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 possibility of being as free with the camera as we are with the pen is a fantastic prospect for the creative life of the 21st century.
Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!
Poems and songs penned as an unstoppable outpouring of the heart take on a life of their own. They transcend the limits of nationality and time as they pass from person to person, from one heart to another.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.
The whole history of music has turned out to be something perfect. It's all come around. The music we did with Funkadelic and Parliament was the DNA for hip-hop.
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