Last
week, we had the good fortune of having Terrance Hayes on our campus, visiting
classes and talking with students. My composition students probably don’t know
how lucky they are to have had this award-winning poet talk to us about his
work for an hour, but I sure got a lot out of it! Terrance also attended our
graduate nonfiction writing class, where we peppered him with questions about
his writing process.
I
asked Terrance about the longevity of his writing career and how his writing
material has evolved over the years.
This was fantastic his response:
“You
can’t outrun your obsessions. Behind every revelation is another question. So I
poke at my obsessions, I play with form. I try to do something different—go in
thru the trap door—but it’s always different angles of the same obsession.”
As a writer at the very beginning of what will
hopefully be a long writing career, I am starting to see these patterns that
he’s referring to. The more I write, the more I realize that I am often
circling the same topics, sometimes even referring to the same event in
different essays or stories. Similar themes show up in everything that I write,
whether it be fiction, memoir, or children’s lit.
He
said something else that was a great image for the writing mind:
“The
mind is a junkyard. I keep rooting around, putting things in a box, then a bag.
I try different containers until I get it right. I stockpile my writing,
looking where to shelve it.”
We pull from our life experiences, so it makes sense that we return to some of the same ideas again and again, but hopefully in a refreshing and illuminating way each time, getting deeper and deeper into the center of that obsession.
Some more great Terrance quotes:
On
poetry:
Poems
are about poetry.
My
poems travel without me.
The
job of poetry is not to correct history but to engage history.
Poems
are living things. They are constantly changing.
The
point of poetry is to get the things we can’t express into the world.
What
else would I be doing if not failing at poetry?
Poetry
is the thinking mind.
On
writing:
I wish to achieve surprise, exhaustion, discomfort in a poem. As a writer, I'm interested in the place of not knowing.
The
mind is a junkyard. I keep rooting around, putting things in a box, then a bag,
different containers until I get it right. I stockpile my writing, looking
where to shelve it.
We
are walking consuming creatures, and all of that we ingest will show up in our
writing.
I
assume everyone is smarter than me.
Get
away from thesis/argument/aboutness.
Challenge
your rituals to create different kinds of work. Observe changes, mess up.
I
know what comes natural to me
Write
without worrying, even if it doesn’t come together right away
The
unification, thread, harmony of a piece might come together differently than
you expect.
Write
for writings sake – find joy in the process.
Trust
your intuitive sense. It’s a dangerous slope to trust what other people think
is good
Vulnerability
is a useful tool, and maybe a kind of weapon. The alternative is silence and
shame, and not much art would get made it we focused on that.
On
revision:
Revision
process is endless. I could revise forever.
Infinite
failures, infinite successes.
Sending
work out as part of the revision process.
I
want a poem to sound easy and natural even if it’s taken a whole lot of work.
If
you’ve offended someone, maybe it’s not done yet.
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THE RESTLESS WRITER WORLD:
- A new piece out in the world! "Night Owl" at Cleaver Mag
- Leading a 6 week memoir workshop at Temple Terrace Library!
- 6 x 6 on March 25 at Felicitous Coffee
- There Will Be Words in Orlando, April 12 at The Gallery at Avalon Island
