Kevin Young Quotes
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I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain.
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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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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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Great music - say jazz - has that inventive, improvisational quality that tells us something about life.
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Forget reparations - we need to rescue aspects of black culture abandoned even by black folks, whether it is the blues or home cookin' or broader forms of not just survival but triumph.
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A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection.
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The first rule of influence is that there isn't any. The second rule of influence is that it is everywhere.
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There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing.
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I remember in the '80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist.
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In the absence of an answer that is complicated and sort of maybe troubling, we sometimes settle for the easy answer. It's easier to believe that my discomfort comes from some fact that is being hidden from me.
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It's a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits.
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Harper Lee's novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird' became iconic almost immediately after appearing in 1960: best-seller status; the Pulitzer Prize the next year; a classic movie soon after, with Gregory Peck in an Academy Award-winning role.
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Can you explore real issues as a fake character? Yes - it's called acting. Or fiction. But acting is not a method of engaging with the actual world, just as pretending to know what a character might eat does not a novel make - much less make that make-believe real.
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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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I think Barnum is at the center of American culture. He's helping to invent what we now think of as pop culture. He invented pretty much our notions of the circus.
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Footnotes are for proving and showing where you've been. Also, they're for the curious - they can then go and find the information on their own.
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Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.
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In many ways, I feel like the form carries so much of the weight in a poem, obviously. But I think we sometimes forget that.
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Certainly, there is, in our culture, this notion of, you know, you can become anything. You can change.
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At our peril, we ignore the fact that black vernacular, like the blues, both has a form and performs... For just as there would be no American music without black folks, there would be very little of our American language.