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.
— Kevin Young
A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection.
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.
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.'
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.
I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there.
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.
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.
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.
There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing.
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.
I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.
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.
I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain.
There's something about the kind of time travel that a poem can provide. It can take you to somewhere else - a culture far from you, a language far from you, but suddenly you're there. You're that person, seeing with that person's eyes. I think that's really tremendous. Even things like cinema or more traditional history can't quite do that.
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.
People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don't think it's a blurry line at all.
Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.
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.
I try to have a lot of influences, which is to say not to have one specific influence too strongly; that can end up badly.
