avery r. young in conversation with LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

young and Diggs both work with words, sound, image—and bodies—as Diggs puts it. On today’s show, they talk about funk, Dolly Parton, taking notes, polyglots, and how these different cadences resonate in young’s series peestain. In these collages and poems, featured in the November issue of Poetry, young weaves his own history with the lives of his students and characters like Willis Jackson from the sitcom Diff'rent Strokes. The familiarity and openness of the references are as heartening as they are devastating. Nothing is neat. Nothing is predictable in young’s work—or Digg’s—as you’ll hear today. In the course of the conversation, Diggs reads one of her own poems and a poem by Carl Hancock Rux.

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