Kevin Young

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The first rule of influence is that there isn't any. The second rule of influence is that it is everywhere.

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.

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.

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.

Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.'

Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.

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