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Kevin Young  Bling Bling Blues poem analysis

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Kevin Young reads at the 2014 Dodge Poetry Festival

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Kevin Young was born in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1970, however he moved around a lot as a child before his family settled in Topeka, Kansas. Having lived in Kansas, Young feels connected to the people of color that also lived there, such as Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. His love for poetry came from a middle school assignment in which his creative writing class had to write a poem and the teacher anonymously picked his. He claims that from there, he just kept writing and couldn’t be stopped. He went on to earn his BA from Harvard University in 1992 and his MFA in creative writing from Brown University in 1996. In his time at Harvard, Young studied with Seamus Heaney and Lucie Brock-Broido and was awarded a Stegner Fellowship directly following graduation. In his time at Harvard, he also became a member of the Dark Room Collective, a group of African American youth-writers in Boston who hosted readings and had a mission to advance the work of their members. His first book of poetry, Most Way Home (1995), was selected for the National Poetry Series. Since then, Kevin Young has become the author of thirteen books of prose and poetry, his most recent being Brown. Two of his books, "Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015" and "Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News," were in the running for National Book Awards for poetry and nonfiction respectively. Young is also the poetry editor at The New Yorker as well as the director of the New York Public Library branch “Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.” In 2016 he was named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. More recently, he was awarded the Thomas Wolfe Prize for his writing on Oct. 3, 2017.

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The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
—Bob Dylan

I want to be doused

in cheese

& fried. I want

to wander

the aisles, my heart's

supermarket stocked high

as cholesterol. I want to die

wearing a sweatsuit—

I want to live

forever in a Christmas sweater,

a teddy bear nursing

off the front. I want to write

a check in the express lane.

I want to scrape

my driveway clean

myself, early, before

anyone's awake—

that'll put em to shame—

I want to see what the sun

sees before it tells

the snow to go. I want to be

the only black person I know.

I want to throw

out my back & not

complain about it.

I wanta drive

two blocks. Why walk—

I want love, n stuff—

I want to cut

my sutures myself.

I want to jog

down to the river

& make it my bed—

I want to walk

its muddy banks

& make me a withdrawal.

I tried jumping in,

found it frozen—

I'll go home, I guess,

to my rooms where the moon

changes & shines

like television.

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Closed Mondays

is music    is men

off early from work    is waiting

for the chance at the chair

while the eagle claws holes

in your pockets    keeping

time    by the turning

of rusty fans    steel flowers with

cold breezes    is having nothing

better to do    than guess at the years

of hair    matted beneath the soiled caps

of drunks    the pain of running

a fisted comb through stubborn

knots    is the dark dirty low

down blues    the tender heads

of sons fresh from cornrows    all

wonder at losing    half their height

is a mother gathering hair    for good

luck    for a soft wig    is the round

difficulty of ears    the peach

faced boys asking Eddie

to cut in parts and arrows

wanting to have their names read

for just a few days    and among thin

jazz    is the quick brush of a done

head    the black flood around

your feet    grandfathers

stopping their games of ivory

dominoes    just before they reach the bone

yard    is winking widowers announcing

cut it clean off    I’m through courting

and hair only gets in the way    is the final

spin of the chair    a reflection of

a reflection    that sting of wintergreen

tonic    on the neck of a sleeping snow

haired man    when you realize it is

your turn    you are next

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I am hoping

to hang your head

on my wall

in shame—

the slightest taxidermy

thrills me. Fish

forever leaping

on the living-room wall—

paperweights made

from skulls

of small animals.

I want to wear

your smile on my sleeve

& break

your heart like a horse

or its leg. Weeks of being

bucked off, then

all at once, you're mine—

Put me down.

I want to call you thine

to tattoo mercy

along my knuckles. I assassin

down the avenue

I hope

to have you forgotten

by noon. To know you

by your knees

palsied by prayer.

Loneliness is a science—

consider the taxidermist's

tender hands

trying to keep from losing

skin, the bobcat grin

of the living.

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DTH: You've written on cultural critique before in your last nonfiction book, and you're back again to the nonfiction world with "Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News,"DTH: I know "Jelly Roll"DTH: Your plate is extremely busy, as director of The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, books/poems you're writing and also soon as editor in a month. How do you find time for reading? I know that's something a lot of college students always complain about. was a finalist for the National Book Award, but how did you feel when you found out Bunk was on the longlist for a National Book Award? Are you anticipating it? DTH: You write a lot about the African-American experience, how does your poetry influence your research with the Schromberg center connect? Do they influence each other? which seems really timely. What inspired you to approach the subject of fake news, and why did you decide to explore this in a work of nonfiction rather than poetry?
KY: When I wrote "The Grey Album," which is my previous book, I was really talking about the good side of lying and this is the bad side of lying. But it also just, what I've found always fascinates me, some of my things that I talk about at parties, or just parts of conversation, but then I was always struck by, when people sit down to write about them in the past, they always seem to think they were about fact or fiction and this made up a blurry line idea. I really couldn't stomach that because it was clear to me that they were about something deeper and something more important, and I also wanted to know why are they happening now evermore frequently. And I both wanted to figure out if that was indeed true, which I suspected, and I think is true, and then also wanted to talk about what they were really about and why now. And then you know, the world continues to change as it always does, and some of those questions became even more pointed. And I think we have cut a name for what was happening between truthiness and fake news, I think there's a lot of be said and learned.

KY: I'm looking forward to the announcement, but who knows. There's a lot of great books on the list, and I'm just happy to ... it's really an honor to be on the long list, but it's especially exciting because I was on the longlist last year for poetry, so to be on it in another genre is pretty cool.
DTH: I wanted to talk about diversity in poetry. On the public stage it's been dominated by white voices and, especially now with you taking on such a big and public role, why is diversity in poetry important?
KY: I feel like students have more time perhaps than they think (laughs). And I also think a lot of is just habit. If you get in the habit, especially as a young writer starting out, of writing every day, of reading a little, just reading in those off moments, just carrying a book with you. You can read at the bus stop or in between classes, or in these moments where you can return to the world of words. I think that's really important. And carrying a notebook, those things I think my students don't do because they're used to writing on devices, I think it can be really helpful to have something on hand that you can write in or about. For me, I try to do that just naturally. When you're writing nonfiction it can be a little harder, you have to sort of be in one place at least long enough to kind of get back into the work, especially with a big book like "Bunk." But, I've been doing it a while. That's the goal, is figuring out the balancing.
DTH: UNC has a really great creative writing program, and some really great poets among its faculty that we students are lucky to have. Do you have any tips for college age poets, how to improve their writing?
KY: If you're writing especially about history, you have to have a certain amount of research in your poems. I think the key is knowing when to stop with a poem, because you don't want to know so much that the poem becomes an essay. You want to be able to kind of imagine, say, a voice or picture something. That leaf of imagination is what the poem, especially the historic poem, does really well. And even a personal poem can involve sort of a, if not research, then an exploration of self and one's own time and place. That can amount to research.
university@dailytarheel.com
But at the same time you have to give yourself that room. For me I've always edited things and done research, whether it's for prose or poetry, and it's just a natural extension of the process to me, and I think it is for a lot of people. It's not just always thought about or talked about. I think it's really important, and of course a research library like Schonberg is a place where it keeps these things safe for you should discover them.

What's amazing is, at New York Public Library, someone just discovered an essay by George Moses Horton, who I think actually used to come here to UNC in the 19th century. He was a slave and a poet, and he used to get passes to come here and he would write poems on demand and stuff. And they just discovered an essay by him in the archive. Obviously it's been there for like 150 years waiting for someone to discover it. That kind of discovery and realization is really important. Horton is one of the poets who I think is a really fascinating figure to me, to write about slavery while still in slavery, which Phillis Wheatley did before but he published his book in the South. He's a fascinating figure and that kind of research, if you don't know about Horton, you have to do a little research and who knows what you can discover.

KY: A big question. The answer is self-evident, the reason American poetry is so strong right now is because of its diversity. And the plenitude of voice, who are saying really interesting things in new ways often, it's because of the diversity and it's because of the efforts of groups like Cave Canem, ... these groups that are, poetry groups, that are in some ways challenging who's speaking but also sort of changing it, and just really providing forums for people to get heard on their own terms as well as provide support for publication and exploration of self and nation. In this moment of a lot of discussions around say race or gender diversity or all these things, the poets are sort of leading the way and have been there first and been there longest, writing out of selfhood and writing out of an expansive American eye and to sort of turn to that is really important.

KY: I think you have to write, write, write and read, read, read. Maybe you have to do that in the reverse order, especially if you're writing more than you're reading early on, I think that can be tough. And you should read everything, you shouldn't decide too early what you're going to like or fall in love with one school or another. You should read the poets who are here, there's a lot of great ones, and find ways you can interact with them in class, at a reading. Making yourself part of that process I think of reading and hearing readings is important. And if you can find a community around that, then you're in big luck.

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Q&A with Thomas Wolfe Award winner Kevin Young

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Kevin Young is the author of 11 books of prose and poetry. Two of his books, "Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015" and "Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News," have been longlisted for National Book Awards for poetry and nonfiction respectively.

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Profile

Image

Kevin Young at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Credit Credit Brad Ogbonna for The New York Times

Kevin Young, the prolific poet, editor, critic and, as of this month, poetry editor of The New Yorker, has, his friends say, a taste for the finer things: He is a reveler in the sensual pleasures of art, food, clothing (this from Natasha Trethewey, the former United States Poet Laureate). He is rarely seen without a pocket square. "We used to have dandy-offs back in the day," the novelist Colson Whitehead recalled. "But I think he surpassed my meager powers. I stopped trying to compete long ago."

As the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, part of the New York Public Library system, Mr. Young oversees a collection of books, manuscripts, papers and ephemera that spans the glories of black arts and letters. There's an unpublished novel and play by James Baldwin; the archive of the jazz saxophone great Sonny Rollins; DVDs of '70s-vintage blaxploitation films that show on screens a few stories above the stage of the American Negro Theater, where Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte once performed.

But Mr. Young, who turns 47 this week, has dedicated the last six years of his life to the intense and sustained study of, politely put, bull. Next week, Mr. Young will publish "Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News," a history, biography and, very nearly, catalogue raisonné of the hoax.

"They tell us a kind of story about ourselves," he said, one that is becoming ever more urgent.

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Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

When Mr. Young began the book, he imagined a "slim meditation on the idea of what a hoax is." But history is rich and well larded with falsehoods, and Mr. Young, already a connoisseur of hoaxes - he described quizzing friends at dinner parties about their favorite hoax, and sharing some of his own (he'd been fascinated by the Spectra poetry hoax, a parody of Modernist poetry taken seriously, for one) - found plenty more that demanded attention. The book, both compendium and commentary, ballooned to nearly 500 pages.

"Bunk" traces a lineage of lies through time. It begins in the 18th century, with Shakespeare forgers and travel liars; makes its way through the 19th, with P. T. Barnum as a kind of ringmaster/hoaxmaster (among whose incredible acts was Joice Heth, a black woman whom he purported had been George Washington's nursemaid - which would have made her, in Barnum's time, 161 years old); and wends through the false memoirs and fake personae of the 20th and 21st. (In Mr. Young's taxonomy the hoax, unlike a lie, a conspiracy theory or an urban legend, flirts with and delights in the possibility of discovery, at least in its early iterations.)

What the hoax returns to, both underpinning and undermining, Mr. Young found, is race. "I had a hunch that they would often deal with race," Mr. Young said, but he was struck how often the hoaxes he found came back to the subject." The hoax lays bare both prejudice (as did Barnum's exhibiting of a black man as "What Is It?," the missing link) and pilfering (as in the case of Rachel Dolezal, the former N.A.A.C.P. chapter president who had been living as a black woman until she was outed, in 2015, as white).

Mr. Young's earlier book, " The Grey Album," looked at the generative power of storytelling, but "Bunk" takes a bleaker view. The progression of the hoax, as Mr. Young describes it, is one from honor to horror. Early hoaxes validated: a young poet tracing a false genealogy between himself and the greats; Joice Heth providing a direct line between her 19th-century spectators and the father of the country. By the late 20th century, the hoax had turned grim: Mr. Young points to hoaxes like false Holocaust or Benghazi memoirs or even, in his view, Dylann Roof, the Charleston, S.C., shooter, whom Mr. Young sees as acting out in the service of a hoax - the hoax that is racism, in Mr. Young's view - that perceives blackness, and black people, as a threat.

In its proximity to violence and its ever-more-accessible transmission via the internet, the hoax has metastasized, the stakes raised ever higher in what Mr. Young calls our "Age of Euphemism," when "fake news" is a rallying cry for any unwelcome report. "In a way, the book is a prehistory to Trump," said David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker. "Donald Trump didn't invent -" he used a word he acknowledged would be unpublishable in The Times - "but he has certainly upped the ante."

The more Mr. Young researched, the more dire today's hoaxers and hoaxes seem. The modern hoax's tragic qualities "have overcome whatever triumph the hoax once tried for," Mr. Young said. "We have more, and worse. They're worse in their damage and in their intent now. And to see that, and be proven right, or prescient, is a kind of hollow victory."

The book ends on a raw note: "The half-hoax world seems in no danger of ending - unless it's to give way to the complete-hoax one." But asked if he felt any compulsion to begin Volume II, Mr. Young was succinct: "I don't."

He has, in any case, other responsibilities at the moment. There is the Schomburg, fresh from a two-year, $22.3 million renovation; he arrived there last fall from Atlanta, where he had been a professor and curator at Emory University. (He retains a visiting post at the school.) There is his next poetry collection, "Brown," which arrives in April. And now there is The New Yorker, one of the rare mainstream publications that still publishes poetry, where he will be tasked with selecting and editing the poems that appear each week.

The poetry world can be insular, Balkanized and obscure - name three star poets - and The New Yorker is one of the largest conduits between its various inlets and a wider world than most of the poetry journals can hope to attract. "People who are not habitual poetry readers happening to read things that are magical is one of the great happy accidents that can occur reading The New Yorker," said Mr. Remnick. "Kevin will be a master of those happy accidents."

As it happens, The New Yorker had some hand in Mr. Young's development as a poet. As a young teenager in Topeka, Kan., where he spent part of his youth, Mr. Young discovered the yellow-covered paperback "The New Yorker Book of Poems."

"I carried that thing around with me," he said. "I recently found my edition - it has little checks next to poems I liked." (One of them, James Dickey's " Falling," introduced Mr. Young to the idea that his own state could have a place in poetry.)

Mr. Young wrote poems of his own from the age of 13, through high school and Harvard, where friends remembered him as an ambitious and driven writer, collecting prizes, the Stegner Fellowship and praise. He published his first book, "Most Way Home," after it was selected by Lucille Clifton for the National Poetry Series. (He would later edit her collected poems.)

"He always knew what he wanted to do," said Mr. Whitehead, a friend since college. "When most people were dabbling, he was working. He was well on his way when most of us were listening to Nirvana and wearing dirty clothes."

Mr. Remnick praised Mr. Young's "catholic with a small c" taste, something he said he shared with the magazine's outgoing poetry editor, Paul Muldoon. And Mr. Young, whose first poem in the magazine, "Langston Hughes," was published in 1999, said he would work to spotlight the wide breadth of American poetry, from its establishment lions to emerging voices. (Of recent note, he said, were Tiana Clark and Kaveh Akbar, both published in the magazine by Mr. Muldoon.)

"It's an exciting moment, in black poetry and poetry in general," he said."I'm really looking forward to that being in the pages."

O.K., but what kind of poems speak to you?

"I mean, good ones," Mr. Young said, and chuckled. "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.'"

Mr. Young is held to be a champion of the good kind.

"I can't think of a better person to be the curator of what poetry people should be reading than Kevin," said Ms. Trethewey, who first met him 20-some years ago as fellow members of the Dark Room Collective, a community of black poets. "I call him 'The Kevin Young.' I started calling him that when we first met. He's certainly grown into it."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: In an Age of Fake News, a Historian of the Hoax. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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In an Age of Fake News, a Historian of the Hoax

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Profile Kevin Young, the prolific poet, editor, critic and, as of this month, poetry editor of The New Yorker, has, his friends say, a taste for the finer things: He is a reveler in the sensual pleasures of art, food, clothing (this from Natasha Trethewey, the former United States Poet Laureate).