Quotes from Kevin Young

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.

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

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.

Footnotes are for proving and showing where you've been. Also, they're for the curious - they can then go and find the information on their own.

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 think the Internet is a free press, you know?

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

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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

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.'

I remember in the '80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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