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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. "

Kevin Young

Year

Classic

Iconic

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" Not many poets have editors. "

" 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. "

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

" Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain. "

" 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 remember in the '80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous. "

" Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it. "

Kevin Young

History

About

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret. "

" 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. "

" 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

" Poems evolve. I don't feel like I choose them; they just come to me. "

Kevin Young

Feel

Choose

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

" 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. "

" Is there a bad song on 'Sign O' The Times?' There isn't. "

" 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. "

" 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. "