The Paris Review talks with Kevin Young about Ardency

In a short web interview, the chatty lit mag talks with Young about his new book (Ardency), his forthcoming memoir (the Grey Album), and poetry remixes:

. . . you’re interested in the DJ aesthetic in your other work. In 2004, you published a remix of To Repel Ghosts, your collection about the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. How do you understand the remix as it applies to poetry?

It took a while for anyone to want to publish To Repel Ghosts. I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn’t. When it came out I was pleased, but had spent so much time on it that I had thought of this whole other way to do the book. It’s not that different than Walt Whitman publishing different versions of “Song of Myself.” I certainly didn’t want it to replace the original and that’s the nice thing about the remix. You can have both. I have no plans to remix Ardency.

There’s something obsessive about remixing a 360-page book. Ardency also has an obsessive quality to, as if it is driven by a need to catalogue every aspect of the Amistad case. Is obsession part of your process?

Definitely. In a long poem or a sequence of poems, you’re trying to formalize your obsessions and give them a shape and a name. The key is to realize if the connections you are making are ones with resonance. That is something a DJ does. A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, “Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.”