In His Newest Poetry Collection, Terrance Hayes Finds a New Form

ARRIEL VINSON: I love how you play with form in this collection. The American sonnets make their way into this collection, and there are “ekphrastic, do-it-yourself sestinas” and more. How did art inform So To Speak and how you played with form in this collection?

TERRANCE HAYES: I began to think more and more about the relationship between drawing and writing, or reading and looking, even. I’m trying to convey that to others as a way of thinking about what it is we do or how we express ourselves. It’s something I’ve always done, but I am able to now put those two things together — my interest in visual art and my interest in language.

I’ve always done it privately. My friends know I do art. I did it in high school, and I’ve always thought of it as a way that leads to language. I started as an artist. So even now, when people hear about where I am, if I see anybody from South Carolina, they’ll say, “Oh, man, we always thought you would be a painter or something.”

So to Speak

Even the Octavia Butler sestina was me messing around. I never meant to publish that. I did it many years ago because I like Octavia Butler, and I was doing these drawings. So, I am trying to bridge those things, and I have been thinking for my whole career, “Why do they have to be separate?”

AV: So To Speak also explores the strangeness of the world, of self, of Lil Wayne. You bring up a lot of legendary Black artists and literary greats. Why did you explore strangeness in this collection?

TH: Well, these are the times. Those sections in the book, like “Watch Your Step,” are all about an anxiety that we’re experiencing. But if somebody says paranoid Black man, I say intuition. My children are experiencing it, my students are experiencing it, some of my friends are experiencing this anxiety that has come to us after Trump and after the pandemic. So To Speak is a gesture; you have “Watch Your Head” — that’s where George Floyd is. “Watch Your Mouth, Watch Your Step” is the Kafka virus, which is just me talking about the coronavirus.

That weirdness that has permeated the space since my last book or the space of these last few years for all of us, there’s certainly very much a strangeness that is in the work everywhere. It’s strange, anxious, unsettling new times that are afoot for us all.

AV: As you mentioned, many of the poems are dated July 2020, August 2020, and were written during the height of the pandemic. Tell me more about what it was like writing these and how they speak to the entirety of the collection.

TH: The sonnets were a response to Trump. I can say now, since that was 2018, I wanted that form to hold my panic, and I wanted whatever the sonnet can do with its motifs, and its turns, and its music to give me a way of processing all the noise of the Trump era. With the quarantine, though, I still returned to form. Some people think I’m a formalist — I think everybody’s everybody; we use what we can. And so after those sonnets, I was more interested in the poems you’ll find in the book. So, a poem like “Pseudacris Crucifer,” that’s opening it, or the last poem I mentioned, I’m telling stories in the book as well. But during quarantine, I did the same thing I did with the sonnets, which is to return the form.

I was supposed to go to D.C. and do a talk, and they had all this African American art. I had been working on poems to read, and then it was canceled. Then I was like, “Well, you know what? I’m just going to make a little thing, and then they can do it themselves, so if they were to get the poem in the mail or email, and if they went to the art by themselves, they would experience it.” I’m using form as a buttress against the craziness that’s coming in, whether it’s Trump or whether it’s somebody telling me, “Oh, the world has changed; you can’t go outside anymore.”

That’s just all the weirdness of that quarantine time, which I really love. What broke me out of quarantine was the George Floyd poem, which I wrote maybe a week after it happened. I wrote it the eve of the very first protest, which happened in New York and shook the whole world.

AV: I forget sometimes that I was also in New York when the pandemic hit, and I can’t even think of where I was when the first protest happened, but I’m sure I was in the house frightened that I was going to get Covid.

TH: It was a Friday, and I was home writing. I knew George Floyd had happened. When there’s no leaves, I can see the arches of Washington Square Park from my balcony — I’m in faculty housing, so I’m literally on Bleeker Street, and I can sometimes hear when drums or helicopters are going, as they were that day. I heard this noise — the first group of people coming, thousands of them, the very beginning of people going into the park — and maybe for the first five minutes, I got up and closed my window, and I was like, “Man, I’m trying to write. What’s all this noise?” I closed it and tried to work, and then I looked, and I was like, “Oh, it must be for George Floyd.” I paused and was like, “I should go out.” So, I went outside. I got in the very heart of it with people.

I made my way through all these throngs of people going to hear, really, nothing. They were just going to be present, but there wasn’t a center, which is how our world feels right now. So, I came back, I could still hear the noise, and I wrote that poem. And when I woke up the next day, I was like, “Man, let me send this thing to The New Yorker before I change it.”

Because I sent it out so soon, I had [the line] “You can be a bother who dies.” And before they told me they wanted it, I was like, “Oh, that should have been ‘brother.’” And then I was like, “No, if people look at that, they’ll see that it can be ‘brother’ or ‘a bother,’” and I left it. But it was a typo that became part of the intensity, the blurring, the craziness, the frustration. Like goddamn it, you would think that after one Emmett Till, we would never have to deal with this again.

That poem comes out of that moment, and that moment broke me out of form. It broke me out of the quatrains; it even broke me out of the sonnets. It is very much central to some shifts in energy in the book.

AV: Scars and wounds reappear throughout the book as well. Tell me more about this theme and why you made sure to use the words “scars” and “wounds” a few times.

TH: One of the great luxuries we have as artists is that we are tracking an emotional growth, a development. The deeper the wound, the more heroic the healing, which is a line that was a refrain in my sonnets, and it comes out of writing what I say. If somebody wounds you, that’s bad, but if you get over that, that’s heroic. So, it really has nothing to do with the person who has enacted that pain on you; it just has to do with you.

In this book, the line that comes twice — one in sonnet form in Julie Dash’s “Octavia Butler” poem and one in Gordon Parks’ — is “If you see suffering’s potential as art, is it art or suffering?” I put this line in my prose book [Watch Your Language] too. So, it’s a cousin to that question from the other book. The deeper that hurt, the more heroic it is when you heal yourself from that. And so here, it’s just a question, but if you let your suffering remain suffering, then it’s suffering. Aren’t we fine to turn it into something else?

AV: I want to hear you talk about the muses. Like you said, Octavia Butler is everywhere. What does she represent in the collection?

TH: I don’t even know how to express this fully. Because there’s my mother, who’s always in my work. My dad is there too, but certainly my relationship to my mother is complicated. I think the sonnet for my grandfather’s love child, I woke up surprised whether she was coming or going. One of the things that’s in the work is reconciling that, figuring out how to come to terms with that. Because she does become a figure, so even in the first DIY sestina, the backside of it is the mother is telling the son about a woman who was claiming she was inside a painting. That is mostly made up, but it was just her talking trash about somebody, sort of. That poem is meditating on both of them — Octavia Butler as a kind of tree.

The muse idea is hovering around an artistic mother. Maybe the artistic spiritual muse would be Octavia Butler, but the artistic mama muse is going to be Gwendolyn Brooks. Gwendolyn Brooks is central to the prose book — she is my poetry muse. She’s the reason I am a poet. Octavia Butler is some spiritual kind of muse — it’s her whole thing, her carriage, her color, her voice, her attitude towards everything.

Yes, they are muses, but they are Black women certainly, and there’s probably some triangulation that I’m working out. The thing that made me hesitate saying that to you is obviously my mama. I would say of all those ideal muses, which is Brooks and Butler, the one that’s the most enduring, that makes me feel the craziest, that makes me feel like I can’t resolve it is my mother. But that’s a kind of a muse too.

AV: You’re contemplating a lot of different histories in this collection of your maternal lineage, of war, of slavery, of religion. Why does history play such a huge role in So To Speak?

TH: I mean, that’s pretty much all we got to work with. We have the present, the history, and the possibility of the future. I don’t know how it could be anything else. The prose book is framed with these two pieces about practice. So between practice, my general comment is that if you’re writing all the time, you’re just capturing everything. You’re trying to catch all the frequencies. If you’re writing, you’re just going to really catch history because that’s such a large part of why we meditate. Some would say memory — they’re adjacent. You see what I mean? I write about memory as much as I write about history, and those two things live under the same roof.

AV: There’s also a theme of the truth versus lies in the collection. There are times when both are reasoned with. Why did you want to interrogate this dichotomy?

TH: I’m just interested in all those nuances and words. I’m very interested in the difference between memory and history or the bond between them. I’m interested in the bond between depression and sadness; that’s one that I’ve been thinking about for my family and friends and saying, “Well, if you’re depressed, there’s medicine, and there’s psychiatry; there’s a response to help with that. But if you sad, well, it’s a sad world. We have to contemplate how much sadness can be folded into our existence.”

I made this book trailer about my Marvin Gaye poem — specifically after he had just gotten divorced, the IRS was coming after him, he was having fights with Motown, and he was on drugs. So, he was supposed to have been in London, and some white dude was like, “Come over to this place, man. Nobody will find you.” So, he went; they took the camera. So, he’s playing basketball, he’s getting clean, he’s singing in the church, he sings in the casino, and he’s dancing.

So when I was trying to make this trailer, I was most interested in this footage where he’s dancing. Then I have this thing where he’s in this empty auditorium and just videotaping and playing. And he said when he looks back at his life, it’s mostly recalled with sadness. And then, I have him dancing while he says it, and then I show my book cover. I put it there, I think, to try to talk about the general thrust of the book. It’s not so much the lies part of it; it’s more truth and fact, truth and accuracy, truth and honesty. Those things don’t always line up.

But he said when he considers what life is, whether it’s been good or bad — whether it’s been the pandemic or whether it’s been death, or whether it’s been joy and great flourishing, whether it’s been a Black president — it’s still a kind of nostalgia. Even nostalgia for the good stuff has in it sadness, certainly the terror for the bad stuff. He says it as a victorious statement, a statement that once you come to terms with, you can be all right. You can actually find great joy.

Arriel Vinson is a Tin House workshop alumna and Hoosier. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and received a B.A. in Journalism from Indiana University. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Catapult, Booth, Cosmonauts Avenue, Waxwing, Electric Literature, and others. She is a 2019 Kimbilio Fellow. She tweets at @arriwrites.

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