Young, Kevin (1970– )
Kevin Young made an impressive entrance onto
the African-American literary stage near the end
of the 20th century. His first collection of poems,
Most Way Home, won The National Poetry Series
and the Zacharis First Book Prize from Plough-
shares. Young, whose family hails from Louisiana,
prefers not to claim or identify a specific birth-
place. His poems suggest he is the product of a
more universal mother, Mother Earth, who gives
birth in a more inclusive American/global vil-
lage—one that is simultaneously Quivira, Bean-
ville, or East Jesus, places Young remaps, revisits,
and rediscovers in his poems without, as TONI
MORRISON writes in Playing in the Dark, “a man-
date for conquest” (3).
In “Quivira City Limits,” “somewhere out-
side Topeka,” for example, Young’s speaker has
an epiphany that, like William Carlos Williams’s
speakers in “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “Spring
and All,” provides insight into and comments on
modernity: “it suddenly all matters again, / those
tractors blooming rust / in the fields only need a
good coat / of paint. Red.” However, Young’s speaker
moves beyond awe and admiration to critique
15th-century Spanish and 19th-century explor-
ers, conquistadors, and colonialists—the empire-
building behavior and greed of appropriators and
settlers that resulted not only in the creation of a
modern “New World” but also in the alienation of
the worker from the land and, even more lamen-
table, the destruction of Native American Indian
cultures, specifically that of the Quivaran Indians
of Kansas, whose culture remains now only in mu-
seums. Desecrated soil and now-silent wheat fields
where once buffalo thunderously roamed against
majestic landscape have given way to tractors that
bloom “rust / in the fields”:
when will all this ever be enough
this wide open they call discovery,
disappointed, this place my
thousand bones carry, now call home.In the end, Young’s speaker’s racial identity or
ethnicity is intentionally blurred, even unimport-
ant. He speaks as an American, a resident and
citizen of “this place,” as the progeny of all that
preceded him: “my thousand bones... call home.”
Despite the history of devastation, exploitation,
and appropriation, the speaker seems to say, he
must embrace this American place, his legacy.
In “East Jesus” Young’s speaker, much like
Sinclair Lewis in Main Street, is concerned with
locality, with Littletown, U.S.A., and specifi-
cally with the myth of the innocence, Christian
conservatism, and provincialism that ostensibly
dominates places located between “Boonies &
Sticks,” in the middle of nowhere, in East Jesus,
U.S.A. Young’s speaker becomes landscaper and
cartographer, providing longitudes and latitudes
of generic East Jesus, where “the water tower is
about half- / empty, the only bar (next county /
over) LA TAVERN & TACKLE SHOP / stay full.”
Despite the residents’ visible subscription to re-
ligious and moral principles, evidenced by their
weekly church attendance and posted sermon ti-
tles—“AVOID /SINS TRAGEDY LEARN SATANS
/ STRATEGY”—during the services parishioners
“sit & pray & can’t /... / hardly wait to make love
or have that drink, hungering through / the ser-
mons & shouts.”
Like MELVIN B. TOLSON, AL YOUNG, RI TA DOVE,
and CARL PHILLIPS, Kevin Young speaks as an
American with an American voice, within an
American context, rather than solely as an Af-
rican-American poet. This is not to say that he
does not value and find complexity and meaning
in African-American culture, as is clearly borne
out by his second collection of poems, To R e p e l
Ghosts (2002), which, based on the work of artist
Jean-Michel-Basquiat, was a finalist for the James
McLaughlin Prize from the Academy of American
Poets. Young seems to call for a reenvisioning of
the African-American literary landscape at the
dawn of the 21st century, revisiting and revising
LeRoi Jones/AMIRI BARAKA’s Home in the title of
his first collection. Young is a former Stegner Fel-
low in Poetry at Stanford; he is currently Ruth
Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gabbin, Joanne V., ed. Furious Flower: African Ameri-
can Poetry from the Black Arts Movement to the574 Young, Kevin