From an interview with Terrance Hayes at Iowa Spring '18, via LitHub:

I think it is my personality that I can pretty much go into any room where people speak English and navigate around that room in terms of engaging with what they’re doing... I’m interested in form; I’m interested in culture. Depending on what space I’m in, depending on what kind of water I’m in, people see me in very different ways. But for myself, I try not to think about it too much.... 

I’m interested in Language School poetics, too. The idea that language in and of itself is a material or communicates sound that is a material—that interests me. I’m a student of poetry, and I feel like everything’s on the table, and I can use it all. I don’t necessarily have to commit to one circle, even though I feel people pulling me, “Be on my team, be on my team!” and I’m not sure if I want to be only in your part of the house. 

Interviewer: Do you think it’s because you had an anomalous path coming into poetry? You come from a small town in South Carolina and went to college because you had a basketball scholarship. You were outside the main academic pipeline and didn’t have a silver spoon. Maybe it’s generational, too. You’re not as fixed in one position. According to the sociology, boomers are more fixed in their positions and more polemical, whereas Generation X is more polyglot and less oppositional: they tend toward what one sociologist calls “the cultural omnivore” and don’t have as strict distinctions among kinds of art. 

That’s a great question. I was born in ’71, and we had multitasking and were in the electronic age. But now there’s digital or social media, which people like my daughter are very aware of. (I’m one of the few people I know of in my cohort that doesn’t do social media. I used to do it, but it was taking up too many of my words.) I do think that the phenomena where you have access to all of that information makes you polyglot. You know a lot of things, but you haven’t spent a whole bunch of time in one area.

And then another, from The Rumpus this past summer:

....I was sitting here thinking what I often think in these interviews… “I hope the poems speak for themselves.” This I do because it’s part of my job. And because I love a good question. I’m enjoying your insights. 

Interviewer: They do speak for themselves. They fit into that William Carlos Williams quote, “I wanted to write a poem / that you would understand. / For what good is it to me / if you can’t understand it? / But you got to try hard —.” These poems reward close reading, and multiple readings, and I hope people sit with this book a long time.