Quotes from Kevin Young

Often, in death, everything else fails. We are left only with the music and the meaning of poetry.

Do not believe angels are easy. Instead, terrible, terrific in the oldest sense-- the ground giving way beneath your feet.

May God or whoever else spare you the arms of bereavement specialists-- grant mercy from the Team dedicated to your transition in this difficult time yet who won't tell you a thing & know far less.

This world is rigged with ruin.

Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don't know it.

The day will come when you'll be dead longer than alive--thankfully not soon.

It's death there is no cure for-- life the long disease. If we're lucky. Otherwise, short trip beyond. And below.

It's hard being human.

Like Rachel Dolezal, I too became black around the age of five. I first became a n----r at nine, so I had me a good run.

Did Dolezal really fool those black folks around her? I have a strange feeling she didn't, that many simply humored her. You have to do this with white people, from time to time.

Do not write a poetry of rarity, or of rarification, but of *never again*. Do not even write this poetry but find it, come across it, and step over it. The helpless ant that in the end can lift more than ten times its weight: that is a poetry.

I have come to know sorrow's not noun but verb, something that, unlike living, by doing right you do less of.

At night I count not the stars but the dark.

I now know pain is part of any journey- that this is the opposite of grief, but grief the only way I know to describe waiting and waiting without knowing, hoping one day joy will arrive.

Deep Song Belief is what buries us—that & the belief in belief— No longer do I trust liltlessness —leeward is the world's way—Go on plunge in —the lungs will let us float. Joy is the mile- high ledge the leap—a breath above the lip of the abandoned quarry—belief the dark the deep.

Like hot food I love you like warm bread & cold cuts, butter sammiches or, days later, after Thanksgiving when I want whatever's left

Not the storm but the calm that slays me.

It never ends, the bruise of being

holding tight / to their pocketbooks / at the pearly gates / just in case.

a calm that would undo most anyone who thought noise worse than its opposite

The apocalypse sounds like this-- black men breaking in to steal back the thing once stole from them.

Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die to get there.

Like God Gumbo is hard to get right & I don't bother asking for it outside my mother's house. Like life, there's no one way to do it, & a hundred ways, from here to Sunday, to get it dead wrong.

I have begun to believe in, and even to preach, a poetry of necessity. This is a recognition not just of the necessity of poetry to our lives, but also the fact that necessity is what drives most of the poetry that matters, or the way that it matters.