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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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.' "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

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

" I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas. "

Kevin Young

Kansas

Know

" 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. "

" Not many poets have editors. "

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

" Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience. "

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

Kevin Young

Feel

Choose

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

" I feel music is another kind of literature. "

" 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. "

" 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

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