Quotes from Terrance Hayes

Christianity is a religion built around a father Who does not rescue his son. It is the story Of a son whose father is a ghost.

America, you just wanted change is all, a return To the kind of awe experiences after beholding a reign Of gold. A leader whose metallic narcissism is a reflection Of your own.

I live a life That burns a hole through life, that leaves a scar for life, That makes me weep for another life. Define life.

Goddamn, so this is what it means to have a leader You despise, the racists said when the president Was black and I'll be damned if I ain't saying it too. Is this a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty, Stupidity, an idiot's threats & gangsta narcissisms threading Every shabby sentence his trumpet constructs?

Probably all our encounters are existential Jambalaya. Which is to say, can a nigga survive?

Something happens everywhere in this country Every day. Someone is praying, someone is prey.

The man was high yellow In public, afraid of himself, pretending his music Was material when in fact, it was the opposite: Like a breath that comes so quickly you know You're breathing ether: either atmospheric And anonymous as the air against a window, Or indefinite & mute as a curtain of wind.

It feels sadder when a black person says Nigga Because it sounds like Nigger.

Sometimes my body is a guitar, a hole waiting in wood, wires trembling to sleep. To identify what you are, to be loved by what you identify, I thought This is how the blood sings into the self. I thought what was hollow in me would be shaped into music. — Terrance Hayes, from "Arbor for Butch," The American Poetry Review . Volume 38, No. 06 November/December

Nothing saddens me more Than Nigger, one whose master has no Lord. No word leaves me more graced by shame.

PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT to be thoroughly drunk and immune to hunger

There is no poet, black or otherwise, writing with as much wicked candor and passion." Terrance Hayes on Wanda Coleman

I'm doing 85 outside the kingdom of heaven

A certain nobility is implicit in saying what I don't believe and hoping you believe it.)

In this we may be alike, Assassin, you & me: we believe We want what's best for humanity. I'll probably survive Dancing with the kinds of people who must find refuge Among the sweat & rancor of a Fish & Chicken Shack But Assassin, they'll probably murder you. Do you ask, Why you should die for me if I will not die for you? I do.

Sometimes Is a good answer to any existential question.

I remember my sister's last hoorah. She joined all the black people I'm tired of losing, All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson, Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, wherever the names alive are Like the names in graves. I am someone With a good memory & better imagination.

True poets might not so much sing about their love as love in order to sing.

I am not going to describe her face because I want you to think of her as a bride.

So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.

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.

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.