Words matter. These are the best Kevin Young Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Certainly, there is, in our culture, this notion of, you know, you can become anything. You can change.
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.’
I feel music is another kind of literature.
Is there a bad song on ‘Sign O’ The Times?’ There isn’t.
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.
At our peril, we ignore the fact that black vernacular, like the blues, both has a form and performs… For just as there would be no American music without black folks, there would be very little of our American language.
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.
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.
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.
I think the Internet is a free press, you know?
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.
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.’
A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection.
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.
I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain.
It’s a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits.
There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism.
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.
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.
Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.
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 try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they’re not so different.
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.
The first rule of influence is that there isn’t any. The second rule of influence is that it is everywhere.
A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, ‘Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.’
Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as ‘black’ could not prepare us for the election of America’s first undeniably black president, Barack Obama.
It’s hard to describe one’s own alchemy that makes one into a writer, but I definitely think American language is so interesting, and specifically Southern language and black Southern language; it’s hard to separate Southern language from black language.
Poems evolve. I don’t feel like I choose them; they just come to me.
Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.
Not many poets have editors.
I remember in the ’80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist.
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.
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.
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.
I do think there’s a certain savviness to be able to recognize the way people want a good story, and I think that we underestimate that.
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.
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.
To me, poetry is spoken – not exclusively, but there’s a mix of languages in it. That’s what I liked about ‘For the Confederate Dead;’ it has many different tones to it.
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.