50 Quotes by Terrance Hayes

I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.