A self-portrait by the American poet Terrance Hayes graces the cover of “How to Be Drawn” (Penguin), Hayes’s fifth book of poems. If you want to be drawn, one straightforward plan would be to draw yourself, as Hayes has done; change the word to “represented,” and the political meanings of his title become clear. Hayes is black. In American poetry, if a black person wants to exist at all, he can either submit to representation by white artists or choose to portray himself. But words are trickier than charcoal and pencil: Hayes can’t make a poem that “looks” like Terrance Hayes, by the standards of visual art, since “Terrance Hayes,” by the standards of poetry, doesn’t exist until his words invent him. Authors, after all, aren’t causes; they’re effects produced by their own language.
Hayes is forty-three and lives in Pittsburgh, where he is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh*. In 2010, his volume “Lighthead” won a National Book Award, and last year he received a MacArthur “genius” grant. He played basketball for Coker College, in South Carolina, where he was an Academic All-American, but he has the bounding imagination of someone fortified and defended, for years, by shyness. If you judge a poem by how big a chunk of reality it smuggles into language before returning it, transformed, you will have a hard time beating this catalogue from “Wigphrastic”:
An ekphrastic poem is one that describes a work of art; “Wigphrastic” describes Ellen Gallagher’s “DeLuxe,” a portfolio of sixty works on paper that depict, among other things, vintage ads for hair straighteners and skin whiteners. You can see the piece, and explore all of Hayes’s references, on his Web site. If the Internet had been around when T. S. Eliot wrote “The Waste Land,” the idea of literary difficulty might have been moot.
Hayes is a poet of swallowed garrulity, imagined riposte, mock correction, and interior litigation. We all have, in our heads, a marionette theatre where we stage what we might have done and should have said. There we are always the conquering puppet. Hayes’s poems are like a Pixar version of the mental marionette show, a dazzling space crammed with comic jabs. “Black Confederate Ghost Story” recalls a hick “handyman’s / insistence that there were brigades of black / Confederates.” Hayes replaces his actual, too polite response with a B-movie horror sequence:
The tone is taken partly from those “Attention, shoppers” announcements heard in supermarkets; instead of flocking to the produce aisle, these “ghosts,” literally “mortified” by having been murdered, are summoned to metaphorically “mortify” this cartoonish dolt. I never noticed before that Whitman’s name is very nearly “white man”: the poem, like all of Hayes’s poems, operates by swift cuts and screens until it finds an opening. Hayes imagines a “tolerant” Whitman “waltzing across the battlefield like a song / covering a cry of distress”; Hayes himself wants to be “a storm / covering a Confederate parade.”
Racial trauma is everywhere in Hayes’s work, instantiated by his personal ghosts—an absent father, a mother who worked as a prison guard, an array of family troubles and damage. But he is brilliantly boxed in by his style, which elates in the language it finds to express tragedy. Hayes has called himself “a gray-area, between-area person”; his poems refuse black-and-white emotions. I have no idea how he works, but the poems give the impression of spontaneity; even if he labors over them, the result is a wild ride without an off switch, an unbroken verbal arc propelled by his accelerating actions of mind. The poem “How to Be Drawn to Trouble” starts out as a tribute to James Brown, “stoned on horns and money,” who was briefly an inmate in the prison where Hayes’s mother worked. By its close, Brown’s song “Please, Please, Please” has gone from soundtrack to sing-along, as Hayes recalls a searing night from his past. His mother has “gone out Saturday night, / and come home an hour or so before church”:
Those lyrics are at once sung by Brown, cried by Hayes’s father, and written by Hayes. So much of life is an uncanny acting out of emotions that we first encounter in art, a notion that Hayes’s verse, in which the poet quotes his father’s quotation of James Brown, explores with extraordinary power.
Hayes’s titles often set up arbitrary collisions, self-imposed restraints, hodgepodge high-wire ideas: “Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime Report,” “Instructions for a Séance with Vladimirs,” “Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh.” All of these poems, foregrounding their own eccentricity, choose rather rigid homemade forms and then stick to them. If the past is prologue, we may now see a rash of poems in the style of a crime report: Hayes is one of a small number of contemporary poets who have invented forms that actually caught on. My favorite is a form that predominates in “Lighthead,” an adaptation of the Japanese slide-show format used for business presentations, called pecha kucha: twenty slides shown for twenty seconds each. In Hayes’s hands, short poems take the place of slides (each can be read in about twenty seconds); the result is a total overhaul of linear narrative, a story with twenty beginnings and twenty endings.
In poetry, form and feeling relate in countless unpredictable ways. The risk with Hayes’s work, which fits strong emotions into virtuoso forms, is that the emotions may also come to seem virtuosic. The poems handle form so deftly that they sometimes seem backfilled with feeling, as though Hayes is afraid of his own aplomb. But the greatest poets can use their style as a way to see past it. Hayes is good enough that we want from him even more, which may mean, in his case, even less: fewer turns of mind, fewer formal tricks and contrivances. I realize that I am in the unenviable position of telling him that he ought to have less fun on the page. Hardly anyone who reads him will agree with me.
Deborah Landau’s new book, her third, is “The Uses of the Body” (Copper Canyon). Many of her previous poems dealt with the accommodations made, in daily life, for fantasy, especially for sexual fantasy. They had a wonderful close-up strut and naughtiness, but you couldn’t really tell what was in the writer’s heart; the poems starred their speakers, whose performances were no less showy for being so personal.
Landau, who directs the Creative Writing Program at N.Y.U., has found an insidiously catchy music in “The Uses of the Body.” It’s like weaponized vers de société. Here is a section from “The Wedding Party”:
The phrases—“gussied up,” “slap down money,” “hit a winner”—are outtakes from the fifties flicks that many weddings still absurdly resemble. The brutality sneaks in sideways, especially in the shrewd deployment of that creepy “we” into which the “I” seems to have been forcefully conscripted. This was supposed to be a wedding night—what are we doing downing vodkas in a casino?
There are several bodies in “The Uses of the Body”: a woman’s, torn between sexual “urge” and the “mandate” that keeps it in check, resisting the “somber hungry forcefield” of men’s gazes; the body of a sick friend, “frayed” and “decayed” before he dies and is “removed // from it promptly and with force”; the body of a fetus, “pale and puny,” who “welled inside me // without visa without a pretty box / dollface-down” or “bald and silverfisted” on an ultrasound. Poetry, too, is a body, built to last—“butchered,” as Allen Ginsberg wrote, out of poets’ “own bodies” and “good to eat a thousand years.” It makes a deathless sustenance out of waste and loss. The uses of its body are never clearer than when it lists the uses of ours:
“The pain of form” is an odd outburst here, as though the poem has borrowed its conflicted relationship with its body from the poet’s ambivalence toward her own. Landau gives us the sublime feeling that formal accomplishment comes with a steep cost. Art uses us; it may even use us up. ♦
*An earlier version of this article misstated where Terrance Hayes is currently teaching.
