NIGHT WATCH: Poems, by Kevin Young
In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art commissioned the poets Kevin Young and Robin Coste Lewis to respond in verse to Robert Rauschenberg’s “Inferno” drawings. Young’s contribution, “Darkling,” shows up as the final and longest of three poetic sequences in his exacting new collection, “Night Watch,” which takes as one of its central themes the ability of artists to recast history.
By calling his book “Night Watch,” Young — a prolific poet and essayist, who also serves as poetry editor of The New Yorker and until recently as director of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History — has at least two references in mind.
The first is “The Night Watch,” a famously misnamed Rembrandt painting. For centuries the work was believed to depict a nocturnal scene, but only because it was covered by a thick varnish. When the lacquer was finally removed, it revealed a daytime setting, fundamentally altering the painting’s meaning. Young seizes on this as a metaphor: The poet’s job is to strip away layers of distortion to reveal and elevate narratives that have been hidden, ignored or erased.
The other reference in “Night Watch” is to its reversal, “Watch Night,” an African American tradition in which churchgoers gather on New Year’s Eve to celebrate the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation with sermon and song. This act of collective remembrance contrasts sharply with the erasures embedded in Western art.
In one poem, the speaker walks past Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” and reworks W.H. Auden’s observation, “About suffering, they were never wrong,/The Old Masters,” into the experience of a museum visitor “suffering past the Old Masters/& the unnamed/servants.” As a Black man walking through the museum, Young is acutely aware of the selective portrayal of suffering. His intervention insists on seeing these hidden lives while celebrating, like Watch Night itself, poetry’s capacity for renewal.
“Darkling” powerfully reinvents Dante’s “Inferno” based on the psychological and cultural experiences of being Black in America. If Rauschenberg rendered hell in smudged fields of near white and Dante wandered a “dark wood,” Young maps a topography shaped by what he elsewhere in the book calls the “dark notes” of the blues. His tercets are clipped and elliptical, echoing the three-line structures of blues stanzas as well as Dante’s terza rima.
The blues also becomes a subversive way to navigate a world governed by surveillance (“frisked & let through/we stepped into/Death’s waiting room”) and racial violence (“the Doctor … will/kneel on your chest/to stop the bullet/or breath”).
Early in a poem called “The Hotel of Hell (Circle Nine, Round 3),” Young summons an unsettling image from the blues singer Robert Johnson, “Me & the Devil/walking side by side—,” then pivots to his own surreal imagery, “his feet terra cotta./His hair a cold fire.” Rooted in Black folklore, the Devil in Young’s cosmology isn’t always evil, but rather a trickster figure who emerges as a stand-in for power. In a country shaped by white supremacy and spectacle, the Devil might even have thin, orange skin and “well paid” friends.
The book’s other poetic sequences are “All Souls,” a meditation on grief and loss, and “Two-Headed Nightingale,” which mines the archives to recover voices silenced by slavery. Here Young turns our attention to the infernos of history through a moving dramatic monologue by Millie and Christine McCoy, conjoined twins who were born into slavery, then kidnapped from their home and exhibited by P.T. Barnum and other showmen on a late-19th-century minstrel circuit. (Another poet, Tyehimba Jess, skillfully engaged with this story in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 collection, “Olio,” but where Jess leans more into formal experimentation, Young turns to voice and persona, focusing on the intimate interiority of the twins’ shared experience.)
Midway through the poem, Young incorporates an unsigned inscription from the twins’ 1885 calling card: “Each have sensitive of lower parts/but only sensitive/of each upper part.” By repurposing this grotesque medical language, he defies the objectifying gaze cast on the twins, who were promoted as “The Two-Headed Nightingale” for their singing talents. This disturbing document is juxtaposed with Young’s tender imagining of the sisters’ voice:
From one
another
we ate
what
the other did
As one we sang,
we spake.
With this poem Young, like Jess, joins a broader effort to uplift submerged histories and amplify marginalized voices, returning dignity to Millie and Christine.
As Young writes, we live in a world in which “the dead won’t leave/us be.” Thankfully, there remains collective work to honor them. “Night Watch” continues one of the most vital currents in contemporary poetry, transforming history and its silences into lyric through the poet’s eloquent invitation: “O wounded soul,/speak.”
NIGHT WATCH: Poems | By Kevin Young | Knopf | 152 pp. | $29
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