I could talk to myself in a room and come up with something, but I wouldnt want to only do only that. Then when I got a fellowship to the University of Pittsburgh, it really seemed cheaper. (Courtesy of Lynn James-Jackson), POST-CONVICTION RELIEF: CHANCE FOR RETRIAL. Trumpet: . 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. People from the outside sometimes look at me and look at how things are going, and they say, You were very strategic. In fact, you were a painter before you were a poet. Since this means there will be no classes for the rest Follow your nose , he says. Like a coin toss that keeps coming up heads, iterated titles suggest an occult lucky streak bound to break. TAYLOR: Yeah, that raise questions. 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 like the poem where you play off the line Thank you for your service.. If youre just trying to make art, nobody has to buy what you do, and the world doesnt need it, so I try to tell them to relax. By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. That means if youre reading a poem that has a reference to Ol Dirty Bastard, thats an academic poem, because not everybody will know who he is, and you have to go research. In his fight for a retrial, Jackson is joined by a coalition that is beginning to form around the issue. TH: Id majored in fine arts, and Id been encouraged as a painter for a long time, since third grade when I started in the art club, so I always thought that was something I could do. 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 . What's going on here? [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. If youve got a restaurant and youre McDonalds, you cant sell sushi, you just make burgers. Of course I was wrong, but its become a practice that Im still trying to read as much as I can. 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. Photograph by Gabriele Stabile for The New Yorker, The New Yorker Interview with David Remnick, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. 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? Activists want Rosenblum to act now, otherwise an answer could be months away. And if jurors of color dissent from the majority, their votes effectively dont count, critics say. 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. TH: Thats Baraka. I also thought that, when I finished, I would just go back home. [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. On the other side, a graduate student is so close to the professional world that they cant help but have those things influence them. Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous. I want to be writing about something; I want to have a subject like novels can, capturing a whole world. 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. In basketball, I was fine. TH: Flexibility is what makes a good program. JW: I want to come back to how you reflect upon your own success, but first I want to ask about your relation to art. Im going to eat it the same. TAYLOR: Perpetual - yes. 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. Jackson is also among those filing for something called post-conviction relief. For this latest collection, he made one big choice at the outset: all the sonnets share the same title, American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin. This repetition is superstitious, a tribute paid to the imagined assassin, as if the poems can buy back time in fourteen-line reprieves. Thats great! But I still want to see him be somebody else. 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 thought, Maybe Ill look at it in a little while. Thats about failure and practice. In his poems, in which he occasionally invents formal constraints, Hayes considers themes of popular culture, race, music, and masculinity. Baraka would say your obligation is to feed black people. Bridging those things is my natural way of thinking, and I think of that as a collage. 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 like James Joyce and Molly Bloom and a fifty-page sentenceJames Joyce really fucked some commas up. When I stop by McDonalds for a cheeseburger, no one suspects what I am. That poem is also a conversation about whether you have to choose a side. You kill me can be a compliment. TH: Or I might have become a high school English teacher. But I want it to yield something for my primary concerns: teaching and writing 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 . Which is to say, A nigga can survive. Above all, hes waiting on Rosenblum. Im not that interested in anything other than making something, playing with something, and it doesnt have to be anything other than poetry. On the other hand, its romantic to assume that youre going to be poor. I would do what everyone else does. Its twenty seconds for each stanza, and Im trying to create out of these twenty-second lyric bursts a narrative that holds together. My legacy is still in an upward arc of poems, so people can say, I didnt know he was going to do that. But their principal greets Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes earned a BA at Coker College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. He has to fight his conviction if not for himself, but for a shot at a normal future with his kids. Dont you want to see me eat it too? Whats important for me in that book is the joining of it, making this new object. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. You are beautiful because of your sadness, but you would be more beautiful without your fear. The day after the 2016 Presidential election, Terrance Hayes wrote the first of the seventy sonnets collected in his new book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Time had been altered in some baleful and uncertain way; the sonnet offered an alternative unit of measurement, at once ancient, its basic features unchanged for centuries, and urgent, its fourteen lines passing at a brutal clip. This figure of something violent keeps moving around this collection, and it doesn't stick to any one thing. In those nonfiction pieces, hes totally present, and Im totally with him; Im totally in his head. She cited the practical consequences of allowing hundreds, potentially thousands of past cases be retried. When Im writing poems, I can get an immediate pleasure but still feel like theres something on the other side of that, which is what I go to novels for, like One Hundred Years of Solitude. To fuck up some commas is an interesting idea. 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. Terrance Hayes is a dazzlingly original poet, interested in adventurous explorations of subject and form. out of the ring of fire around. My job in the university is simple: Im a teacher. 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. 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. Sometimes he uses sonnets to stump the reader: This word can be the difference between knowing/And thinking. You are beautiful because of your sadness, Hayes admits. There are people who have achieved more than I have, like Nobel laureates in literature, but still, theres no guarantee. Maybe I can, but I need to try that. 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. Where theres an experience, Im thinking: Is this going to be converted to a lyric moment? whether the poem speaks of #devastation or #hope whether it happens #before or #after That is what I value in a workshop. You've got the music. Even if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against retroactivity, however, that wont bind Oregon courts, Kaplan said. I also thought, if it didnt work, I could just go back home and get a job there. But Marys attitude is that, if you never get to eat it, youre like the cafeteria worker, which is why she does not like that kind of poetry. TH: Yeah, but its not always just my imagination. Copyright 2018 NPR. Dave Killen/The OregonianThe Oregonian. 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. It could be an enormous one, or it could just be a small table. Terrance Hayes (born November 18, 1971) is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. Its important that new things can show up, as opposed to things that shut doors and segregate people. (Reading) A barn shootout endangering the farm life - I live a life that burns a hole through life that leaves a scar for life that makes me weep for another life. Its unclear how the court will rule. My whole life journey is pretty much to get back to my people, Jackson said. Especially in poetry, although the joys are when its not poetry. TAYLOR: Yeah. 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. 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.. 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. Another one of my English teachers had gone to Pitt in the sixties, and he talked to Toi Derricotte, and she talked to me and told me to apply. Nikole Hannah-Jones (Narrator), The New York Times Magazine (Contributor), 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. I think thats useful, but on the other hand, its not quite satisfying for me. [1] Trumpet reinforces. He envies poets who have the luxury of wandering into all corners of American life. It gives me a way to not be limited. SHAPIRO: The most striking thing about this book when you open it up is that each poem has the same title. It allows me to not get too caught up in terms of privacy and secrecy across the poems. You can read Toni Morrison and still read Shakespeare. His own attempt to cook for the first time again hes embarrassed to say resulted in a burnt grilled cheese sandwich. 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. I have a friend whos a critic, and he said that my work was an anthem to ambivalence. My deepest ambition is always for the poem, but the growth comes from trying to not get stuck as a human being. I would say, first, thats who I am. He is known for his collections American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins and To Float In The Space Between. Your sadness, Hayes admits if not for himself, but he was good. A painter before you were a poet first time again hes embarrassed to say, I talk.: is this going to be a small table th: or might... Be no classes for the poem where you play off the line Thank you for your service at me look... 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