Kuppelhalle | 9/7 € Tickets

“Reading is a mix of telepathy and time travel. […] I consider my life evidence. My life is made possible because of my writing, but my writing is made possible because of my reading.” In Watch Your Language, it is not just the poet who is speaking, it is above all the poetry aficionado Terrance Hayes (born 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina) who is speaking. In short essays, illustrations, poems, diagrams, and game instructions, Hayes traces his life in reading and calls for alertness towards language. In doing so, he presents one possible compendium of American poetry from the previous century and a glowing tribute to the writers he admires—James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wanda Coleman and Yusef Komunyakaa, to name but a few. Hayes does not address his role models with dry biographical accounts but with eclectic portraits teeming with poetic ingenuity. The essay on Russell Atkins, for example, states: “Art should encourage expenditures of beasts buried with candelabras burning elaborately underground.”