Poem-a-Day - "Ledge" by Kevin Young

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April 28, 2023

Ledge

Kevin Young

No use telling
the dead what
you’ve learned since

they’ve learnt it too—

how to go on
without you, the mercy
of morning, or moving,

the light that persists
even if.

✶

Beauty is as beauty
does, my mother says,
who is beautiful & speaks

loud so she can be understood
unlike poets who can’t
talk to save their lives

so they write.

✶

It’s like a language,
loss—
can be

learned only
by living—there—

✶

What anchors us
to this thirst
& earth, its threats

& thinnesses—
its ways of waning
& making the most of—

of worse & much
worse—if not
this light lifting

up over the ridge

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“‘Ledge’ is taken from a longer poetic sequence inspired by Dante [Alighieri]. My friend and fellow poet Robin Coste Lewis and I divided up ‘The Inferno’ and wrote our respective versions after I was asked by the Museum of Modern Art to respond to Robert Rauschenberg’s drawings based on ‘The Inferno,’ which a friend had read to the artist canto by canto, circle by circle. I happened to have grown up with the same John Ciardi translation that Rauschenberg heard and, in composing my cantos, incorporated the Dante I first encountered as a teenager, together with African American cosmologies and spirituals that grounded me. Without telling a soul, after the initial project I continued to write through the rest of The Divine Comedy. As its title suggests, ‘Ledge’ is from the ‘Purgatory’ section, which, in our current era of social and bodily strife—not unlike Dante’s own time—manages to offer some hard-won hope.”
—Kevin Young

Kevin Young is the author of Stones (Knopf, 2021) and the children’s book Emile and the Field (Knopf, 2022), among other titles. He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and currently serves as poetry editor of The New Yorker.

Stones
(Knopf, 2021)

“At Night” by Stanley Plumly
read more

“Incantation” by Chris Abani
read more

Thanks to U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón, author of The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. As of this year, the U.S. poet laureate guest editorship during National Poetry Month is a collaboration between the Academy and the Library of Congress. Read or listen to a Q&A about Limón’s curatorial approach and find out more about our guest editors for the year.

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