Quotes from Terrance Hayes

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

While the debate over banned books usually seems to happen just outside the gates of government, it takes on a new danger and urgency when legislators get involved. Their actions cause voices to be silenced both inside and outside the books. That's un-American.

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.

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.

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

Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet.

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.

Poets are like the decathletes of literature.

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.

We can't really know ourselves because we have not created ourselves. But we can know computers, we can know cars, because anything that we made, we can understand.

I value teaching. It's one of the places I get inspiration, engagement.

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.

Anyone reading contemporary poetry - especially contemporary African-American poetry - will quickly see that race is an enduring subject. What some don't realize is just how diverse the handling of that subject is. It's as diverse as blackness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am carrying the whimper you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash. Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights out on a limb, there's a chance you'll fall in your sleep.

Trouble is one of the ways we discover the complexities Of the soul.

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.

This is what it means to believe in ascension and fear climbing.

I'll eat you to live: that's poetry.

You will never assassinate my ghosts.

When the wound is deep, the healing is heroic. Suffering and ascendance require the same work.