Kevin Young Quotes
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I think the hardest thing, really, is trying not to write.
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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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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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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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I remember in the '80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist.
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There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing.
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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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A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection.
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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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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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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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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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Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.
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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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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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That sense of mystery, but also of revelation, is what I turn to poems for. They're able to embody experience. We need more and more of that.
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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.