Kevin Young Quotes
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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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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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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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There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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Not many poets have editors.
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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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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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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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Writers need their totems, their altars. Mine, I feel, share the same randomness and utility of those belonging to painters I know, who are relentlessly visual and even poetic.
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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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I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret.
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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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I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.
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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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Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin.
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What a poem can do is provide you this intimate eye that, for the length of a poem and hopefully a little bit after, can provide testimony or a point of view.
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I feel music is another kind of literature.
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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.