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

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" In the absence of an answer that is complicated and sort of maybe troubling, we sometimes settle for the easy answer. It's easier to believe that my discomfort comes from some fact that is being hidden from me. "

" I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there. "

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

" 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. "

" I write about what hoaxers do, but I also want us to think about what believers do. Why do we want to believe a story like James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces?' Why did we want to believe that Lance Armstrong really did all these things that, looking back, seemed impossible? "

" I think music is poetry in the sense that I think the condition of poetry I'm going for has some qualities of music that it aspires to. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world. "

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

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

" There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For me Louisiana was mostly family when I was there. We hardly left; there was no need to... We hardly left the front porch. You would just sit, and folks would come by, and it was really old school in that way. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It took a while for anyone to want to publish 'To Repel Ghosts.' I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn't. "

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

" 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. "

" A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.' "

" I remember in the '80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist. "

" There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism. "

" We had moved cross-country from upstate New York to Kansas in the heat wave of 1980, with two cars, no air-conditioning, and a black dog. I can still see the infernal temperature of a hundred and nineteen degrees on a bank sign somewhere near Ohio. "

" Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as 'black' could not prepare us for the election of America's first undeniably black president, Barack Obama. "

" While claiming advocacy, what hoaxers really exhibit is self-interest. Often, this is because there is only the self to support their false claims; any revelations merely provide further opportunities for details and forgery. "

" 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. "