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" A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection. "
Kevin Young
Solace
Poem
Testimony
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" Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain. "
Kevin Young
Pain
Revolutionary
Act
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Character
Fake
Know
" 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. "
Kevin Young
History
Forgotten
Shame
" Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it. "
Kevin Young
Us
History
About
" Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as 'black' could not prepare us for the election of America's first undeniably black president, Barack Obama. "
Kevin Young
Prepare
First
Election
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Me
Believe
Sometimes
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Going
Think
Some
" I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain. "
Kevin Young
Earth
Sun
Rain
" The willed recovery of what's been lost - often forcibly, I suppose - is what keeps me going. It is this reason I found myself a poet and a collector and now a curator: to save what we didn't even know needed saving. "
Kevin Young
Know
Lost
Myself
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Why
Place
First
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Dark
People
Long
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Triumph
Home
Culture
" I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas. "
Kevin Young
Kansas
Know
Up
" The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent, too - hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art. "
Kevin Young
Art
Reality
Imagination
" I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret. "
Kevin Young
Keep
Think
Things
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Feel
Forget
Like
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Against
Become
News
" I remember in the '80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist. "
Kevin Young
Remember
People
Best
" The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world. "
Kevin Young
People
Music
History
" For me Louisiana was mostly family when I was there. We hardly left; there was no need to... We hardly left the front porch. You would just sit, and folks would come by, and it was really old school in that way. "
Kevin Young
Need
Me
You
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Wave
Black
New York
" The first rule of influence is that there isn't any. The second rule of influence is that it is everywhere. "
Kevin Young
First
Influence
Rule
" When I was ten and in fifth grade, I read all of 'Robinson Crusoe' in one weekend. "
Kevin Young
Grade
Read
Ten
" There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism. "
Kevin Young
History
Hysteria
Racism
" I think the Internet is a free press, you know? "
Kevin Young
Internet
Free
Think
" I think the hardest thing, really, is trying not to write. "
Kevin Young
Think
The Hardest Thing
Write
" For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie - forging an identity, 'making' one, but 'lying' about one, too. "
Kevin Young
Black
Lying
Creativity
" I try to have a lot of influences, which is to say not to have one specific influence too strongly; that can end up badly. "
Kevin Young
Influence
End
Up
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Been
Far
More
" Not many poets have editors. "
Kevin Young
Many
Editors
Poets