Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Writers need their totems, their altars. Mine, I feel, share the same randomness and utility of those belonging to painters I know, who are relentlessly visual and even poetic. "

" Not many poets have editors. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" Poems evolve. I don't feel like I choose them; they just come to me. "

" 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.' "

" Harper Lee's novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird' became iconic almost immediately after appearing in 1960: best-seller status; the Pulitzer Prize the next year; a classic movie soon after, with Gregory Peck in an Academy Award-winning role. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 think Barnum is at the center of American culture. He's helping to invent what we now think of as pop culture. He invented pretty much our notions of the circus. "