Kevin Young Discusses a Century of Poetry in The New Yorker with Deborah Garrison

BPL Presents welcomes Kevin Young, poetry editor for The New Yorker, to discuss a new anthology celebrating one hundred years of "influential, entertaining, and taste-making verse" published in the magazine. Young will be in conversation with Deborah Garrison.

Some of the stellar names making up just a fraction of the wonderfulness that is present in this essential anthology include: Seamus Heaney, Dorothy Parker, Louise Bogan, Louise Glück, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Plath, W. S. Merwin, Czesław Miłosz, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Strand, E. E. Cummings, Sharon Olds, Franz Wright, John Ashbery, Sandra Cisneros, Amanda Gorman, Maggie Smith, Kaveh Akbar.

The book is organized into sections honoring times of day (“Morning Bell,” “Lunch Break,” “After-Work Drinks,” “Night Shift”), allowing poets from different eras to talk back to one another in the same space, intertwined with chronological groupings from the decades as they march by: the frothy 1920s and 1930s (“despite the depression,” Young notes), the more serious ’40s and ’50s (introducing us to the early greats of our contemporary poetry, like Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich), the political ’60s and ’70s, the lyrical ’80s and ’90s, and then the 2000s’ with their explosion of greater diversity in the magazine, greater depth and breadth. 

The magazine’s poetic influence resides not just in this historical and cultural relevance but in sheer human connection, exemplified by the passing verses that became what Young calls “refrigerator poems”: the ones you tear out and affix to the fridge to read again and again over months and years. Our love for that singular Billy Collins or Ada Limón poem—or lines by a new writer you’ve never heard of but will hear much more from in the future—is what has made The New Yorker a great organ for poetry, a mouthpiece for our changing culture and way of life, even a mirror of our collective soul. Young will discuss the book with Garrison, interspersed by readings and followed by a signing. Copies of the anthology will be on sale courtesy of Greenlight Bookstore. 

Participants

Kevin Young is the poetry editor of The New Yorker, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast, and is the editor of nine other anthology volumes, including African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song. He is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the author of fifteen books of poetry and prose. 

 

 

 

 

 

Deb Garrison, formerly an editor at The New Yorker and the author of the bestselling poetry collection A Working Girl Can’t Win, joined book publishing in 2000 as the poetry editor at Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at Pantheon Books. Her areas of interest include poetry, literary fiction, biography, and books of Jewish interest (for Schocken). Among her authors are Heather Clark, Catherine Cohen, Alex Dimitrov, Mary Gaitskill, Julia Glass, David Grossman, Robin Coste Lewis, Sharon Olds, Joseph O’Neill, Clare Sestanovich, and Kevin Young; she also works with the literary estates of Frank O’Hara, Oliver Sacks, and John Updike. Photo credit Michael Lionstar