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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. "

Kevin Young

American

Music

Ignore

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" I try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they're not so different. "

" I feel music is another kind of literature. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Certainly, there is, in our culture, this notion of, you know, you can become anything. You can change. "

" 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. "

" I think the Internet is a free press, you know? "

" It took a while for anyone to want to publish 'To Repel Ghosts.' I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn't. "

" People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don't think it's a blurry line at all. "

" There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism. "

" 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

" 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

" I do think there's a certain savviness to be able to recognize the way people want a good story, and I think that we underestimate that. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there. "

Kevin Young

Both

Parents

" A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.' "

Kevin Young

Connection

Dance

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

You

" When I was ten and in fifth grade, I read all of 'Robinson Crusoe' in one weekend. "

" Not many poets have editors. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" To me, poetry is spoken - not exclusively, but there's a mix of languages in it. That's what I liked about 'For the Confederate Dead;' it has many different tones to it. "

Kevin Young

Poetry

Different

" 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. "

" I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas. "

Kevin Young

Kansas

Know

" A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection. "