Quotes from Kevin Young

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.

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

A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Not many poets have editors.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as 'black' could not prepare us for the election of America's first undeniably black president, Barack Obama.

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.

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

I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there.

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

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.