Terrance Hayes Is the Most Interesting Poet in the World | Bonobos
Being a good poet takes practice. Just ask Terrance Hayes, a veritable renaissance man whose resume includes winning the 2010 National Book Award in poetry (among many other awards), landing a McArthur Fellow Grant in 2014, teaching roles at Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University, a stint as poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine, and seven published books under his name. Oh, and he was also an Academic All American on his college basketball team and has played piano for the past 20 years. Needless to say, Hayes has lived the life of an artist most people can only dream of. You would think that an innate ability to distill inspiration into a series of beautiful verses and thoughtful syntax would be his secret to success. But inspiration isn’t the word he’d use. It’s practice.
“I work by showing up, practicing, and for me, inspiration is usually right in the moment of already being at work,” he says. “The pursuit of inspiration as opposed to waiting for inspiration is how I think about [it].” The basketball player in Hayes comes in for the proverbial assist, in this case, a metaphor. “Publishing poems, speaking to people. That to me is like a game, where there’s a referee and there’s an audience. But most of the time, you’re just in the gym maybe with people who care about the same things you care about, who care about the minutiae of daily practice.”
What drives the South-Carolina born Hayes is simple. “Some people prioritize thinking over feeling, and some people would prioritize feeling overthinking,” he explains. “I’m trying to influence the way you feel. I want to help you feel connected between things.” The way he feels about his subject matter intermixed with the feelings of the reader in response to his work serves as a sort of creative fuel for Hayes. Sure, other factors come into play, like love, empathy, introspection, and all those commons threads found in most poetry. What exactly goes into crafting verses designed to provoke certain types of responses? Hayes will be the first to tell you that it takes a lot of work.