Kevin Young

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

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

“I feel music is another kind of literature.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Certainly, there is, in our culture, this notion of, you know, you can become anything. You can change.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they're not so different.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”