Pittsburgh was the first chance to be in a classroom with other writers, to have conversations with other writers. In fact, after graduate school, I lived in Japan, Ohio and New Orleans, and only upon leaving Pittsburgh did I see what a special community it was for poets, so I was eager to come back. It's a strong arts community across the board.

Terrance Hayes

Categorized in : School Strong Chance Community

Ask a glass of water why it pities

Terrance Hayes

glasses dog rain

I'm chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people's expectations. I think music is the primary model-how close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I'm just trying to get it so it can be like feeling.

Terrance Hayes

expectations people thinking

Look, the world is everywhere: satellites, end tables, the pink and white poinsettias outside the church; reunions and degrees. All those radiant asterisks . . . Soon it will all make sense.

Terrance Hayes

degrees church white

One of Still Lifes many achievements is its paradoxical mix of intensity and stillness. Alexander Longs visions of landscape, identity and "History itself, a joke that no one gets" are simultaneously meditative and alert, restless and focused. This is a smart, compassionate poet. Still Life is a mesmerizing new book.

Terrance Hayes

smart achievement book

In HEATHEN, R. Flowers Rivera remixes the classical and the Biblical, the usual and the typical until what we thought we knew of ourselves and others is new again. The mythic becomes particular; the particular becomes mythic in these fascinating poems of personalities and personas. Rivera’s work is rich in empathy and invention. Heathen is a book of psalms for the present day.

Terrance Hayes

biblical flower book

Patricia Smith is one of the best poets around and has been for a long time. Her Blood Dazzler is full of capacious soul and formal inventiveness: the compassion and artfulness necessary to capture the tragedies and Tragedy of Katrina. Smith is herself a storm of beautiful, frightening talent. Her words will wash you or wash you away. I consider this new book a major literary event.

Terrance Hayes

compassion beautiful book

We look at the Mona Lisa and say we're going to do our version of the Mona Lisa. We mirror it. But exaptation would say that painting the Mona Lisa would lead to a whole new place... Bugs Bunny.

Terrance Hayes

mirror place look painting

Poems are not read: they are reread. Reread the poem, then read between the lines, then look at it, then watch it, then peek at it: handle it like an object. Contemplate its shadows, angles and dimensions.

Terrance Hayes

shadows like look lines

I became a poet in Pittsburgh. When I lived in the South, I was a basketball player and primarily a jock. An English teacher essentially suggested that I send the poems that I'd been writing - really just for him - to a few programs, so that when I wound up in Pittsburgh, it's where I figured out that I could actually be a poet.

Terrance Hayes

poet basketball writing teacher

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.

Terrance Hayes

just music language happens

When people ask me for secrets to writing, I say, 'Read to write.'

Terrance Hayes

secrets me writing people

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

Terrance Hayes

turn always tired poet

The summer I got to Pittsburgh for graduate school, I house-sat for a Ph.D. student who had a lot of books. One of the books that I found was 'Lolita' by Vladimir Nabokov. That was eye opening. I've probably read it every other year since my 20s.

Terrance Hayes

student opening eye school

When I was in high school, I remember writing a research paper, and the teacher said I should write about Langston Hughes. I felt as if I was the only black dude who didn't like Langston Hughes. He didn't seem as dark and layered as someone like Flannery O'Connor.

Terrance Hayes

black research teacher school

Poets are like the decathletes of literature.

Terrance Hayes

poets like literature

When I applied for grad school, I did not specify genre. I said I wanted an MFA in Creative Writing. I was so cute and stupid! The admissions committee at Pitt decided to put me in poetry.

Terrance Hayes

me poetry stupid cute

Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet.

Terrance Hayes

door every another poet

Art is not the kind of thing where you get what you put into it all the time. So I learned to not expect anything other than the sort of joy of having a poem in front of me.

Terrance Hayes

me you time art

The thing that I've decided is, I don't want to be invisible, but I'd like to be transparent. I want people to see what I'm thinking and see through me.

Terrance Hayes

see me people thinking

My working habit is to separate my aims as a painting from my aims as a poet. They come from very different places and ultimately lead me to very different places... I'll leave what I mean by 'places' ambiguous.

Terrance Hayes

leave me painting habit