It's been a year and a half since we lost poet Al Young, and he is still sorely missed. We start this week off by highlighting his November 15, 2018 reading at our own Kelly Writers House.
Young was a prolific author and editor with more than twenty books to his name (including poetry collections, novels, and musical memoirs), and a former Poet Laureate of California, hailed by no less than Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as "an educator and a man with a passion for the Arts. His remarkable talent and sense of mission to bring poetry into the lives of Californians is an inspiration."
This seventy-minute reading starts with a welcome from Al Filreis and a longer introduction by William J. Harris, who details his personal history with Young more than fifty years ago as a grad student, and observes that "like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka, Al is a blues jazz poet." Later, he tells us that "like a blues in the heart, there's much pain and joy in the poems of Al Young," before enumerating his many publications and achievements of this "man of great craft and soul." After a long and charming salvo of opening comments, that moves from Ben Franklin to Bahrain and back again, Young delivers a fantastic reading for the appreciative audience.
You can find audio and video of this event on PennSound's Al Young author page, which is also home to a 2006 reading in San Francisco and a 1990 set at Printer's Ink in Palo Alto, CA. To listen to any of these recordings, click here.
