"The great thing about being a poet is that you can think about poetry at all times"

Cari Wade Gervin, from Knoxville's Metro Pulse conducted an interview with Terrance Hayes.

Here Hayes talks about form, most notably the ol' pecha kucha:

You’ve gotten a lot of attention for the “pecha kucha” format you use in Lighthead. What prompted you to turn the slideshow presentation into stanzas? [A pecha kucha is a Japanese business presentation format in which 20 slides are shown for just 20 seconds each. Hayes employs quatrains for a similar effect.]

The great thing about being a poet is that you can think about poetry at all times. I was invited to participate in an actual pecha kucha event some years ago at the school of architecture here in Pittsburgh. And so when I participated, I thought it would be a very interesting way to write poems. … I think I was unsuccessful for quite a while before I got few that actually seemed to work.

I think it’s really interesting the way you play with structure in relation to language, because so much of your language, unlike some contemporary poets, is so musical. When you’re writing, how do you balance the structure with that rhythm?

I feel like I sort of have to tamp it down a bit, because I am more inclined to go towards sound, because I am just surrounded by music—it’s always in the house and I think about it often, and in another world maybe I would have been a musician. So for me the challenge is not to walk towards the easy thing but just to figure out ways—which would go back to the form—to change it or challenge myself with it. But the musicality in the work just comes from a sort of lifestyle. It’s just a natural part of how I move through the world and how I think about things. I’m the friend who always has the new music and is always suggesting to people, even in my classes, “Hey, do you guys know who this guy is?”

And later a bit on David Berman and other poets he likes:

So who are some other contemporary poets you really like or that you think are worth checking out?

Do you know about David Berman—hey, isn’t he in Nashville?
Yeah. I actually interviewed him once, a long time ago.

He’s a great poet! And I’m not saying that just because he’s in Nashville. He’s always comes instantly to mind. He wrote the one book—Actual Air—it came out the same year as my first book in 1999, and it’s just what I’m talking about. What I was drawn to in that book was a sense of David Berman. This is separate from saying the poems are autobiographical or even confessional, but there’s a certain kind of perspective driving the poems. …The way that his poems sort of operate, the logic, or slanted logic in those poems excites me. And in other poets like that—like Larry Levis, who’s a bigger poet, a more loose meditative poet, is also someone I’m drawn to for that reason. Sylvia Plath. Elizabeth Alexander, for sure. And then Emily Dickinson—even Wallace Stevens. … I’m always looking to sort of see the person behind the poem. This is how great essays work. This is how David Foster Wallace’s essays work. You’re really having a conversation with him and his mind more than his subject. There’s something more than just getting a lesson or having an argument be proven in his essays, and that excites me.