The conviction obstructs him in other ways. But their principal greets And I thought, after Id written it, Well, if I dont go out there and find this dude whos my biological father, Im going to keep writing this poem. So thats a personal thing from my life, and if I didnt answer that life question, I felt like I was going to be stuck in my work. In my body of work, thats what Im aiming for, and I never can get it. But I dont want to be tied to one adjective. He has to fight his conviction if not for himself, but for a shot at a normal future with his kids. In your most recent work, in books like How to be Drawn, you have poems like Gentle Measures where youre figuring yourself out and thinking about fatherhood. Even though I had not done that much poetry, it seemed cheaper. Her office is handling petitions for relief from Jackson and hundreds of others seeking retrials. People can come and sit around and talk about work. Activists want Rosenblum to act now, otherwise an answer could be months away. Im going to eat it the same. I was excited for folks, but I understood there was gonna be people like me who would ask for relief and have to fight to get it, Hayes said. Anybody who has sat down, as I have, to make a list of things that at any given moment could kill him knows that the possibilities are potentially endless, the anxiety correspondingly boundless. The challenge for me in grad school was other peoples timelines. 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 dont have as strict distinctions among kinds of art. Most late nights, the husband, father of two, and full-time professor escapes the "jam of life's traffic" by walking the 14 steps to his third-floor study. He envies poets who have the luxury of wandering into all corners of American life. Thats a nightmare for me. Whats great about painting is that all the different things get absorbed, and then theres still a result. I dont necessarily think Im entitled to anything or that I can control very much. . Thats Wallace Stevens or T.S. Which is to say, In Sanford, something happened in Ferguson, And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened, In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore & happens. I think he could just sit down, listen to some music every day, and feel like he could make an interesting poem. Its like James Joyce and Molly Bloom and a fifty-page sentenceJames Joyce really fucked some commas up. 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. Part of that is just obsessive-compulsiveness, which may be in my personality. And SHAPIRO: We should tell people that Terrance Hayes is a black poet, and blackness - and maleness comes up a lot in these poems. JW: And its also the table to come, which you cant quite predict, or you might be totally off if you do. In the most general sense, my deepest ambitions are for the poem as a puzzle, as an object, as a Rubiks cube to play with. I need the tension of asking myself day to day, Is that what I think? Maybe thats what gets called ambivalence or curiosity or even just playingand it was different when I was in my twenties. Its so erotic! And then for the next year, I was working on a poem that was totally a Keats imitation. Dont you want to see me eat it too? So I really could not afford to do the kind of art I wanted to do in graduate school. Activists point to New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams, who opted not to wait for a court ruling on retroactivity. I got letters from LSU, Clemson, UNC Chapel-Hill, but no one gave a full ride. Terrance Hayes began writing this innovative "crown" (or "corona") of sonnets the day after Donald Trump was elected US president, and Trump himself is clearly among the company addressed . Im interested in Shakespeare, but especially how Shakespeare is in conversation with Scooby-Doo or The Walking Dead. Its not like you could move something out just because it happens to not look like you. Ive always tried to stay very focused in terms of what I need to write. Its all these other things and the more, the better. The following interview appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The Iowa Review. Im someone who wants to experiment and play and see what happens, because itll be new no matter what it is, which is probably why I cant write a novel. In all of his work, five poetry collections to date, he ferociously unearths the layers of racist thinking and its harmful effects, often using the poem's form as his tool. This interview took place on June 24 and July 1, 2016, in Pittsburgh. Or am I going to break a line here? JW: You have a significant position nowyou won the National Book Award in 2010, and youve won several other awards, and you got the MacArthur in 2014. All my flaws and quirks and neuroses, they fit just as well as the scarring that comes from racism or masculinity, and I dont want to have to cut that off. Im a dialectical thinker. "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. Could you run a press? But Hayes isnt describing canonical melancholy, the pined-for vision of mortality that poets sometimes indulge in. When I got in, the joy of college was my teachers. The names alive are like the names, In graves. TH: The other side would be the question of failure. Terrance Hayes. Im a student of poetry, and I feel like everythings on the table, and I can use it all. The thing that limits people sometimes is that, at a certain age, they start to say, This is what I do.. I would say, first, thats who I am. In her statement announcing she had filed a brief in the Ramos case, she cited the practical consequences that could result from overturning cases. Probably all my encounters. I have a friend whos a critic, and he said that my work was an anthem to ambivalence. Hayes and Jackson have already served their decades in prison, but their felonies remain on their records a scarlet letter that continues to affect every aspect of their lives, even in freedom. 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. I did high jump and the four-hundred-meter relay. 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. When he left the Oregon State Penitentiary two decades later, he had grandchildren. Hayes, who is forty-six, won the 2010 National Book Award and is a professor at N.Y.U. I havent seen that prize. He teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family. Theres some moments in David Foster Wallaces nonfiction, like Consider the Lobster, that do it. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. Tara McEvoy, right, whose review of Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin won third place in the 2019 Burgess award for arts journalism, with Observer editor Paul . (Courtesy of Lynn James-Jackson), POST-CONVICTION RELIEF: CHANCE FOR RETRIAL. I dont think about everybody that looks the same; I dont know who those people are, but Im going to feed them. Maybe its generational, too. Something happened. JW: When you went to Coker College, you went for visual arts. But I hear, too, an affectionate nod to a lover. I feel like thats something I cant do: the canvas is not big enough to fully capture consciousness in a poem. I am interested in whether youll like it or not, but if you say, I like your steak but dont like the beans, all right, eat the steak, and dont eat the beans. When people read Sylvia Plath, everyone wanted to write confessional poems. Follow your nose , he says. As he remarks in this interview, he resists being tied to one adjective to describe himself as a poet. My grandfather was a war veteran; my dad was in the army; my brother was in the army. But Id say thats always been true. Terrance Hayes (born November 18, 1971) is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes earned a BA at Coker College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. - abstract. You aint allowed to derideWomen when youve never wept in front of a womanThat wasnt your mother. Issue Date: September 28, 2015. When Id go home, all they said was, Why are you still going to school? And I would say, Youre not paying for it. Most of the time, I was going to leave. Then it was three years, and I was done. That goes back to transparency. I dont think the number increases or decreases the potential for finding real brilliance in the pool. When you look at all of the MFA programs, very few offer alternatives other than looking for an academic job, but I say to folks all the time, It is not your only option.. I feel like this is true in the poetry process. JW: Where would you place your work? Whats going to be left out? All rights reserved. by. TAYLOR: Well, again, it's interesting in that poem that I just read where he says, assassin, you are a mystery to me, I say to my reflection sometimes. It frees me up to tell the truth. Or Toni Morrison. So Ill risk naivety in the moment. Employing an almost improvisational approach to writing, Hayes conjoins fluid, often humorous wordplay with references to popular culture both past and present in his subversion of . 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. He understood the rhythm of a deltaFarmer on guitar in a juke joint circa 1933, as wellAs the rhythm of your standard bohemian on guitarIn a New York apartment amid daydreams of jumpingThrough windows, ballads of footwork, Monk orchestras,Miles with strings. Ginsbergs comrades sang out of their windows in despair, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, and danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records. The white bohemians have the freedom to go on benders and sprees, while Hayes must wonder how to hold my face. He is not afraid of looking goofy; he is afraid of being murdered. It goes on - really specific, really concrete. TH: Flexibility is what makes a good program. 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. Then last summer, in 2015, I pulled it out again, and I was like, Okay, Im going to get these pages down to sixty pages. 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