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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the innocence and naivety of the speaker during their application process.
Terrance Hayes reminisces about his graduate school application experience, highlighting a moment of unawareness regarding the implications of not specifying a genre in his pursuit of a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. His self-reflection suggests a blend of humility and acknowledgment of his youthful inexperience, ultimately resulting in him being placed in a poetry program, which may have significant implications for his creative journey.
In practice
This quote would be perfect for a speech at a writing conference to illustrate the beginning of one's creative journey.
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.
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.
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.
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 a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.
Writing poetry is what I am. I wouldn’t know what else to be.
When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.
I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.
When something really hits me, it makes me want to either jump off something really high or lie down and be buried. I want people to get hit and caught by my music.
If it's a good work of adaptation, the book should remain a book and the film should remain a film, and you should not necessarily read the book to see the film. If you do need that, then that means that it's a failure. That is what I think.
I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
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