Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Not many poets have editors.
I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.
I think the Internet is a free press, you know?
Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.
I think the hardest thing, really, is trying not to write.
I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University.
It's a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits.
I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret.
I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain.
I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there.
When I was ten and in fifth grade, I read all of 'Robinson Crusoe' in one weekend.
A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection.
I remember in the '80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist.
There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism.
There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing.
Certainly, there is, in our culture, this notion of, you know, you can become anything. You can change.
Great music - say jazz - has that inventive, improvisational quality that tells us something about life.
I think that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived.
Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.
Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.
A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 music is poetry in the sense that I think the condition of poetry I'm going for has some qualities of music that it aspires to.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.'
Footnotes are for proving and showing where you've been. Also, they're for the curious - they can then go and find the information on their own.
Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as 'black' could not prepare us for the election of America's first undeniably black president, Barack Obama.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.