Kevin Young Quotes
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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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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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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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Rereading 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was struck by what I had forgotten of the book: in a manner of pages, we encounter shame, history, ruin, conflicting stories, and wounds badly healed; in short, the South.
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Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as 'black' could not prepare us for the election of America's first undeniably black president, Barack Obama.
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We had moved cross-country from upstate New York to Kansas in the heat wave of 1980, with two cars, no air-conditioning, and a black dog. I can still see the infernal temperature of a hundred and nineteen degrees on a bank sign somewhere near Ohio.
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I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret.
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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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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.
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Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.
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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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One of the most troubling things about the term 'fake news' is that it has become a force field against accusations you don't like.
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I think the hardest thing, really, is trying not to write.
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It's hard to describe one's own alchemy that makes one into a writer, but I definitely think American language is so interesting, and specifically Southern language and black Southern language; it's hard to separate Southern language from black language.
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Not many poets have editors.
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There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism.
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I think I go with the Duke Ellington view on music. He said, 'There's two kinds of music - there's good music, and then there's the other kind.'
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I write about what hoaxers do, but I also want us to think about what believers do. Why do we want to believe a story like James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces?' Why did we want to believe that Lance Armstrong really did all these things that, looking back, seemed impossible?
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A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.'
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I feel music is another kind of literature.
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Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience.
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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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While claiming advocacy, what hoaxers really exhibit is self-interest. Often, this is because there is only the self to support their false claims; any revelations merely provide further opportunities for details and forgery.
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I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.