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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. "
Kevin Young
Triumph
Home
Culture
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" I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain. "
Kevin Young
Earth
Sun
Rain
" 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
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Experience
Turn
Need
" There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing. "
Kevin Young
Always
Talking
Interesting
" 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
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Difference
Just
Just One
" 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
" 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
" 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
DJ
" Listen to the late Isaac Hayes covering 'Walk on By' by Burt Bacharach or Mayfield singing The Carpenters' vanilla-seeming 'We've Only Just Begun,' and you realize soul's insistence on transformation: Mayfield in particular makes the song not just about love but the start of revolution. "
Kevin Young
Soul
Love
Revolution
" 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
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Year
Classic
Iconic
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Information
Curious
Find
" 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
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Tough
Day
Judge
" 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
" 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
" I write about what hoaxers do, but I also want us to think about what believers do. Why do we want to believe a story like James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces?' Why did we want to believe that Lance Armstrong really did all these things that, looking back, seemed impossible? "
Kevin Young
Looking
Looking Back
Think
" Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous. "
Kevin Young
Hip-Hop
Thinking
Fact
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Long
You
Trying
" It's a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits. "
Kevin Young
Glass
Blue
Black
" Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain. "
Kevin Young
Pain
Revolutionary
Act
" 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. "
Kevin Young
World
Think
Looking
" I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas. "
Kevin Young
Kansas
Know
Up
" Great music - say jazz - has that inventive, improvisational quality that tells us something about life. "
Kevin Young
Jazz
Life
Music
" There's something about the kind of time travel that a poem can provide. It can take you to somewhere else - a culture far from you, a language far from you, but suddenly you're there. You're that person, seeing with that person's eyes. I think that's really tremendous. Even things like cinema or more traditional history can't quite do that. "
Kevin Young
Time
Culture
Eyes
" 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
" 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
" 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
" In African-American culture, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has. "
Kevin Young
Someone
Bible
Culture