Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" Not many poets have editors. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing. "

" 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. "