Kevin Young Talks to Amber Rose Johnson About African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song

Kevin Young's African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America) is "much more diasporic than 'African American' might seem to suggest," says Amber Rose Johnson in an interview with Young now up at Bookforum. They also discuss the poet and editor's relationship to institutions (Young is director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and incoming director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture):

…You’re obviously a poet and a scholar deeply immersed in archives and historical research. How does your relationship to these institutions—where you’re archiving objects and media and a lot more than poetry—inform the way you construct an anthology as its own kind of archive?

You almost answered the question, I think! You have to compose poetry as a place of discovery and memory, which is what archives are. Sometimes people say they “found” something in the archive. Well, it was there to be found—that’s the point. As a curator, you are adding material to enable discovery in the future. The hardest thing is not discovering or rediscovering, it’s limiting those discoveries and making editorial choices.

It was really important to have a diversity of women’s voices and nonbinary voices in the anthology. And the process demands that because, especially in Black poetry, so much of it is not as recorded as you might wish—or downright neglected. And places like the Schomburg Center are places that kept this history always. The reason we have such a great collection of, say, Black Arts poetry or the world’s largest collection of Green Books is because we were collecting all along. We’ve always kept the flame alive.

Find out more at Bookforum.