[10], In January 2017, Hayes was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. I wish I were as tolerant as Walt Whitman, Hayes wrote in a poem from an earlier volume, but I want to be a storm covering a Confederate parade. Whitmans freedom to waltz across the battlefield like a song does not exist for a black poet in America. From the Spring 2018 issue of The Iowa Review. On the one hand, it seems like your career was accidental. 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. My whole life journey is pretty much to get back to my people, Jackson said. He received a MacArthur Fellowship beginning in 2014. SHAPIRO: The most striking thing about this book when you open it up is that each poem has the same title. Terrence Haynes. 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. The editors discuss two poems by Terrance Hayes called "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin" from the September 2017 issue of Poetry. When he left the Oregon State Penitentiary two decades later, he had grandchildren. We knew where it came from, we knew it was designed culturally for us, for Black men, people of color, Jackson said. Her office is handling petitions for relief from Jackson and hundreds of others seeking retrials. I have to fight in ways that a normal American doesnt have to, he said. TAYLOR: Yeah. While resolution of any case that might come before the Oregon Supreme Court could take years until appeals are exhausted, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case in December on past convictions, but a ruling isnt expected until at least July. 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. [6] His second collection, Hip Logic (2002), won the National Poetry Series, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. I do think that the phenomena where you have access to all of that information makes you polyglot. 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. That might be a better way of thinking about it. My deepest ambition is always for the poem, but the growth comes from trying to not get stuck as a human being. (Im one of the few people I know of in my cohort that doesnt do social media. Born in 1971 in Columbia, SC, Hayes's mother was a corrections officer and father a military barber. 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. of the ball and chain around . In this studio class that Ive taken, the teacher had a joke that I should take pictures of my paintings, because he would come over, and I would have a painting of a boy, and he would go away, and then an hour later it would be a painting of a tree, then he would go and come back and it would be a painting of a shoe, and its still the same canvas. Critics argued these laws are a relic from a racist past that marginalize minority jurors. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesizingthat certainly is my way of being in the world all the time. Im going to starve if I dont eat it, but if I dont eat it, neither should you. People can come and sit around and talk about work. Its unclear how the court will rule. Thats manifested in the pecha kucha poems in Lighthead: theyre not measurements of meter; theyre measurements of time. Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous. In those nonfiction pieces, hes totally present, and Im totally with him; Im totally in his head. There are beautiful, personal poems about Hayess father and the consequences of being abandoned by him. I learned this stuff in college, and it has become one way for me to understand what metaphor is. JW: One complaint about creative writing programs is that they routinize the process and produce cookie-cutter writing, but the university also allows a lot of people to write and do things like that. In his fight for a retrial, Jackson is joined by a coalition that is beginning to form around the issue. You kill me can be a compliment. But Im still trying to get people to the table. 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. 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?. "[7], In September 2014, he was honored as one of the 21 2014 fellows of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. TH: The other side would be the question of failure. What I would say to him is that I was just trying to build up a surface. It goes on - really specific, really concrete. Thats a nightmare for me. It directly asks the high court whether the Ramos case applies retroactively; a ruling is expected by July. Even though I had not done that much poetry, it seemed cheaper. Hes still on post-prison supervision. The other thing is what the pronoun I does in my poemsis it a confessional I, an intellectual I? Even if you cant see underneath all of it, I know that theres a face of a boy and that Ive built it up. So maybe thats a form of ambivalence. He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. Ishion Hutchinson, Post-Postcolonial Poet. The university seems to be fairly fixed and stable, where James Joyce is more important than Fuck Up Some Commas. But for me, the university is as fluid and as responsive as the culture is. In January, Jackson was granted early release by Gov. So I operate in the long view: whatever prize I get today doesnt guarantee a real legacy. Baraka would say your obligation is to feed black people. I think about the next poem, because Im always thinking I could do better, and have I done the best I can? Id rather take a year to figure it out than have you tell me in five minutes whats wrong with it. How did you get here? Maybe theyll like caviar, maybe youll like octopus. These poems all happen in the mind, which has been portioned into zones called I and you. Both assume countless different roles, but what remains constant is their reliance upon each other and their tendency to flip positions. On the one hand, people must want things from you. For the known cases though, Rosenblum can ask the court to reverse the convictions and send them back to county district attorneys for retrial. But students often dont want that; they want a strategy for how to make it in the academy. But there are also parts of my personality that just have to do with some weird thing my mother said to me or that I sat on the lap of a woman that couldnt speak at a piano when I was three years old. If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation. 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. "Terrance Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase. TH: Yeah, a full ride. On the other hand, its romantic to assume that youre going to be poor. But Id say thats always been true. The latter won the Poetry Foundation's 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Jackson said he was immediately upset when he learned of Rosenblums objection to allowing Ramos type cases to be retried, especially her statement on the potential impacts on the states legal system. The girls are eager to transform him with a kiss; the boys eager The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Advance Local. I mean, he could've just given the book that title and called each sonnet one, two, three, four, five or the first line of the poem. In my body of work, thats what Im aiming for, and I never can get it. I didnt know a poem could do that. I continually want to make the last poem more interesting. I think I read somewhere that you only took one creative writing course. Its gonna be work, its gonna be a hobby, its gonna be something I love., jding@oregonian.com; 503-221-4395; @j_dingdingding. I had no sense of what kind of avenues might open up. 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. And I think, if I was really trying to fully capture consciousness, I would have to leave poems. But I dont want to be tied to one adjective. Then in Lighthead, theres a lot of fire throughout the book, so Im playing around with the paradox of fire and lighting things up. 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. Whats going to be the rhythm of my sentences? Or am I going to break a line here? TAYLOR: The sonnets themselves have all of these different contents within them, but he's basically pointing to the force of American racial violence and sort of how repetitive it is. 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. My attitude is to split the difference. How does that bear on your poetry? TAYLOR: Yeah, that raise questions. Certainly, after enough books and enough acknowledgments, are you still comfortable with failing? I smile at Ronald's poster, perpetual grin behind the pissed-off, fly-girl cashier I love. Terrance Hayes is probably the most innovative poet addressing the complexities of race in America today. I dont know; I hope not. Thats great! But I still want to see him be somebody else. 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. 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