now, with this new book, it is also kind of a ballsy thing to invite comparison to Dante.

I guess, you know, we all have our own Dante, right?

And this is the moment that I wanted to try to, you know, he helped me so much in a weird way.

Because this is a book that I think without him I would have kept in a drawer because the subjects were kind of dark that I was trying to contend with.

...