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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Not many poets have editors. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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

" 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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

" Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.' "

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

" 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

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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