TH: The other side would be the question of failure. A former college basketball star, he treats poetry like a timed game, a theatre for dramatic last-minute outcomes. Could you run a press? Id already read their books, but now I had somebody to talk to. He was a Yankee and he was generally bored and impatient with everything about the South, but he liked me and he thought I was special. To me, the conversation is done once I choose a side. Issue Date: September 28, 2015. All rights reserved (About Us). Part of my personality, certainly, is because Im black, and Im Southern, and Im male. Who those people are, I dont really think too much about that. In his poems, in which he occasionally invents formal constraints, Hayes considers themes of popular culture, race, music, and masculinity. But then there are the poems that are just about feelings and about family, and maybe you dont have to have a dictionary or internet next to you. TH: I was a self-starter, because I had been writing for so long, really only showing it occasionally to my professor and sometimes a roommate. Hawaii, Florida, Chicago, Atlanta anywhere there was family, he was there, he said. The sonnet, an Italian contrivance adapted by the poets of the English Renaissance, was handed down to twentieth-century writers like Robert Lowell and Gwendolyn Brooks and self-consciously Americanizedits gait loosened, its politics sharpened. And there's a way that it changes slightly, and then there's a way that it's kind of relentless. JW: So your obligation is to ask questions? That doesnt mean automatic release. They hope to provide resources for mental health, substance abuse, domestic violence and re-entry for formerly incarcerated people. Sometimes it might be confessional, but I do like to make stuff up. Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site. That figure is just moving around. I was just doing a Q and A and bouncing between The Simpsons and Picasso. In those nonfiction pieces, hes totally present, and Im totally with him; Im totally in his head. Born in 1971 in Columbia, SC, Hayess mother was a corrections officer and father a military barber. But their principal greets I got letters from LSU, Clemson, UNC Chapel-Hill, but no one gave a full ride. Depending on what space Im in, depending on what kind of water Im in, people see me in very different ways. Photo by Kathy Ryan. Are existential jambalaya. Its always what I go back to, and everything is filtered through that. He freelances inside a form he calls part music box, part meat grinder, fashioning a diary of survival during a period when black men are in constant danger. These poems all happen in the mind, which has been portioned into zones called I and you. Both assume countless different roles, but what remains constant is their reliance upon each other and their tendency to flip positions. His name was Jack French, and he actually called up Maya Angelou for me when he was trying to convince me that I could do this. You can read Toni Morrison and still read Shakespeare. These crisis conditions suit Hayes. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes earned a BA at Coker College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. In his five books, he has perfected a sort of poem where wild jams carom inside arbitrary formal boundaries. Are existential jambalaya. As a student of poetry, I find that confessionalism is a great tool that fiction writers dont have. But I have no nose, no mouth, so you tell me what's good, what's god, what's funky. I knew I could talk to this professor about Faulkner because he was teaching it. Trump is a palpable undercurrent throughout the book, and occasionally Hayes addresses the President directly, calling him Mr. Here, cradled amid his wall of books and self-drawn canvases, he shuts down the noise of a thousand thoughts and goes into the quiet of listening to . I read To Autumn by Keats, and I was like, This is blowing my mind! How you get fairly boring poems about race is because you are trying to plug into some notion about identity, as opposed to some notion of personality. Youre not as fixed in one position. He was the type of professor whose house youd visit, and all my family had met him before he passed. This figure of something violent keeps moving around this collection, and it doesn't stick to any one thing. Hayes's first book of poetry, Muscular Music (1999), won both a Whiting Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. in their lockers & hustle to the windows to stare. Emphasizing the necessity for African American people to adapt to the unfair standards of modern American society, Hayes demonstrates the struggles that vulnerable racial minorities have to suffer in order to gain a semblance of hope in advancing in the social hierarchy. With success, you get encouraged to think, Im so special that people will just watch me be me. So when Pacino starts being himself in his movies and stops acting, people accept that and say, Oh, its Al Pacino! If I switch metaphorsand Ive had this argument with Mary Karrits like if you make a meal and your audience is waiting to eat it, but when you put it on the table, they have to watch you eat it. Ive realized that my students definitely need to be praised and encouraged, but my method goes back, again, to the way I write my own poems. Terrance Hayes segregate On the first morning of school there is a young tree- frog waiting patiently at the front gate. My legacy is still in an upward arc of poems, so people can say, I didnt know he was going to do that. [8], Hayes's poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Jubilat, Harvard Review, West Branch, Poetry, and The Adroit Journal. You can insert anything in that but certainly fluidity in terms of faculty and aesthetics. Im not that interested in anything other than making something, playing with something, and it doesnt have to be anything other than poetry. "My Aesthetic Schizophrenia: An Interview with Terrence Hayes", Jonathan Moody, Audio: Terrance Hayes Reading for From the Fishouse, Library of Congress Online Catalog > Terrance Hayes, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Terrance_Hayes&oldid=1111538819, Short description is different from Wikidata, Official website different in Wikidata and Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 21 September 2022, at 14:09. The poet Terrance Hayes first arrived on the scene in 1999 with a book called "Muscular Music." My dad said, Maybe you should major in business. If he had said that when I was eight years old, I probably would have done it, but it was too late. So for basketball scholarships, it was going to be D-II or D-III, and I thought that was the only way I was going to go to school. I want us to enjoy a meal together, and I cant say its only for me, even though there is a part of meand this is what I like about Ashberythat says, if you dont like it, thats your problem. Hendrix, his blues pedigree whitewashed by hippie culture, is a powerful figure of passionate ambivalence, unsure how to dance in a way that is both black and not black. The you, now & then of the last line is, I take it, the reader and also the assassin. The girls are eager to transform him with a kiss; the boys eager shelved 32,633 times. But Hayes isnt describing canonical melancholy, the pined-for vision of mortality that poets sometimes indulge in. So whats useful about the Allen Grossman line is to say, what is the puzzle about? The Criminal Justice Reform Clinic gathered racial data from public records on the group of people who have filed relief petitions asking for the Supreme Court ruling to apply to them as of late January. A little bit of reading, talking to some people about art and how art worksthose are things I know work for basic stimulation. While no agency or body in the state tracks nonunanimous convictions, a study by Oregons Office of Public Defense Services in 2009 found more than 40% of the 662 convictions it surveyed from 2007 and 2008 were nonunanimous. JW: I can see how youre a time poet rather than a space poet. Born in 1971 in Columbia, SC, Hayes's mother was a corrections officer and father a military barber. So I feel like, if Im going to make a meal, were going to sit down at the table and eat it together. Im interested in Language School poetics, too. [7] He won the National Book Award for Lighthead[1] (in which he invented the "golden shovel" poetic form). Its like your grandfather worked every day at the mill, but you never knew what his favorite color was, or what cruel thing his mother said to him when he was ten years old. [2], Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina. Almost everywhere in this country every day. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Since graduate school, Hayes has published a steady stream of books, beginning with Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999; reprint Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2006); Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), selected for the National Poetry Series; Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006); Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), which won a National Book Award; How to Draw (Penguin, 2015); and the forthcoming American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018). By Dan Chiasson. The poetry was from Hayes' book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.[11]. I didnt know a poem could do that. I continually want to make the last poem more interesting. NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with poetry reviewer, Tess Taylor about Terrance Hayes' new collection American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin. There are formal and rhetorical puzzles in nearly every one of Hayess poems. In 2020, the song cycle was made into a film by Opera Philadelphia and released on their digital channel. Cookie Settings/Do Not Sell My Personal Information. He teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family. But the big challenge was other people trying to tell me how to fix the poems. I also thought, if it didnt work, I could just go back home and get a job there. But Marys attitude is that, if you never get to eat it, youre like the cafeteria worker, which is why she does not like that kind of poetry. Copyright 2018 NPR. I think for younger people especially, everything is so simultaneous now. Then Toi, it just so happened, was reading in South Carolina around the time I was thinking, Can I really do this? and I went to the reading and met her, and I decided I was going to. There never was a black male hysteria, a poem about Emmett Till begins, because a fret of white men drove you crazy/Or a clutch of goons drove you through Money,/Stole your money, paid you money, stole it again. In Money, Mississippi, where Till was lynched, Hayes finds in miniature the economic formula that has been scaled up successfully across America: black men are paid with money stolen from their ancestors, only to have it again taken away from them. There are definitely 14 lines per poem, so that's that sonnet form that you may or may not remember from your 10th grade English class. Trumpet: . In my ignorance, though, that meant I was majoring in fine arts, and I was taking writing. Tacuma Jackson was 26 when he was involved in a tavern heist in 2000. But then there is that other part of me that walks up the street and watches CNN and hears stories, and it is true that I inhabit this world and want to respond to that. I thought, Maybe Ill look at it in a little while. Thats about failure and practice. I didnt know what happened on the other side of college. I had another poem about my father working in the yard called The Earth God, and I worked on it for about two years. But 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 theyre doing. I knew that was my only course of action, Jackson said. SHAPIRO: Why do you think it's important that he calls these all-American sonnets? I dont think Ashbery thinks that. Everybody assumes that the I is a confessional I, and they assume that with me, but I find its a useful device so I can lie to people in plain sight. He came home to his wife of three years, Lynn James-Jackson, and his first home-cooked meal of smoked salmon, steamed broccoli and baby shrimp. The challenge for me in grad school was other peoples timelines. TH: Yeah, but its not always just my imagination. I have to fight in ways that a normal American doesnt have to, he said. In my body of work, thats what Im aiming for, and I never can get it. 2023 Cond Nast. Probably twilight makes blackness, Darkness. JW:: How did you end up at Pitt for grad school? Her office is handling petitions for relief from Jackson and hundreds of others seeking retrials. TAYLOR: Yeah. Either youve been born into wealth, or youre down-and-out in the gutter, like Charles Bukowski, doing terrible jobs? Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature, My grandfather was a war veteran; my dad was in the army; my brother was in the army. I would do what everyone else does. TH: What I think the university can do is bridge the things weve been discussing; it can bridge James Joyce and Future. They love their grandpop, Jackson said. She has an opportunity to do right by it, and she hasnt.. I think a novelist has to be a strategist of sorts and think this is the general structure Im working out. That informs my teaching, too, and that could be a problem for an MFA student or a young poet who wants a strategy and says, Tell me how to become a successful writer. Id say, I believe in experimenting, and some experiments succeed, and some fail.. David Remnick talks with Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times, and Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for the paper, about reporting on Trump and the perils facing American democracy. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. Terrance Hayes (born November 18, 1971) is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. I was born in 71, and we had multitasking and were in the electronic age. It was a room of low-residency MFA people in Tampa, and I said, Half of you are going to get what I say about abstract expressionism, cubism, Rothko, and Picasso, and half of you are going to get The Simpsons, Lil Wayne, and Future, this new rapper. Why do I have to separate those out? 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