So I really could not afford to do the kind of art I wanted to do in graduate school. And a gate. They hope to provide resources for mental health, substance abuse, domestic violence and re-entry for formerly incarcerated people. Are those our only options? Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Part of that is just obsessive-compulsiveness, which may be in my personality. But his felony excludes him from better-paying federal contracts, he said. To go back the other way, when Im talking to someone whos sixty-five, and Im making a reference to Future and saying its a song about strip clubs, Im still saying its interesting. Whats important for me in that book is the joining of it, making this new object. Its a petition that can be submitted in civil court even after someone has exhausted criminal court options. You know a lot of things, but you havent spent a whole bunch of time in one area. It seems like, at midcentury, whatever limitations they had, they had a common idea of literature, which probably valued highbrow modernism, whereas now its much more disparate and up for grabs. For my poetry, I havent had the prize that makes me feel like Im secure and dont need to write another good poem. Convicted of robbery, kidnapping and burglary by 11-1 and 10-2 jury votes, he was sentenced to 34 years in prison. So when my mother saw my earliest poems in the first book, she was like, Oh, it was just your imagination.. TAYLOR: Yeah, that raise questions. These cases returned to the county level, where district attorneys could decide whether to retry or take some other action. 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. 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). Hayess sonnets emerge out of a sense of peril, and the evasiveness and protectiveness it requires. Which is really lucky. The you, now & then of the last line is, I take it, the reader and also the assassin. Jackson was still in prison when he heard about the Supreme Court ruling. Kate Brown, who has commuted sentences for more than 100 prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic. I thought, Wow, a poem a week? Even now, I really dont show people stuff when Im working on it. Its all these other things and the more, the better. If I dont do something about this, then they still have to deal with all the stigmas that come with a father with a violent history, he said. But clearly the cool-blooded Amphibian-American does not agree. - abstract. Most black people know thisAbout him. JW: You do sometimes talk about race and recent politics. Im going to eat it the same. The following interview appears in the Spring 2018 issue of The Iowa Review. Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters. I want to be writing about something; I want to have a subject like novels can, capturing a whole world. 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. I knew that was my only course of action, Jackson said. 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. 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. I also was in track and field. Could you do community workshops? 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. I did help start the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, which is important in archiving poetry, but most of my concerns, over eighty percent, go toward teaching. But students often dont want that; they want a strategy for how to make it in the academy. Maybe theyll like caviar, maybe youll like octopus. 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. Or in a poem Ill talk about Ol Dirty Bastard and Othello. It was my first time hearing it. In the lines from Howl that, I suspect, Hayes has in mind, you can see how blackness is used as a prop. Terrance Hayes, others to serve as interim editors of Pitt Poetry Series Thursday, January 13, 2022 The Pitt Poetry Series, which was created by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1967, is transitioning from the longtime editorship of Ed Ochester, who retired in October after more than four decades at the helm of the series. And yet I still feel like theres something wrong with trying to force me to support the troops. Another U.S. Supreme Court case, however, could address it sooner. Ive always tried to stay very focused in terms of what I need to write. To go back to your point about the later books, in Lighthead, the first poem begins with a line, I could never get the hang of Time, and the epigraph is a Borges quote from A New Refutation of Time. At some point I realized, even more than fatherhood, even more than parents, even more than race, the thing Im really obsessed with is measuring time. 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. His claim of self-defense was rejected by a jury that convicted him, 10-2, of attempted murder, assault and unlawful use of a weapon. But if I find a flaw, I feel myself coming up against a statement like that. 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 . The desire to want to feed people is not a bad desire. In Wind in a Box, I decided the only way to get into a poem was as a puzzle that was going to come together, so the great revelation was all the boxes in the book. JW: When you went to Coker College, you went for visual arts. But Im still trying to get people to the table. 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. On the other hand, it has to be gratifying. Its important that new things can show up, as opposed to things that shut doors and segregate people. Im not asking to get rid of Bach and Beethoven and only to listen to this knucklehead from Atlanta. Its not like you could move something out just because it happens to not look like you. Her office is handling petitions for relief from Jackson and hundreds of others seeking retrials. TH: Its true, I do like OHara, I like Berrigan, and I actually like Ashbery, too. 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. In basketball, I was fine. TH: Right, Intro to Creative Writing. from the University of Pittsburgh writing program. Blacks make up 2% of Oregons population, but they represent 17.9% of petitioners. Thats the Stephen King end of things. A white reader of these poems has to think hard about his own commodified analysis of them. But now theres digital or social media, which people like my daughter are very aware of. You wont admit it. Above all, hes waiting on Rosenblum. 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. My grandfather was a war veteran; my dad was in the army; my brother was in the army. When people read Sylvia Plath, everyone wanted to write confessional poems. My whole life journey is pretty much to get back to my people, Jackson said. I dont know how many people know this, but I was on ESPN for the National Scholastic Indoor Track and Field Championships. In your first book, Muscular Music, you play with popular culture, but theres a stronger sense of self in your last two books. JW: I want to ask about your background and how you came to do poetry. 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 . Hayess poems describe the black bodyboth fetishized and criminalized. Thelonious Monk says there is no failure, theres only rehearsal and practice. I think thats a working-class outlook: if it didnt look like it was for me, if I felt in the workshop the way I felt in the barber shop, I could just go home and work. They sometimes say, Theres all this new work, and youre still trying to make us read these old white dudes from the canon. Last year at Yale, some students protested, saying, Why do we have to read all these white guys? Hayes said hes fortunate to have been able to get his electricians license in prison, an opportunity afforded to only a handful of people, and he found a job in July. JW: College was pivotal for you, and you work in a university. NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with poetry reviewer, Tess Taylor about Terrance Hayes' new collection American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin. Terrance Hayes is the author of Wind in a Box (Penguin 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin 2002) and Muscular Music (Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Classics, 2005 and Tia Chucha Press, 1999). He is known for his collections American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins and To Float In The Space Between. Its a pecha kucha, a Japanese form. 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. 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. Now, Rosenblum has the power to change Hayes life again. I know you paint and have for a long time. What does it mean to say only certain people? I used to do it, but it was taking up too many of my words.) Accuracy and availability may vary. 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. But their principal greets He envies poets who have the luxury of wandering into all corners of American life. He was very direct about what he thought my potential was. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. JW: So your obligation is to ask questions? "Terrance Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase. It might take years before the Oregon State Supreme Court takes on a case that has made its way through the often lengthy appeals process so it can issue a judgment on the retroactive application of Ramos. of the day, the children dump their school gear I wrote them one at a time, and there are six, because a box has six sides. I had no sense of what kind of avenues might open up. gas. But I have no nose, no mouth, so you tell me what's good, what's god, what's funky. Theres some moments in David Foster Wallaces nonfiction, like Consider the Lobster, that do it. Theyre also about identity, and some of them talk about race explicitly. Like a coin toss that keeps coming up heads, iterated titles suggest an occult lucky streak bound to break. Some of my undergraduate students dont know that there is another way of learning. What do you think universities can do? [7], In 2018, Hayes premiered Cycles of My Being commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and Carnegie Hall with music by Tyshawn Sorey starring Lawrence Brownlee. My skepticism around strategy is that it doesnt have room for failure. 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! It goes on - really specific, really concrete. It could be an enormous one, or it could just be a small table. TH: Yesand many other things. And his answer is its just language, its just poetry. Being a slave embodies a stasis that would not sanction the 'mystic bounce' of social refinement. We knew where it came from, we knew it was designed culturally for us, for Black men, people of color, Jackson said. My default answer to just about everything in the world is, Man, Im just going to go write a poem. When things get rough, whether its grading student papers or paying the bills or a fight with my wife, my default answer is to write a poem and just forget about all of it. What's going on here? Because Oregon is 76% white and 2% Black, according to U.S. Census figures, critics say its rare to see more than one or two black jurors assigned to any jury. I think theres a good book-length poem in here. But I still couldnt do it. There are no doubt different kinds of programs, but what do you think makes a good program, and what makes a bad program? You work on the poem, you bring it in, and people say this is wrong, heres a strategy on how to fix it. In seventy sonnets written after Trump's election, Hayes manages boundless anxiety with formal innovation. Whats going to be the rhythm of my sentences? It gives me a way to not be limited. Activists want Rosenblum to act now, otherwise an answer could be months away. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. And there's a way that it changes slightly, and then there's a way that it's kind of relentless. Or am I going to break a line here? Thats manifested in the pecha kucha poems in Lighthead: theyre not measurements of meter; theyre measurements of time. This is not the first time Rosenblum has stood in the way of striking down nonunanimous jury verdicts in Oregon. In my ignorance, though, that meant I was majoring in fine arts, and I was taking writing. I would do what everyone else does. Why do we have to read Shakespeare? I know because an article came back to me that said, You should read Shakespeare and Terrance Hayes. I agree with that, and I dont see why it cant be both. to see him on the basketball court. These adversaries, dreamed up in Hayess poems, are also confined there: I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,/Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame., The conflict between flight and confinement is built into the form he has chosen. Terrance Hayes, Hip Logic, Penguin Books, 2002. Race might be part of my identity, but its not the only thing thats there. If the court rules in favor of allowing Ramos to apply to past cases, people like Jackson and Hayes will have a chance for a retrial. It was because I couldnt afford a twelve-by-twelve canvas for each of the pieces. He fears a more immediate kind of danger, which cant be aestheticized or glorified in verse. They must withstand humiliating sexual reviews to participate in the economy at all: There was black male review for ladies nightAt the nightclub. 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. I still need it to be more relevant, and the stakes have to be a little deeper. 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 . 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. Its gonna be work, its gonna be a hobby, its gonna be something I love., jding@oregonian.com; 503-221-4395; @j_dingdingding. Critics argued these laws are a relic from a racist past that marginalize minority jurors. I have a friend whos a critic, and he said that my work was an anthem to ambivalence. Should I mirror the rhythm of her hips,Or should I take the lead? the afternoon came evening's bell. Thats the procedural crazy in our law that requires a ruling that says, this opinion is retroactive, Kaplan said. Define life. Could you get a job for a company using your skills with language? Hayes is working to rebuild relationships strained by his decade-long absence. And yet I still feel like theres something wrong with trying to force me to support the troops., Ive always had a sense of moving into spaces where I felt a little bit different. Hi, Tess. This is one of the deepest accounts I have read in poetry of what it feels like to have ones body fetishized as an object but criminalized as a force. Which is to say, In Sanford, something happened in Ferguson, And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened, In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore & happens. Witnessing the struggle for freedom, from the American Revolution to the Black Lives Matter movement. SHAPIRO: Tess Taylor sharing Terrance Hayes's new collection called "American Sonnets From My Past And Future Assassin." The "Racket of ascension" is emblematic of the social progress that results in the upgrading of one's social rank. I mean, I can't actually remember another book that does this, where every single poem has the same title for an entire collection. I also sent in storiesit was an MFA in creative writing, not just poetry, and I didnt know they had different sects. I think he could just sit down, listen to some music every day, and feel like he could make an interesting poem. I would say, first, thats who I am. JW: I can see how youre a time poet rather than a space poet. In seventy sonnets written after Trumps election, Hayes manages boundless anxiety with formal innovation. For decades, Oregon and Louisiana were the only states that allowed felony convictions by split jury votes. His claim of self-defense was rejected by a jury that convicted him, 10-2, of attempted murder, assault and unlawful use of a. I smile at Ronald's poster, perpetual grin behind the pissed-off, fly-girl cashier I love. My legacy is still in an upward arc of poems, so people can say, I didnt know he was going to do that. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesizingthat certainly is my way of being in the world all the time. They all had faces of oranges in them and a bunch of other stuff. You were outside the main academic pipeline and didnt have a silver spoon. If were talking about class, the people who could survive as poets before were people who were wealthy already. Im interested in Language School poetics, too. Assassin, you are a mystery/To me, I say to my reflection sometimes, Hayes writes, acknowledging the part anyone plays in his own existential undoing. 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. [7] He won the National Book Award for Lighthead[1] (in which he invented the "golden shovel" poetic form). You say it's really inventive. Then it was three years, and I was done. He is currently distinguished professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and also distinguished visiting writer at New York University. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. [10], In January 2017, Hayes was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. I couldnt do Division I, because I would have been a guard, and because Ive been this tall since I was fifteen, Ive always played inside, so I never really learned how to handle the ball. She has an opportunity to do right by it, and she hasnt.. Showing 30 distinct works. These crisis conditions suit Hayes. 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. I think about the next poem, because Im always thinking I could do better, and have I done the best I can? JW: Its hard to get around the question of jobs and the shrinkage of the academic profession. I was a visual artist, too, so I got offers from Savannah College of Design, but they didnt have any sports, and they didnt give me enough money. But does that mean Im only making black-eyed peas and collard greens? And how should I look at my partner: in her eyesOr at her body? And the poem opens out into this big question - define life. Thats great! But I still want to see him be somebody else. How does that bear on your poetry? Terrance Hayes (born November 18, 1971) is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. In his quiet Southeast Portland townhouse, Jackson said he can walk outside and hear the birds and the woodpeckers. I had another poem about my father working in the yard called The Earth God, and I worked on it for about two years. "You belong in our swamps not our schools!" Terrence Hayes was 19 when he shot a man in the leg in 2004. Some of them want that, but they dont know what it looks like or know enough about the template for becoming a successful writer, so they wind up writing really interesting things all the time. Anything else connected to that is just gravy. And then, yes, as the title suggests, every single poem is a sonnet. 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. Jeffrey J. Williams: You use a variety of forms, you sometimes draw from popular culture, and your poetry changes from book to book, so it would be hard to define you as one kind of poet or from one school. Its the right thing to do; we shouldnt wait for a court ruling to do this, association legislative director Mae Lee Browning told The Oregonian/OregonLive. On the one hand, it seems like your career was accidental. 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. Are existential jambalaya. JW: Related to art, theres been a lot of critical writing about postmodernism and different kinds of theories, and you mentioned Benjamin. Im going to starve if I dont eat it, but if I dont eat it, neither should you. And I think that that - this relentless title comes back to the relentlessness of, you know, the American racism that we live with. Each one is called "American Sonnet For My Past And Future Assassin" - almost identical as the title of the collection. Or Toni Morrison. TH: Thats Baraka. Tess's most recent book of poetry is called "Work And Days." And theres a lot of ways to choose a side. The university space should be, ideally, a fluid space, but instead we often encounter people saying, This is at the top of the pyramid, and everything else is beneath it. I think that a good program values Language poets the same way they value Black Arts poets and confessional poets. Youre a synthetic poet. 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. sort by. I could just write a poem for the fun of it, but Id spent all this time as a painter, and my art teacher, whos also passed away now, Kim Chalmers, certainly encouraged me. Presiding Judge Ellen Rosenblum sentenced him to more than 12 years in prison. Whether they will be able to change that depends on one unanswered question: Does the Supreme Courts decision apply retroactively to past cases? A week earlier, Murrell had assaulted Haynes at a shopping mall in an . The idea that language in and of itself is a material or communicates sound that is a materialthat interests me. 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. But when the time came and I looked at studio arts, I couldnt afford it. Its a great meal, and maybe youre a terrific eater, so they watch and wow, those noodles look delicious. Terrance Hayes is probably the most innovative poet addressing the complexities of race in America today. Its twenty seconds for each stanza, and Im trying to create out of these twenty-second lyric bursts a narrative that holds together. 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.. Im not doing enough as an individual if Im not seeking out new experiences, new people, being challenged, being honest with who I am, or my poems are going to be stuck. Jackson stepped foot into prison when his kids were in elementary school. 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. The conviction obstructs him in other ways. Because I was lucky enough to get a scholarship, my parents didnt feel compelled to tell me what to do. 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. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. I dont think Ashbery thinks that. 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. TH: The thing that is always a challenge from one poem to the next is managing time. Movies. 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. In his poems, in which he occasionally invents formal constraints, Hayes considers themes of popular culture, race, music, and masculinity. It frees me up to tell the truth. Some defendants were retried and convicted again, while others had charges dropped or were retried and released. It gets into the art for arts sake versus social purpose argument, but I think the real purpose is who do you want at the table with you? The Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association is on board. Or maybe they wont. 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