Kevin Young Quotes
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For me Louisiana was mostly family when I was there. We hardly left; there was no need to... We hardly left the front porch. You would just sit, and folks would come by, and it was really old school in that way.
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I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there.
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I try to have a lot of influences, which is to say not to have one specific influence too strongly; that can end up badly.
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It took a while for anyone to want to publish 'To Repel Ghosts.' I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn't.
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In African-American culture, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.
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When I was ten and in fifth grade, I read all of 'Robinson Crusoe' in one weekend.
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The willed recovery of what's been lost - often forcibly, I suppose - is what keeps me going. It is this reason I found myself a poet and a collector and now a curator: to save what we didn't even know needed saving.
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I think that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived.
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Is there a bad song on 'Sign O' The Times?' There isn't.
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I try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they're not so different.
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The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world.
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In a long poem or a sequence of poems, you're trying to formalize your obsessions and give them a shape and a name. The key is to realize if the connections you are making are ones with resonance.
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To me, poetry is spoken - not exclusively, but there's a mix of languages in it. That's what I liked about 'For the Confederate Dead;' it has many different tones to it.
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I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets.
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People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don't think it's a blurry line at all.
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Listen to the late Isaac Hayes covering 'Walk on By' by Burt Bacharach or Mayfield singing The Carpenters' vanilla-seeming 'We've Only Just Begun,' and you realize soul's insistence on transformation: Mayfield in particular makes the song not just about love but the start of revolution.
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I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University.
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I do think there's a certain savviness to be able to recognize the way people want a good story, and I think that we underestimate that.
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I think the Internet is a free press, you know?
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The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent, too - hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art.
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When I'm in full-on writing mode and have the day, I try to get in my office around 10 A.M. and stop once 'Judge Judy' comes on at 4, when I quit and come down. Sometimes, I leave her on while I edit - if she can make the tough calls, then so can I.
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For 'The Grey Album,' I'd been thinking about the good side of lying - lying as a kind of improvisatory act in black culture. Afterward, it nagged at me because there are those other kinds of lies that I think are all around us, and I was fascinated about hoaxes in general. So 'Bunk' became a natural extension of 'The Grey Album.'
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There's something about the kind of time travel that a poem can provide. It can take you to somewhere else - a culture far from you, a language far from you, but suddenly you're there. You're that person, seeing with that person's eyes. I think that's really tremendous. Even things like cinema or more traditional history can't quite do that.
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The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference.