Kevin Young Quotes
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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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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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There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing.
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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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Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.
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It's a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits.
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A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection.
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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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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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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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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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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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I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.
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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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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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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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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.
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Poems evolve. I don't feel like I choose them; they just come to me.
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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.