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" 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.' "

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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

" In a long poem or a sequence of poems, you're trying to formalize your obsessions and give them a shape and a name. The key is to realize if the connections you are making are ones with resonance. "

" 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

Believe

Sometimes

" I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University. "

" The first rule of influence is that there isn't any. The second rule of influence is that it is everywhere. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I feel music is another kind of literature. "

" I think the hardest thing, really, is trying not to write. "

" 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. "

" I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets. "

" It's a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits. "

" When I'm in full-on writing mode and have the day, I try to get in my office around 10 A.M. and stop once 'Judge Judy' comes on at 4, when I quit and come down. Sometimes, I leave her on while I edit - if she can make the tough calls, then so can I. "

" 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. "

" I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain. "

" Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as 'black' could not prepare us for the election of America's first undeniably black president, Barack Obama. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Great music - say jazz - has that inventive, improvisational quality that tells us something about life. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived. "

" I think I go with the Duke Ellington view on music. He said, 'There's two kinds of music - there's good music, and then there's the other kind.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "