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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Not many poets have editors. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Here are the facts: my folks grew up so poor that, in the words of Redd Foxx, there were twenty o's between the p and r. "

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

" Is there a bad song on 'Sign O' The Times?' There isn't. "

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

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

" I feel music is another kind of literature. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "