power of intimacy

[Toi Derricotte’s] poems insist on the power of intimacy and, perhaps more significantly, the power of vulnerability. To choose such a stance where most would choose the armor of bravado or detachment requires considerable will and skill.

—Terrance Hayes, Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (Penguin Books, 2023)

machine or animal

Craft gets at the science and engineering of poetry. It makes poems machines. And though I’m about to tell you poems are not mere machines, I’ll fully acknowledge the value of talking about them this way. Craft gives us a common language, common tools….But if a poem is a machine, it’s an animal too—depending on your stance, an animal with a machine skeleton (say Steve Austin, the bionic man) or a machine shell with an animal heart (say Robocop). I’ll say here that I think the poem is mostly an animal. We work to tame it, to train it, but ultimately it has a mind of its own. It’s a child we’re raising, a child we birthed and are responsible for, but a child we don’t ‘own’….If the poem is an animal, we are not after perfection (the thing we are after if we view it as a machine); we are after what a parent is after. We are helping the poem discover its dream. Every poem has a dream.

—Terrance Hayes, Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (Penguin Books, 2023)

bouncy house

For some reason he’d put off reading the book, only to find it was built for a reader to bounce around in.

[Upon reading Terrance Hayes' Watch Your Language.]