Kevin Young
Kevin Young is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Jelly Roll: A
Blues, published by Knopf in January 2003. Young's first book Most Way Home was
selected for the National Poetry Series and won the Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares.
His second book of poems, To Repel Ghosts, was based on the work of the late artist
Jean-Michel Basquiat and recently appeared in paperback from Steerforth Press. Young is
also the editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers and
the forthcoming Everyman Pocket Poets Blues Poems anthology. A former Stegner
Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, he is currently Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at
Indiana University and the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Statement of Poetics
All the poems featured here are taken from my latest book Jelly Roll: A Blues. A
few poems in the book are in strict blues form, but most of the poems try to get at what I
guess could be called the inner music of the blues, their tragicomic spirit. You could say
the poems seek to "finger the jagged grain" (as Ralph Ellison described the
blues), turning pain into performance and danger into humor.
There are some other great definitions of the blues: "Laughing to keep from
crying" is what Langston Hughes used to favor; but there’s also "the blues
ain’t nothing but a good man (or woman) feeling bad." Recently, someone also
reminded me that the opposite is just as true: "the blues ain’t nothing but a
bad woman (or man) feeling good." The poems seek this play between feeling good and
acting bad, feeling bad and wishing things were good, that make up the blues.
The result, as seen in "Litany" is somewhere between sorrow and survival.
But, I hope poems such as "Gumbo" also convey the mix of pleasure and play that
blues provide—the blues, after all, is good time music meant for Saturday Night.
Sometimes though, like in "Aubade," there is the morning after.
The poems may read as more personal than my previous book, To Repel Ghosts, which
was based on the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Ghosts is as public as Jelly
Roll is personal, and as inspired by jazz as Jelly Roll is by blues. In each of
these books however, I didn’t want to mistake mere autobiography for poetry. I love
how the blues, while personal, transform experience into poetry, making it swing with
metaphor and music.
Looking back now, I see the poems are also trying to connect to some of the metaphors of
the blues and African American culture—which is to say, to the heart of American
culture—using symbols such as the train as in "Cotillion," or the
river, as in "Intermezzo." I love such metaphors in the blues because
they aren’t highfalutin’, but everyday and yet extraordinary, especially in the
hands of brilliant blues singers such as Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson. When Smith sings
"You been a good old wagon/but you done broke down" there’s that sense of
the everyday and a sense of humor I love, while also telling us something bigger about
love and loss and acceptance and laughter.
Please note that Jelly Roll doesn’t claim to be all blues; it’s called
"a blues" and not "the blues" for a reason. Right now I’m
completing editing Blues Poems, an anthology for the Everyman Pocket Poets Series
due out fall 2003, that should show some of the range of poets and poems responding to the
blues. In the end, with Jelly Roll I was just trying to capture the sound in my
head, a sound the blues seemed to name.
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