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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" In a long poem or a sequence of poems, you're trying to formalize your obsessions and give them a shape and a name. The key is to realize if the connections you are making are ones with resonance. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 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.' "

" There's something about the kind of time travel that a poem can provide. It can take you to somewhere else - a culture far from you, a language far from you, but suddenly you're there. You're that person, seeing with that person's eyes. I think that's really tremendous. Even things like cinema or more traditional history can't quite do that. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

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