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.
Interpretation
The quote explores the desire for a pure form of expression that transcends traditional language and conveys emotions directly, similar to music.
Terrance Hayes reflects on the limitations of language, expressing a yearning for a communicative form that can bypass the expectations and burdens associated with words. He suggests that music serves as an ideal model for this, conveying emotions without the constraints of verbal thought. Hayes acknowledges the challenge of achieving such a language, yet he aspires to create a means of communication that resonates with raw feeling.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the impact of art on communication.
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.
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.
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.
By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.
It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.
I'm not really a songwriter - I'm an interpreter. So in a sense I am an actress first and foremost. I act out the songs, and I lead with my heart.
Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child.
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
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