So I really could not afford to do the kind of art I wanted to do in graduate school. Like a coin toss that keeps coming up heads, iterated titles suggest an occult lucky streak bound to break. Im not asking to get rid of Bach and Beethoven and only to listen to this knucklehead from Atlanta. They all had faces of oranges in them and a bunch of other stuff. 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. This is not the first time Rosenblum has stood in the way of striking down nonunanimous jury verdicts in Oregon. Im going to starve if I dont eat it, but if I dont eat it, neither should you. TH: I feel limited as a painter. This song cycles center on what it means to be a Black man living in America today. What does it mean to say only certain people? But countless defendants in Oregon have been convicted by a nonunanimous jury since the 1934 law was enacted and received their final judgment which means their cases and sentences were final. Theyre also about identity, and some of them talk about race explicitly. Hayess sonnets emerge out of a sense of peril, and the evasiveness and protectiveness it requires. [1] JW: So you went to Coker College because they gave you a scholarship in basketball? That gets back to transparency. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. 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. Or maybe they wont. 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. How do you see that affecting creative writing programs? Hayes's first book of poetry, Muscular Music (1999), won both a Whiting Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Are existential jambalaya. I thought, Maybe Ill look at it in a little while. Thats about failure and practice. I feel like thats what I aspire to. Terrance Hayes is a contemporary American poet born in 1971. JW: You do sometimes talk about race and recent politics. So whats useful about the Allen Grossman line is to say, what is the puzzle about? He teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family. Ive always tried to stay very focused in terms of what I need to write. TH: You get that with students. [2], Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina. American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin ["Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous"] By Terrance Hayes. The problem is what to do with them after that, if they cant get a job teaching? But students often dont want that; they want a strategy for how to make it in the academy. JW:: How did you end up at Pitt for grad school? Its still an open-ended process. He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. He had been in Vietnam, and I think he worked as one of JFKs speech-writers or something like that, but he had left all of that and had this big horse farm in Camden. Another U.S. Supreme Court case, however, could address it sooner. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes earned a BA at Coker College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. We will take a very serious look at whether the interests of justice are served in retrying Ramos cases that are returned to us after a court ruling, and we plan to center equity and fairness in making these determinations, Weisberg said. Currently a MacArthur Fellow, Hayes synthesizes disparate elements in his work: classical forms like the sonnet; popular culture references from hip-hop to Scooby-Doo; comments on race, especially African-American experience; modes such as the Japanese business presentation slide series pecha kucha; and reflections on fatherhood and family. The poet Terrance Hayes first arrived on the scene in 1999 with a book called "Muscular Music." 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. JW: I can see how youre a time poet rather than a space poet. I also was in track and field. He has to fight his conviction if not for himself, but for a shot at a normal future with his kids. But hes not idling either. I feel like this is true in the poetry process. Part of that is just obsessive-compulsiveness, which may be in my personality. Hayes is preparing to file for post-conviction relief. Of course I was wrong, but its become a practice that Im still trying to read as much as I can. Showing 30 distinct works. sort by. Dave Killen/The OregonianThe Oregonian. You told me another time that, when you were growing up, you didnt know if youd become a corrections officer like your mother or go into the military like your stepfather, but you came to poetry while you were in college. 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.. from Coker University and an M.F.A. So I operate in the long view: whatever prize I get today doesnt guarantee a real legacy. I havent seen that prize. The assassin takes many shapes: a stinkbug, the gang that lynched Emmett Till, a bunch of white girls posing for selfies, Donald Trump, and, unsettlingly, Hayess own reflection. Terrance Hayes is the author of six poetry collections: American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn ; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip I didnt know a poem could do that. I continually want to make the last poem more interesting. And the poem opens out into this big question - define life. 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. A little bit of reading, talking to some people about art and how art worksthose are things I know work for basic stimulation. I was just doing a Q and A and bouncing between The Simpsons and Picasso. 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. Americas struggle with itselfHas always had people like me at the heart of it. But the big challenge was other people trying to tell me how to fix the poems. She has an opportunity to do right by it, and she hasnt.. Its all these other things and the more, the better. 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. Then I stood them up, and I had a grid of images. TH: Thats a great question. That might be true, but I think for the last ten or fifteen years, Ashbery wrote the same book. As of late January, 201 people with public defenders in Oregon had filed for post-conviction relief, and 50 of them are in Multnomah County, according to data gathered by the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic. 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. It goes on - really specific, really concrete. Probably all my encounters. 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. Terrance Hayes (born November 18, 1971) is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. 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., Im not that interested in anything other than making something, playing with something, and it doesnt have to be anything other than poetry., On Choosing a New York I Didn't Think I Wanted. Terrance Hayes is a dazzlingly original poet, interested in adventurous explorations of subject and form. - abstract. Every poem is a sonnet, and every sonnet is titled: "American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin.". Movies. Maybe its generational, too. 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. JW: Is there a tension between form or aesthetic value and identity? In your first book, Muscular Music, you play with popular culture, but theres a stronger sense of self in your last two books. Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum has the power to allow post-conviction relief cases be sent back to county district attorneys for retrial. I like the texture of it, so the only way to get to that is to keep painting stuff and erasing it, and painting on top of it and struggling with it so the layers would be hidden. It directly asks the high court whether the Ramos case applies retroactively; a ruling is expected by July. Then when I got a fellowship to the University of Pittsburgh, it really seemed cheaper. It was my first time hearing it. All rights reserved (About Us). So I just accepted that. And yet I still feel like theres something wrong with trying to force me to support the troops. Its always what I go back to, and everything is filtered through that. A security guard fetches the tear- So my definition of the academic requires a little outside information. This makes the work morally ambiguous in ways some readers will resist: I suspect that not everybody will recognize blackness as any part, even a rejected part, of Trump, a man whose loathing of black people seems unabashed. Terrence Hayes (center), 37, is shown with his family in their Northeast Portland home on Friday, March 5, 2021. Are you making a landscape or a figure drawing when you put the puzzle together? I think I read somewhere that you only took one creative writing course. 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. There are no doubt different kinds of programs, but what do you think makes a good program, and what makes a bad program? JW: Its hard to get around the question of jobs and the shrinkage of the academic profession. 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. When he left the Oregon State Penitentiary two decades later, he had grandchildren. He was very direct about what he thought my potential was. The defendant can claim a constitutional violation occurred during the trial in this case, Jackson and his attorney would argue Ramos applies to him, which could grant him a retrial. Even though I had not done that much poetry, it seemed cheaper. Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous. 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. I hear Jimi HendrixWas also unsure in dance despite being beautifulAnd especially attuned. That is what I value in a workshop. TH: Most workshops are set up around strategy, but theyre not set up around failure. TAYLOR: Yeah, that raise questions. I feel like thats something I cant do: the canvas is not big enough to fully capture consciousness in a poem. I learned this stuff in college, and it has become one way for me to understand what metaphor is. When I got in, the joy of college was my teachers. A white reader of these poems has to think hard about his own commodified analysis of them. Even if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against retroactivity, however, that wont bind Oregon courts, Kaplan said. But when the time came and I looked at studio arts, I couldnt afford it. 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. 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. And somehow, I think it's a form that is able to capture and refract, like, the mysterious forcefulness of American violence right now. Terrence Hayes is known for Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game (2017), Knives Out (2019) and Manchester by the Sea (2016). Im not sure how to hold my face when I dance, he writes: In an expression of determination or euphoria?. And then there are poems that are really - what's the word I want? Since this means there will be no classes for the rest I say to students that its fine to not know stuff, but you have to research everything. Whether they will be able to change that depends on one unanswered question: Does the Supreme Courts decision apply retroactively to past cases? Theres some moments in David Foster Wallaces nonfiction, like Consider the Lobster, that do it. watch your mouth is little more. I got letters from LSU, Clemson, UNC Chapel-Hill, but no one gave a full ride. JW: One downside with the glut of information now is that theres no stable core of references. 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. I didnt know what happened on the other side of college. My legacy is still in an upward arc of poems, so people can say, I didnt know he was going to do that. Its not like the basketball team. To me, personality is getting close to something like transparency. Those arent academic poems. Hes signing up for online courses in communications and marketing to help with a foundation co-founded by his wife, a substance abuse and mental health professional. I do think that the phenomena where you have access to all of that information makes you polyglot. Hayes was surprised at the Ramos ruling, having had little faith in the countrys criminal justice system. Im a student of poetry, and I feel like everythings on the table, and I can use it all. [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. Track teams are so big, they dont usually give them. Terrance Hayes Reads American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin. Almost everywhere in this country every day. 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. 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. The poem breaks down the various oppositionsblack and white, men and womenthat Mr. I dont think the number increases or decreases the potential for finding real brilliance in the pool. TH: Gentle Measures almost went into Lighthead, but I just didnt have it finished. SHAPIRO: The most striking thing about this book when you open it up is that each poem has the same title. This figure of something violent keeps moving around this collection, and it doesn't stick to any one thing. Ad Choices. 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. In Multnomah County, where Blacks are 6% of the population, they represent 45.3% of petitioners. TH: The most basic one is Hegel and the dialectic. Menu. After missing out on his kids, he wants to make the most of his time with his grandkids. Trump is a palpable undercurrent throughout the book, and occasionally Hayes addresses the President directly, calling him Mr. Thats what I find interesting, and to have that wall stops it. So maybe thats a form of ambivalence. My job in the university is simple: Im a teacher. It's really inventive, right? You work on the poem, you bring it in, and people say this is wrong, heres a strategy on how to fix it. Thats a nightmare for me. SHAPIRO: Tess Taylor sharing Terrance Hayes's new collection called "American Sonnets From My Past And Future Assassin." The New York School poets are interesting to me for their immediacy; New York School culture is about being present and being in the moment. 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. 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. What do you think is a flaw of your poetry? SHAPIRO: It seems like some of these poems are really grounded in American life today. Activists point to New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams, who opted not to wait for a court ruling on retroactivity. Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site. Terrance Hayes (born November 18, 1971) is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. . When people read Sylvia Plath, everyone wanted to write confessional poems. Or in a poem Ill talk about Ol Dirty Bastard and Othello. Id rather take a year to figure it out than have you tell me in five minutes whats wrong with it. Darkness. Sometimes it seems like the New York School, but at other times, its very different. If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation. Terrance Hayes observes, "Even if you love the racket of ascension,/you must know how the power leaves you.". Like, one of these sonnets begins, (reading) a remix of "Pony" by Ginuwine plays while half a dozen beautiful black men strut on stage wearing translucent black housecoats, then pause with their backs to us before a slow twerking as half a dozen beautiful black women walk on stage in sharp alabaster tuxedos and surgical masks. 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. 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