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" 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. "

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" 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

Teacher

Writing

Lived

" 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

Handle

Look

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Language is always burdened by thought. "

" Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet. "

" Poets are like the decathletes of literature. "

Terrance Hayes

Poets

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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Joy

Kind