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" Not many poets have editors. "

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" For 'The Grey Album,' I'd been thinking about the good side of lying - lying as a kind of improvisatory act in black culture. Afterward, it nagged at me because there are those other kinds of lies that I think are all around us, and I was fascinated about hoaxes in general. So 'Bunk' became a natural extension of 'The Grey Album.' "

" 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. "

" The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference. "

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

" A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection. "

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

" When I was ten and in fifth grade, I read all of 'Robinson Crusoe' in one weekend. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" We quickly erase hoaxes once exposed, excising the monstrous palimpsest, because as with any witch hunt or obvious fake, afterward we can't quite explain why we ever believed the outrageous thing in the first place. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie - forging an identity, 'making' one, but 'lying' about one, too. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

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

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

" I think the Internet is a free press, you know? "

" Can you explore real issues as a fake character? Yes - it's called acting. Or fiction. But acting is not a method of engaging with the actual world, just as pretending to know what a character might eat does not a novel make - much less make that make-believe real. "

" 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. "