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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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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For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie - forging an identity, 'making' one, but 'lying' about one, too.
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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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Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.'
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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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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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I think the Internet is a free press, you know?
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Here are the facts: my folks grew up so poor that, in the words of Redd Foxx, there were twenty o's between the p and r.
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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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We've learned quickly that the Web is far more pseudonymous than anonymous: online, our names have simply been changed to a number, an I.P. address, protocol, and code.
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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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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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I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.
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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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Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.
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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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I think that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived.
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Not many poets have editors.
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We quickly erase hoaxes once exposed, excising the monstrous palimpsest, because as with any witch hunt or obvious fake, afterward we can't quite explain why we ever believed the outrageous thing in the first place.
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Is there a bad song on 'Sign O' The Times?' There isn't.
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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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I think music is poetry in the sense that I think the condition of poetry I'm going for has some qualities of music that it aspires to.