Morning Reading: Kevin Young on realizing the subject of writing is close
Adam’s favorite from T Magazine’s “Letters to an Artist.”
This weekend’s NYT Style Magazine includes dozens of short interviews with advice from artists and short profiles of artists (cleverly organized around the hours in a day). The whole thing is worth checking out. The following advice, from poet Kevin Young, makes me feel like we are on target with raison d'être of the podcast.
As a high schooler, I wrote terrible poems. But when I realized the subject of writing wasn't far away from me but close by - in the field behind your house, or the dirt beneath your feet - I understood what a poem could be. I wrote about my parents, my grandparents, my family in Louisiana - people I didn't see in the books I read. Understanding that literature was about them was probably the biggest leap for me. I didn't discover some confidence in myself; it was more like, "I have to tell this story." Doing so was very urgent and important. I stand by that. It was crucial to learn that poetry was about everyday people, places and things. It was finding the extraordinary in the everyday. -Kevin Young, poet, 51.
Why Morning Reading? Sometimes it’s what I read in the morning and sometimes it’s for you to read in the morning. Mostly it’s a signifier that this blog post is primarily a quotation.
