There’s an old saying about not telling the truth, which goes something like, “Lying, when the truth will do.”
It essentially means that the truth is bad enough. You don’t have to lie about it.
In poet Kevin Young’s new book of prose, “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness,” he makes the argument that lying, at least in the African-American storytelling tradition, has always led to the truth. His book takes its title from “The Grey Album,” the producer Danger Mouse’s mash up of rapper Jay-Z’s “Black Album” and the Beatles’ “The Beatles,” also known as “the white album.” The musical experiment inspired Young, who has been a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry and is a curator and professor of poetry at Emory University, to combine his ranging interests in black culture and put them together in one 476-page volume of essays.
It’s an ambitious work, one that spans centuries. In an effort not to overwhelm the reader, if not the writer himself, Young uses music and the tradition of storytelling in the African-American community as a framework for his essays. Here he talks about how lies and the truth can be one and the same.
Q: Others might have been intimidated by the very thought of examining the entire African-American cultural aesthetic from slavery to the present, but you just jumped right in. Why take such an encyclopedic look?
A: I guess I was just trying to explain why I like James Brown and why I like Langston Hughes, and why I like poet Phillis Wheatley and church music. It wasn’t so much that I thought I needed to write about everything, so much as one seemed to call forth the other.
Q: You’re one of Georgia’s accomplished poets, a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry. So were you at war with your poet self as you wrote this book of essays? Because there are moments when it seems like the poet just breaks out from the prose as you make your arguments.
A: Sometimes a poem can get burdened down. But even in prose you are allowed lyrics and you do break out into song.
Q: How long did it take you to write this? Clearly you didn’t do it on a summer break.
A: A number of years. The Langston Hughes chapter appeared 15 years ago in a magazine, but I never got to say the whole thing. Being able to say the whole thing was one of my goals with the book.
Q: How did you settle on the tradition of ‘telling lies’ or ‘stories’ as a vehicle for examining the impact of African-American culture?
A: I was trying to get at a question of fiction and a question of the power of invention and of the imagination more broadly. And as I say in the book, if you can’t imagine yourself free, you can’t get free. That idea is contained in the spirituals. It’s contained in a Charlie Parker solo, or in a De La Soul [song]. That idea runs through several hundred years of African-American culture.
Q: Since so much of this book is based on music, tell me what’s in your own musical collection.
A: Everyone says they like to listen to everything, but I actually do. I have all of Bessie Smith, and I listen to Sun House and the Ramones; old country and western music, Ray Charles doing old country and western music, hip hop.
Q: What should a reader take away from your book?
A: I want people to have a sense of the range and depth of the culture I’m talking about and to suggest some new avenues for people to think about. And at the same time, if people only learn who Bob Kaufman is, that’s a wonderful thing because I think he’s a tremendous writer we don’t always think about.
Book signing
Poet Kevin Young
Young will read from and sign copies of his new book “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness,” (Graywolf Press, $25) at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Highland Inn Ballroom, 644 N. Highland Ave. 404-681-5128, www.acappellabooks.com
About the Author
