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.
The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.
The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.
I've just finished my 20th book this past year and I'm working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I'll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I'm an artist too.
Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
I am working, but when one has ceased to do seascape, it is the devil afterward - very difficult; it changes at every instant, and here the weather varies several times in the same day.
Each arrow you shoot off carries its own target into the decidedly secret tangle
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