Checking in With Kevin Young at Esquire

Robert P. Baird contributes a fabulous article for Esquire about incoming New Yorker Poetry editor, Kevin Young, which puts the celebrated poet, scholar, and editor into context within the larger framework of American verse. The article arrives on the occasion of Young's latest non-fiction book, about hoaxes, called Bunk. In his article, "Can Kevin Young Make Poetry Matter Again?," Baird writes, "Now forty-seven, he possesses a résumé that reads like a passport stamped on a Grand Tour of institutional high culture, with stops at Harvard, Stanford (a Stegner Fellowship), Brown (an MFA), Emory (a named professorship), and the Schomburg." From there: 

He has published ten collections of his own poems, edited eight volumes of others’, and, with Bunk, written two massive volumes of nonfiction. Capping off this run, he has just taken over as the poetry editor of The New Yorker.

And yet while Young has accomplished enough, quickly enough, to suggest a man in a hurry, in person there is nothing rushed about his manner. As we headed out into the gentrified neighborhood around the Schomburg in search of a late lunch, he walked slowly, his weight on his heels, and took the time to point out local landmarks with the proprietary authority of an alderman.

After settling into a red banquette at a local African-French bistro, Young ordered a pork chop with haricots verts and a sweet fruit mocktail. He told me that he’d started thinking about Bunk before Donald Trump merited a joke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, let alone a desk in the Oval Office. He traces his interest in hoaxes to a boss he worked for in college who was later implicated in a number of scams. Back then, Young had shoulder-length dreadlocks and a goatee that traversed his upper chin in a narrow strip before unfurling in a rakish inverted plume. He maintained the dreads into his thirties—“It was important to have them and have them be a fact,” he said—but by 2001 they’d gotten “heavy on the head” and he lopped them off. (An inveterate collector, he still has them in a box somewhere.)

Young is well aware that everyone from Plato on has accused poets of being purveyors of eloquent deceit—“liars by profession,” as David Hume put it. But he insists that the hoax is the enemy of art. “People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don’t think it’s a blurry line at all,” he said. Unlike hoaxers, artists promise their audience fair warning: “There’s a level of ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘In a galaxy far, far away’ that tells you I’m going to be telling you a story.” When that pact is broken, art stops and the hoax begins. “It means we’ve lost fiction,” he told me. “We’ve lost fruitful art.”

Read more at Esquire.