What Poems Can’t: On Terrance Hayes
Terrance Hayes | So To Speak | Penguin Books | July 2023 | 112 Pages
Terrance Hayes | Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry | Penguin Books | July 2023 | 240 Pages
Perhaps the story, if there is a story, of Terrance Hayes’ work, from collection to collections, essays to drawings, could be told through the moments Prince appears. Rogers Nelson, I’m saying. As far back at least as Wind in a Box (2006), the speakers in Hayes’ poems mention Prince as a weird, influential figure toward (or away from) whom conflations of poetics and identities strain. Hayes’ two books published in July of 2023, So to Speak, a book of poems, and Watch Your Language, a collection of essays on poets and poetry, feature his most extensive Prince-writing to date.
In “The Prince of Cleveland,” a man is “belting ‘Purple Rain,’ poorly, but earnestly. / He likely sings throughout the day for money / and tourists seeking the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame…” Rather than a trickster or a saint, the version of Prince that Hayes’ speaker sees here (and therefore the version of Hayes presented to the reader) is one of echoes, of recognition, of contingent identity. The singing man’s boom box is of the sort:
you never see anymore. My uncle used
to have one. It was in his bedroom
I first saw a Prince record, though I didn’t know
it was Prince at the time. I thought it was
a mustached & hairy woman on a horse.
He’s talking about Prince’s second album, the eponymous one. The album’s front cover is a portrait of Prince, shirtless, with the chest hair and bare shoulders, and, yes, mustache. On the back cover, as the speaker recalls, Prince rides a white horse. The steed has wings and so belongs to a species of Pegasus. Would it be a stretch to say that Prince’s understanding of gender as a commercial yet fluid form with which to provoke and move audiences reminds me of Hayes’ attempts to use poetic form as a vehicle to explore, challenge, and complicate questions of self?
For Hayes, Prince pops in and out of poems and essays, presiding over the thinking, inflecting it, leading the piece in and out of memory, observation, and argument. As though there can be no thought without running it through Prince first, in the act of listening, or remembering listening, to the first Prince record that made an impression on you: in your uncle’s bedroom or your mother’s dusty CD cabinet, which opened by pulling a large metal ring from the wooden door carved and painted to look like a bookshelf. If there’s anything Hayes’ generation of poets and writers taught us, it’s that listening to nerdy R&B music is a sort of literacy that can delimit new boundaries and constructions of expression. After winning the National Book Award for Lighthead (2010), Hayes has produced works that are increasingly theoretical—which is to say technical—driven by imposed, seemingly arbitrary constraints.
In an early poem in So to Speak, “George Floyd,” Hayes deploys malapropisms, twisting everyday speech to make strange, make unfamiliar, the violence against Black people that’s embedded in American life and in the idiom of the nation. The poem opens:
You can be a bother who dyes
his hair Dennis Rodman blue
in the face of the man kneeling in blue
in the face the music of his wrist.
Among the surprises of these first lines: exchanging “dies” for its homonym and “brother” for what seems to be a typo? With what appears to be little more than absentminded fiddling with language, Hayes engineers an uncanny elegy. The absence of punctuation operates as another of the poem’s formal techniques, suggesting not resistance to the constraints of the full-stop, but rather an openness to speculation and chance, to leakage and unsettled borders between nouns and verbs. Clock the next Prince reference among the study of precarious contemporary life:
like a puff the magic bullet point
of transformation both kills & fires
the life of the party like it’s 1999 bottles
of beer on the wall street people
who sleep in the streets do not sleep
Along with poems that respond to the uprisings of 2020, the middle section of So to Speak includes a series of poems about that first year of COVID, each one bearing the date of the month of its composition. “Mark your calendars. Tomorrow loves you,” proclaims the earliest poem, dated April 2020. Hayes doesn’t sequence the poems chronologically. They move forward and backward within the claustrophobic limits of isolation—the reader is to presume that the strangeness of that year led Hayes to dub it “The Kafka Virus.” The poems approach the repetitiveness of that time with long trails of “quarantine quatrains,” as the book’s notes call them. For these Kafka Virus Verses, the quatrain enables longwindedness, and a thought need not be more than mildly amusing to find its way into a given piece.
In quarantine, even misspellings, or wishful spellings, deserve airtime: “I continue to half believe a fourth s / resides somewhere inside the word obsession.” Those lines come from the poem “Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm,” which helpfully includes the subtitle “An Analogue PechaKucha, 2020.” The pecha kucha—a form based on a PowerPoint technique, which Hayes unveiled in Lighthead—also happens to use quatrains, albeit as sections parceled by headings that revolve around a theme. For the 2020 version, the section titles are variations of the shrug emoticon, the one made of dashes, parentheses, and quotation marks—¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Written as two words in its earliest iterations, the pecha kucha is fused for So to Speak, rebranded. And while the original version of the form staged crushingly personal lyric utterances alongside considerations of place and history, the “PechaKucha” in So to Speak, through the dispassionate, if glib, emoticons serving as section titles, exemplifies the poet’s new mature, pithy pursuits: “If you watch Hitchcock’s Vertigo / the other way round, you may notice / inside the movie is a whole other movie / told from the point of view of the young lady.” With these shifts in perspective and reversals in time and gender, Hayes plays with the materials of art and language, seeking new ways to pay attention to his world.
In one later poem in So to Speak, Hayes extends the movie-in-reverse conceit, imagining a scene between lovers happening again and again with slight shifts in the gradients of emotion, rain, and speech. The collection replaces much of his typical candor with resources like the apology and resignation, disclosed, as in “The Kafka Virus Verses: Thursday,” through a haze of questions, movie references, and amalgamations of characters from novels and history. The poems engage in the language of art from the recent and not-so-recent past, like Erkyah Badu and Gertrude Stein, who Hayes melds into a single artist in “Homage to Gertrude Badu.” He also uses historical language, incorporating Thomas Jefferson’s famous response to Shays’ Rebellion in “American Sonnet & Golden Shovel for the Tree of Liberty,” a combination of two of Hayes’ most popular nonce forms. Fusing, melding, combining—formations of the kind of synthesis I think Hayes is after in both of his new collections.
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If Hayes was twenty years older, I’d call this essay, “My Terrance Hayes,” and I would apposition his formal ambition and rigor with some frank personal revelation occurring at the intersection of sexual desire, familial backlash, and a fluent understanding of Prince’s catalog. It would start: Terrance Hayes was born in 1971, the year The Temptations released “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me),” which Prince would cover in concert seventeen years later, around the time the Dark Room Collective was founded. Maybe nothing would come from that triangulation. But in “My Terrance Hayes,” I get to just be searching. I would get to be an expert in nothing but my enthusiasm.
It is by now a cliché to compare the structure of a book of poems to the sequencing of songs on an album. Certainly, publishing two books simultaneously invites the reader to think about the existence of the other book while you’re reading one. He’s got more to say? Rather than the second disc of a double-album, however, which would imply a complimentary, if appositive, thematic development or switch, Watch Your Language undoes the circumscription of the poetry collection, serving as an echo of the inquiry that must have gone into making So to Speak, an imperfect depiction of the way that poets claim to engage at all times, with increasing sensitivity. Are these two books the most sensitive Hayes has written? Not in terms of sheer emotion. But otherwise? These two new books are examples of an honest pursuit grown out of the pursuit of honesty found in the books previous to To Float in the Space Between (2018). To Float provided Hayes a consistent subject beyond the bounds of himself—his first prose book revealed a poet on a quest. Watch Your Language, on the other hand, shadows So to Speak, offering what the poems can’t—not explanations of the origins of lyric impulse, but a recreation of the process involved in coaxing it. Put differently, Watch Your Language is an example of what the pursuit of making poems leaves in its wake.
To Float, by the way, divided the graduate workshop I read it with. Some thought it boring, others, the ones susceptible to exhibitions of straight brown male tenderness, like me, grew wide-eyed at the essay’s confusion of reader/writer, poet/person, and son/father. The boundaries are fluid. Someone has to be the first to tell you. Hayes was among the first for me.
In Watch Your Language, Hayes approaches his usual obsessions (masculinity, Americanness, ambition, poetry, family, mentors, the self) with provisional solutions rather than ones predicated on mastery. The subtitle for Watch Your Language suggests his renewed approach: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry. Like So to Speak, with its distribution of sketches alongside “DIY Sestinas” and fuzzy maps among quarantine quatrains, the essays make ample use of Hayes’ quirky artmaking by featuring drawings, scans of notebook pages, and word banks alongside meditations on the poets that have mattered to him and his poems.
From his citations of Kafka and Octavia Butler in So to Speak and Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison in Watch Your Language, Hayes appears to circle fiction, the fictive mode. This would make sense as he seems made of stories. But he’s chosen the essay as the form for Watch Your Language, one that starts with the autobiography (or the seemingly autobiographical) and casual candor of To Float. Hayes begins in anecdote but quickly ditches narrative in favor of sketching little impressions of the poets that have endured for him or for whom he wishes a larger audience. The book is less künstlerroman, and more like a roll call at the draft for a pro ball league. If the sports metaphor seems glib, I’m delighted to report that Hayes has also included drawn portraits of the poets he lists and, for the Black poets, he places a banner above their heads, declaring each one an “AA ALL STAR” so as to preclude any confusion over whether or not his book is a celebration. Watch Your Language deals in enthusiasm rather than expertise, but that’s not to say Hayes is not an expert. Rather, he retains the energy of the amateur, grasping after how to describe what a given poet means to him, what reading makes him feel, think, and do. He’s a fan; he’s a poet.
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It’s worth noting that To Float made no mention of American Sonnets for My Past in Future Assassin (2018), Hayes’ poetry collection published just months before. They stand as discrete works. Separate pursuits. For the conceptual sequels released in 2023, however, the boundary between projects is another form to exploit. Watch Your Language gives insight into certain aspects of the poems found in So to Speak by suggesting which other poets influenced Hayes during the composition process. He shows his work.
In the caesura-stacked “Folk Stone,” featured early on in So to Speak, the speaker addresses reincarnation and persona—to coming back as a shotgun in the “most southern & southernmost of the Carolinas.”
“Folk Stone,” refers to the neighborhood in South Carolina where Hayes grew up. In her profile of Hayes for the New York Times, Stephanie Burt writes:
In 1980 the Hayes family settled in Folkstone, an African-American neighborhood 12 miles from downtown Columbia, S.C. James II, Hayes’s younger brother, called Folkstone ‘a Utopia of youth,’ with places to play outdoors, no gangs and no night life.
Even the neighborhood’s name is up for reappraisal—split it apart and lean further into the false pastoral idyll of the South.
Hayes repositions “Folk Stone” in Watch Your Language alongside a five-part essay called “A Frank Stanford Lyric Speech Act Test with Visions.” These disparate pieces connect beyond their shared speculative, associative, and biographical, sensibilities. The reprinted poem also includes its earlier title, a provisional one: “Frank Stanford as a Child of Alphabet City.” This compositional tidbit repositions the poem’s place in So to Speak, making legible the kind of poem Hayes is after—one as attuned as Stanford’s work is to the surrealism of the American idiom.
In another essay, Hayes raids pop music and poetry for clues about Tim Seibles’ books and probes Seibles’ work for clues on pop music and poetry. The essay is sectioned and illustrated, replete with pithy observations and questions. “Tim Seibles was born poised at the middle of the century between Brown v. Board of Education and the founding of Motown,” is an observation. “Does Seibles see the brothers as peers or influences?” is one of the questions. Hayes is asking about Seibles’ relationship to Michael Jackson and Prince who each released albums in 1988, the year Seibles published his debut poetry collection. The singers were both 30 years old at the time, while Seibles was 33. Below the question, Hayes has drawn a Janus-faced Seibles on a poker card. The suit, a quill. Above the question, Prince has his own card, and his portrait is of the viral, very fake mugshot that makes its hay doing the rounds on certain social media feeds. The more I describe these two books, the more I find myself describing the scavenger hunt staged by the essays and poems, leading back to the South, back to Prince, back to fathers, mothers, and brothers.