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" I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University. "

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" I think that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived. "

" 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. "

" When I'm in full-on writing mode and have the day, I try to get in my office around 10 A.M. and stop once 'Judge Judy' comes on at 4, when I quit and come down. Sometimes, I leave her on while I edit - if she can make the tough calls, then so can I. "

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

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

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

" The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent, too - hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art. "

" In many ways, I feel like the form carries so much of the weight in a poem, obviously. But I think we sometimes forget that. "

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

" 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. "

" Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin. "

" I try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they're not so different. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Rereading 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was struck by what I had forgotten of the book: in a manner of pages, we encounter shame, history, ruin, conflicting stories, and wounds badly healed; in short, the South. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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'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. "

" 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. "

" 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 a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits. "

" I feel music is another kind of literature. "