Hayes shares what he's learned about the VFW since starting his new position. It was launched in February by Zealous, a national organization founded by prominent criminal justice advocate and attorney Scott Hechinger that pushes for more advocacy by public defenders. Americas struggle with itselfHas always had people like me at the heart of it. If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation. Eliot, so the model for the poet who lives as a poet would primarily be rich white dudes. You have to be adaptable. Part of the reason for the relatively low number is insufficient data in many cases, defendants will never know if they were convicted by a split jury because their lawyer never asked and it was never preserved in court records, Kaplan said. I dont think Ashbery thinks that. Im interested in Language School poetics, too. 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. Some of the resources available to me now allow me to put myself in new situations, but that has never been my ambition. Of his son the way one twilight matches another. He wants to be more involved with his 3-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son by volunteering at school or coaching sports, but his felony prohibits it. JW: Where would you place your work? June 25, 2018. Hayes' 14-line projects react to the poet's own frustration with his fame (which eats up his time with worthy obligations, isolates him, and cannot give him peace), as well as reacting . TH: Gentle Measures almost went into Lighthead, but I just didnt have it finished. Above all, hes waiting on Rosenblum. Because I was lucky enough to get a scholarship, my parents didnt feel compelled to tell me what to do. Every time Im flying out of Pittsburgh, I see your picture in the airport, with Pitt advertising, Come study with a genius. How do you feel about your position? I have to trust my own perception as opposed to waiting for someone to tell you how to fix it, which is what happens in an MFA program. How did you win this? And I say, I didnt predict any of this. With each book, I think every poem is the last poem, every book is the last book. 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. It directly asks the high court whether the Ramos case applies retroactively; a ruling is expected by July. And the poem opens out into this big question - define life. 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. 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. Hayes lives in Manhattan, and he and his ex-wife, the poet Yona Harvey, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, share the custody of their two children. The reason I used them is because I could get a big box of tiles for like five dollars. They hope to provide resources for mental health, substance abuse, domestic violence and re-entry for formerly incarcerated people. To stay with the food metaphor, you can make something bad. 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. Since then, he's won a huge number of literary prizes, including a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. 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. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, "Pittsburgh poet Terrance Hayes named MacArthur Fellow", "Briefing Books: Lauded poet Terrance Hayes heads to Pitt", The End of the Line: Terrance Hayes and Formal Innovation, "John Simom Guggenheim Memorial Foundation >2009 Fellow in Creative Arts - Poetry > Terrance Hayes Bio", "MacArthur Awards Go to 21 Diverse Fellows", "The Politics and Play of Terrance Hayes", "United States Artists Official Website Terrance Hayes", Profile and poems of Terrance Hayes, including audio files. 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. In his poems, in which he occasionally invents formal constraints, Hayes considers themes of popular culture, race, music, and masculinity. But when the time came and I looked at studio arts, I couldnt afford it. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. As a poet, you know your limitations, and those limitations are the form of the person or the poet. I can do pretty good figurative stuffLucian Freud is my man. You write a poem, and you think its a failed poem, but maybe its a draft, and you just keep going onto the next poem. In my last year, I had done a series of paintings on ceiling tiles. TH: Maybe a satirical question like in Support the Troops! where Im asking, why should I support them? Terrance Hayes is probably the most innovative poet addressing the complexities of race in America today. I think for younger people especially, everything is so simultaneous now. Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters. from the University of Pittsburgh writing program. There are people that, when someone becomes a celebrity, they just say, Its enough if you write it, and its just something youve written, well take that.. JW: One downside with the glut of information now is that theres no stable core of references. That has helped me deal with the success, because the success still feels very ephemeral or temporary, and it certainly hasnt helped me write poems. For the known cases though, Rosenblum can ask the court to reverse the convictions and send them back to county district attorneys for retrial. He was a Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University until 2013, at which time he joined the faculty at the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh. SHAPIRO: (Laughter) Right. Im a dialectical thinker. Im chasing it. For me, that wouldnt be enough. Future has this song Fuck Up Some Commas. Hes talking about money, but when I hear it, I hear it about syntax and the way a sentence is built. Responding to the person in front of you and their potential and interests, and challenging those potentials and interests, seem to me benchmarks for a program. Menu. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes earned a BA at Coker College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. Critics argued these laws are a relic from a racist past that marginalize minority jurors. Photograph by Gabriele Stabile for The New Yorker, The New Yorker Interview with David Remnick, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Whats important for me in that book is the joining of it, making this new object. The problem is what to do with them after that, if they cant get a job teaching? 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. JW: And its also the table to come, which you cant quite predict, or you might be totally off if you do. And then, yes, as the title suggests, every single poem is a sonnet. Then it was three years, and I was done. I smile at Ronald's poster, perpetual grin behind the pissed-off, fly-girl cashier I love. Presiding Judge Ellen Rosenblum sentenced him to more than 12 years in prison. But students often dont want that; they want a strategy for how to make it in the academy. TH: What I think the university can do is bridge the things weve been discussing; it can bridge James Joyce and Future. Is it also a little gimmicky (ph)? Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous. I thought, Wow, a poem a week? Even now, I really dont show people stuff when Im working on it. Its not like you could move something out just because it happens to not look like you. Hayes was surprised at the Ramos ruling, having had little faith in the countrys criminal justice system. TH: One thing that people say is that were creating robots, and students are just writing the same 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. Accuracy and availability may vary. And there's a way that it changes slightly, and then there's a way that it's kind of relentless. The Politics and Play of Terrance Hayes. I mean, what does he accomplish by doing this? I thought, Maybe Ill look at it in a little while. Thats about failure and practice. It was with a professor who was the first person to say to me, This is something you could do. He has passed away now, but he was a good friend. Im always torn between the dilemma of saying there has to be something worthwhile to someone other than myself, even though I can get pretty far just eating what I make for myself and having no one else at the table. JW: So you went to Coker College because they gave you a scholarship in basketball? Rosenblum, who initially spoke in favor of repealing the law, eventually filed a brief in Ramos v. Louisiana opposing the U.S. Supreme Court overturning split jury verdicts. 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. Dave Killen/The OregonianThe Oregonian. You come from a small town in South Carolina and went to college because you had a basketball scholarship. Im going to eat it the same. Or Toni Morrison. Sometimes it seems like the New York School, but at other times, its very different. Thats my attitude in the workshop, too. Hi, Tess. I also thought that, when I finished, I would just go back home. 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. [2], Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina. JW: There are more than four hundred creative writing programs in the United States. TH: Once your picture is up at the airport, theres always people making proposals to you about what they think your name could lend to their ventures. You cantGrasp your own hustle, your blackness, you cant graspYour own pussy, your black pussy dies for touch. Growing up working class and not having anyone who had ever have gone to college, I didnt have an extreme pressure. 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. by. All rights reserved (About Us). What do you think universities can do? Anything else connected to that is just gravy. On the one hand, it seems like your career was accidental. To fuck up some commas is an interesting idea. Either youve been born into wealth, or youre down-and-out in the gutter, like Charles Bukowski, doing terrible jobs? People confuse privacy and secrecy way too much. Hes still on post-prison supervision. Terrance Hayes is a poet who reflects on race, gender, and family in works marked by formal dexterity and a reverence for history and the artistry of crafting verse. So I didnt want to have to pay anything, and because of my background, I had no sense that people went to college if they didnt have their own money. Which is to say, In Sanford, something happened in Ferguson, And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened, In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore & happens. TH: Thats a great question. Follow your nose , he says. And somehow, I think it's a form that is able to capture and refract, like, the mysterious forcefulness of American violence right now. So for someone to say this is your audience and you have to give people the thing theyll really eat, Im saying you dont know what peoples capacity is. watch your mouth is little more. So I feel like, if Im going to make a meal, were going to sit down at the table and eat it together. In her statement announcing she had filed a brief in the Ramos case, she cited the practical consequences that could result from overturning cases. You are beautiful because of your sadness, Hayes admits. To avoid confusion across jurisdictions in Oregon, post-conviction relief proceedings should be consistent across the state to avoid confusion and future litigation.. I dont think the number increases or decreases the potential for finding real brilliance in the pool. But Hayes isnt describing canonical melancholy, the pined-for vision of mortality that poets sometimes indulge in. But it so happens that theres something in his music that can be of interest to how we workespecially to a room of writers or people who think about language and literature. The poet Terrance Hayes first arrived on the scene in 1999 with a book called "Muscular Music." Maybe youll try this? And maybe well generate poems that arent done or finished, but at least weve made something new. I understand that people around me think that my involvement in a new center will be a good thing, but I say, Well, how does a MacArthur make me a better poet?. 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. In that box, there were twelve twelve-by-twelve tiles, and once I put some gesso on oneit was smooth, and I could paint on it. Terrence L. Hayes, press secretary, Office of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs: Prior to assuming the role of VA press secretary, Terrence Hayes served as national director of Communication and Public Affairs for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. But I had gotten into a habit of working as long as I wanted to on my poems. Certainly, after enough books and enough acknowledgments, are you still comfortable with failing? I wouldnt limit it there: I would say, yes, Im African-American; yes, Im Southern; yes, Im male; yes, Im hip-hop; yes, Im neurotic; yes, Im a bastard poet. When I think about the Black Arts poets, people like Baraka, who I knew and hung out with, or Sonia Sanchez, to me the great tragedy is that theres this wall because theyre interested in blackness and uplift and a certain kind of identity, but I get no sense through their work of their personality. But I dont think thats always true for other people. Maybe the one thats covered up is more interesting, and maybe the last result is sort of a failure, but thats all right, Im still going through the process. Even if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against retroactivity, however, that wont bind Oregon courts, Kaplan said. So I would hope that in my forties I would be different, more interesting, and know moreand probably be more ambivalentthan I was in my twenties. SHAPIRO: And the fact that he refers to my past and future assassin suggests that this is something perpetual in America that won't go away. Its not necessarily thesis and antithesis, but several things that you might bring together. None of those were affected by the Ramos decision. That poem is also a conversation about whether you have to choose a side. The Supreme Courts Ramos v. Louisiana ruling allowed the verdict to be tossed out in many nonunanimous jury convictions that were still in the appeals process. 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? And then there are poems that are really - what's the word I want? TH: Me too, because theres too much affect in the fiction. The other thing is what the pronoun I does in my poemsis it a confessional I, an intellectual I? I was gonna fight it until I couldnt fight anymore.. The order of those things shifts depending on where I am that day: some days, Im a male poet first, and thats whats really going to inform the work; a lot of days, Im a black poet first and thats whats going to inform it. Terrance Hayes is a contemporary American poet born in 1971. they rage. To me, the conversation is done once I choose a side. I was just doing a Q and A and bouncing between The Simpsons and Picasso. After Ive done a poem, then I can think about it as a piece of the puzzle and as a part of this whole thing, as opposed to writing one poem at a time, and when I get to twenty poems or forty poems, I have a book. Even though I had not done that much poetry, it seemed cheaper. You can insert anything in that but certainly fluidity in terms of faculty and aesthetics. Reasonable people do want somebody at the table with them; theres something wrong with the image of me sitting at the table and people watching me eat. I dont think about everybody that looks the same; I dont know who those people are, but Im going to feed them. Tacuma Jackson was 26 when he was involved in a tavern heist in 2000. You are beautiful because of your sadness, but you would be more beautiful without your fear. Copyright 2018 NPR. I didnt write a lot of poems as an undergrad, but I was always working on them. [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. How do you see that affecting creative writing programs? After missing out on his kids, he wants to make the most of his time with his grandkids. The issue of retroactivity is a legal doctrine that was specifically not decided by the Ramos decision, said Rosenblum spokesperson Kristina Edmunson. What do you think is a flaw of your poetry? His office only handles the post-conviction relief cases when the individual is not in custody nor on post-prison supervision currently only four people. Its the name people of color call/Themselves on weekends & the name colorful/People call their enemies & friends. Or, in the manner of a personals ad, to invite her closer: A brother versed in spiritual calisthenics/And cowboy quiet seeks funny, lonesome,/Speculative or eye-glassed lass. Alongside these gamelike poemsthere is a sonnet about Scrabbleare tributes to Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes, an appreciation of James Baldwins face, and the first #MeToo-era elegy Ive ever read, working through the legacy of Derek Walcott. JW: Do you think its because you had an anomalous path coming into poetry? But clearly the cool-blooded Amphibian-American does not agree. These cases returned to the county level, where district attorneys could decide whether to retry or take some other action. My job in the university is simple: Im a teacher. Theres an assumption in contemporary literature that writers represent their identities. He, Jackson and hundreds like them all convicted by nonunanimous Oregon juries hope to have their cases retried after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a Louisiana case last April that such verdicts are unconstitutional. Since this means there will be no classes for the rest of the day, the children dump their school gear in their lockers & hustle to the windows to stare. Im interested in Shakespeare, but especially how Shakespeare is in conversation with Scooby-Doo or The Walking Dead. I havent seen that prize. Something happened. But I have no nose, no mouth, so you tell me what's good, what's god, what's funky. In fact, I tried to do that, all the contemporary poetry books and the books on the Pitt Press, because I assumed that everybody else had. Whether they will be able to change that depends on one unanswered question: Does the Supreme Courts decision apply retroactively to past cases? I have a friend whos a critic, and he said that my work was an anthem to ambivalence. 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. And yet: You would be more beautiful without your fear.. The "Racket of ascension" is emblematic of the social progress that results in the upgrading of one's social rank. Most black people know thisAbout him. What you find with the typical grad student, even on the first day, is theyre thinking about books and concepts. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Where theres an experience, Im thinking: Is this going to be converted to a lyric moment? Probably all my encounters. Or maybe they wont. He attended Coker College on a basketball scholarship, but explored painting and poetry and, encouraged by an English professor there and the poet Toi Derricotte, went to the University of Pittsburgh for an MFA in Creative Writing. What's going on here? JW: And the decision is how big the table is. He fears a more immediate kind of danger, which cant be aestheticized or glorified in verse. Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site. I wrote them one at a time, and there are six, because a box has six sides. Part of my personality, certainly, is because Im black, and Im Southern, and Im male. By Dan Chiasson. 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. 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. I dont necessarily have to commit to one circle, even though I feel people pulling me, Be on my team, be on my team! and Im not sure if I want to be only in your part of the house. JW: Related to art, theres been a lot of critical writing about postmodernism and different kinds of theories, and you mentioned Benjamin. TH: Yesand many other things. If were talking about class, the people who could survive as poets before were people who were wealthy already. Probably the dark blue skin, Of a black man matches the dark blue skin. Im not asking to get rid of Bach and Beethoven and only to listen to this knucklehead from Atlanta. 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 now has a new book out called "American Sonnets For My Past And Future Assassin," and here to talk with us about it is our reviewer Tess Taylor. Define life. Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Top 250 TV Shows Most Popular TV Shows Most Popular Video Games Most Popular Music Videos Most Popular Podcasts. 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. So why would I have to segregate them? I did high jump and the four-hundred-meter relay. Why only Shakespeare, when theres this other stuff thats happening? Those arent academic poems. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. Maybe I can, but I need to try that. I would not want to do thatalthough maybe I will when Im eighty. A white reader of these poems has to think hard about his own commodified analysis of them. Every poem is a sonnet, and every sonnet is titled: "American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin.". Hayess poems describe the black bodyboth fetishized and criminalized. States are allowed to use their own retroactivity test, and we do not know whether Oregon will follow the federal standard or come up with its own state test, Kaplan said. JW: Do you consider yourself an African-American poet? Its not like the basketball team. I think what young folks recoil from is when they show up and say, I was just listening to something interesting, or I just saw something interesting on my Twitter feed, and older folks say thats not important. On the first morning of school there is a young tree- Its gonna be work, its gonna be a hobby, its gonna be something I love., jding@oregonian.com; 503-221-4395; @j_dingdingding. Hayes, 49, won the National Book Award in 2010 for his book of poems titled "Lighthead" and was a finalist twice more in 2015 and 2018. Like a coin toss that keeps coming up heads, iterated titles suggest an occult lucky streak bound to break. 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. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. In 2020, the song cycle was made into a film by Opera Philadelphia and released on their digital channel. But if I dont know that, then the poem will also be about that; it will be about not knowing. Thats a better way of being an artist to me; thats a more interesting artist who doesnt know and is pursuing an answer versus an artist who does know. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement, and Your Privacy Choices and Rights (each updated 1/26/2023). After that, he taught in Japan, at Xavier University in Louisiana, and from 2001 to 2013 at Carnegie Mellon University. People come up to me saying, You know, I think of you as a confessional poet. Thats OK, too; I think the word means to be opened up. Terrance Hayes explicates, "If you subtract the minor losses,/you can return to your childhood too:/the blackboard chalked with crosses." The 'minor losses' signify Terrance's childhood, heartening innocence. Whether thats a black barbershop, or working as a temp in an office, or working in a warehouse, I always felt there was nobody in that space like me. So I really could not afford to do the kind of art I wanted to do in graduate school. Even if you cant see underneath all of it, I know that theres a face of a boy and that Ive built it up. Trending. If I see something is wrong, I will say its wrong. Its always what I go back to, and everything is filtered through that. Its in Lighthead, and that poem is in conversation with The Same City, about meeting this man who is my father, where he says to me, God made nothing sweeter than pussy. The growth of the poems is very local, and when they become confessional, its because Im trying to become someone better from one day to the next, or come to terms with the ways I cant be better from one day to the next. TH: Yeah, but its not always just my imagination. Hayess sonnets emerge out of a sense of peril, and the evasiveness and protectiveness it requires. It allows me to not get too caught up in terms of privacy and secrecy across the poems. SHAPIRO: Why do you think it's important that he calls these all-American sonnets? But I want it to yield something for my primary concerns: teaching and writing poetry. Often dont want that ; they want a segregate terrance hayes for how to hold my face why! Available to me saying, you cant graspYour own pussy, your blackness, you agree to our Agreement. Poems has to think hard about his own commodified analysis of them it changes slightly, and dispatches from world. 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