A Golden Age of Poetry

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Kevin Young: Hi, I’m Kevin Young, the poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine. We’re looking here at several photos of poets that originally hung in Howard Moss’s office. Howard Moss was the longtime poetry editor of The New Yorker and published many of the poets pictured here.

Well, working on the anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925 to 2025 was a real treat. And when David Remnick asked me if I wanted to do it, my answer was, “Only since I was 15 years old,” because when I was 15—and maybe a little earlier than that—I bought The New Yorker Book of Poetry from 1969. You know, it wasn’t 1969, but it was still in print and, you know, very much a bible for me.

I still have my copy, and it has neat little pen underlines. I would never use pen now, but then it seemed fine, and it really was my introduction to a full world of poetry. I was growing up in Kansas then, and it was, you know, hard to find poets. It just felt like I was trying to write these things that no one else I knew was interested in or wasn’t around.

And The New Yorker as a magazine was a conduit to that. You could find it—it came to you, you know. So that was really a powerful thing. And that power of connectivity, I think, is still ongoing with The New Yorker. People get The New Yorker for many reasons, but there’s poems amongst the pages, amongst the features, next to the cartoons, you know.

And so I think people encounter poetry in a way that is both purposeful and, I think, fortuitous in those pages. And I think that very much continues. And that’s really the spirit I wanted to try to capture in the anthology itself, is one of discovery.