DRAWING TERRANCE HAYES
Hayes, Terrance. How To Be Drawn. New York: Penguin, 2015.
You could be drawn to the work of Terrance Hayes by way
of Elizabeth Alexander's advance praise for How To Be Drawn, a statement that
draws you to such words as dust, urgency,
necessity, by any means necessary
(the latter cluster evoking an injunction from Malcolm X); in addition, you
could be drawn by noticing poems by Terrance Hayes are anthologized in Angles of Ascent as instances of
"Second Wave, Post-1960s" but not in What I Say or The BreakBeat
Poets, and the notice is a signal either that you are curious about where
the cipher (a good Arabic zero) or
that you do have non-trivial questions about inclusion/exclusion and
probabilities/possibilities; it is better that you could be drawn by accessing
http://terrancehayes.com/notes-drawn
to find "notes, reference, and inspiration for the
poems" in How To Be Drawn. Maximize your options.
Truth could tell itself by revealing that you are drawn
initially by none of the above. You were
drawn to the poems of Terrance Hayes by sustained interest in the innovative
poetics of Asili Ya Nadhiri as manifested in his "tonal drawings." The required proof is located at
The
device of ekphrasis may be one motivating
link between the poems of Nadhiri and Hayes, because that device draws
attention to how American poetry is a process which defies consensus. It
motivates a few readers to think beyond the belief that "poetry"
exists independent of a historicized reading and to ask whether poetry is
actually or really necessary. Answers
vary according to your choice of adverb ---really or actually. A poem lacks a fixed definition of its
identity. It does have
descriptions. Thus, an imagined
conversation between Hayes and Nadhiri is rewarding, because it begins to cast
light on why some readers actually fear
poetry while other readers so love
poetry that they argue for the validity of any and every form that a poem
can assume. The Republic of American
Letters is becoming the Democracy of Writing in a slow hurry.
Truth
also tells on itself when you access Terrance Hayes's website to acquire the
information needed for intelligent reading of the academic poems in How To Be Drawn. Hayes provides a most welcomed, common sense
definition of what an academic poem is.
When he answers the question "If you could be any tree, what would
you be and why?" with a rich accident: "I'm trying to think of
something clever here? I like the word
magnolia. I like the smell of pinewood.
I like the flowers of dogwoods. I'd be
an apple tree." The accident, for
which Hayes is not responsible, is conjuring the relevance in the context of
the question of Michael S. Harper's remarkable
Photographs: Negatives: History As Apple
Tree (San Francisco: Scarab Press, 1972).
The last five lines in Section 9 of Harper's long poem are
let
it become my skeleton,
become
my own myth:
my
arm the historical branch,
my
name the bruised fruit,
black
human photograph: apple tree (n.p.)
Hayes made a good choice, as good as the choices he made
of which poems to include in How To Be
Drawn, which remarks to make in the Spring 2015
"Anything But Invisible" audio
interview with Studio 360, and which forms to give "Black Confederate
Ghost Story, "How to Draw an Invisible Man,"" Portrait of
Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime Report," and "Reconstructed
Reconstruction" ----poems I would recommend
that my Chinese colleagues would teach in their American and African American
literature courses. No. Those are my favorite poems. Good pedagogy requires that all the poems in How To Be Drawn should be taught, so
that poems can themselves teach us something.
Navigating among works by Hayes and Nadhiri and all the
poets who are in the most recent anthologies brings a jolt of recognition to
people who have taught literature for several decades. Close reading and re-reading of texts are
still worthwhile procedures as we transform dead print/drawings into vibrant
literary events. But close reading now
depends greatly, though not exclusively, on the use of the Internet, digital tools, and
audio-visual information. New ways of
"reading" give some credibility to the notion that a poem in the
canon is not innately superior to a poem which is not so archived or
museumed. Inclusion or exclusion seems
to be a result of a poet's having the "right" connections or a
dynamite agent, having more than demitasse spoon of genuine talent, and having
the blessings of Fortune in an over-crowded market. You are indeed drawn in to be lessoned by the
closing lines of Hayes's poem "Ars Poetica For The Ones Like
Us"------
Do not depend on speech to be felt.
Remember too that the eyes are not flesh,
That crisis is irritated by the absence of witness,
That Orpheus, in time, became nothing
But a lying-ass song
Sung for the woman he failed. (96)
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
June 30, 2015
