Kevin Young Quotes
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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 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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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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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'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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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 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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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 think the Internet is a free press, you know?
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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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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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Is there a bad song on 'Sign O' The Times?' There isn't.
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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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I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there.
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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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I try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they're not so different.
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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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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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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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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 that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived.
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I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University.
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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.
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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.