No. 8

Winter 2005

My Aesthetic Schizophrenia: An Interview with Terrence Hayes
Jonathan Moody

Terrance Hayes is a native of South Carolina. Some of his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The African-American Review; The Beloit Poetry Journal; Best American Poetry 2005; The Bloomsbury Review; Callaloo, Controlled Burn; Crab Orchard Review; 5am; Harvard Review; jubilat; Pittsburgh Quarterly; Ploughshares; The Southern Review; and the Xavier Review. He is the author of Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press), and Hip Logic (Penguin). His third collection, Wind in a Box (Penguin), is scheduled for release in 2006. Hayes lives in Pittsburgh, with his wife and two children, where he is an Associate Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

Jonathan Moody grew up in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida. He received his B.S. in Psychology from Xavier University of Louisiana. Currently, Moody is a second-year MFA poetry student at the University of Pittsburgh and a Cave Canem fellow.


In your sonnet "For Robert Hayden," you sneak in the amazing lines: "Was your father was a mountain twenty shovels couldn't bury?" You always find ways to surprise me as a reader. Do surprises come naturally to you during the initial act of writing?

Surprise, I like to think, is the engine that drives me to keep writing. If the writer isn't surprised, chances are the reader won't be surprised either . . . Stephen Dobyns says something like that somewhere. But no, it doesn't always come naturally. Sometimes it's a matter of excavation. As in life, in poetry a discovery or two is usually buried beneath the first thoughts and assumptions.

Another quality that I find fascinating in "For Robert Hayden" is how the speaker uses a series of rhetoric to initiate a conversation with "Those Winter Sundays," which is arguably Hayden's most anthologized poem, as well as Hayden himself. The dialogue, however, is not returned. The speaker is isolated much in the same way that Hayden was isolated after he challenged the Blacks Arts Movement at the Fisk conference. Referring back to the lack of exchange between the speaker & Hayden, does the speaker's strict reliance on rhetoric correlate with the view of poetry as being the language that speaks the unspeakable?

Maybe it's not simply a matter of "speaking the unspeakable" though. Sometimes it's exploring the unspeakable, engaging it, questioning it . . . one shouldn't assume the poet has the answers.

How long did it take for you to complete each manuscript?

It takes about three years to generate the material before organizing it into a collection. My wife thinks I write a lot -- but most of it's slush. I don't so much write according to "prescripted projects" as to "restless obsessions." Usually those obsessions lead to the core materials -- sequences of the books.

"When the Neighbors Fight," is one poem that I always return to because it consists mainly of metaphor. In this sense, the poem itself takes on the energy of not only a riddle, but the movement of a jazz solo in that it literally stops time. This occurs whenever the refrain of "Miles Davis beat his wife" is nuanced in the lines: "The wall is damaged skin," & "The wife is a bleeding trumpet." That's quite an accomplishment. Besides stopping time, what else makes a lyrical poem great?

I'm not the one to ask such a question . . . Given the burden and inherently connotative nature of language (especially in the context of poetry), I'm not sure poems can be a lyric poem can be without its bit of narrative. Maybe. All language is stopped time ain't it? Photography. A score of music . . . I'm sorry, I'm just trying to dance around this notion of what makes any poem great. If I knew that, Brother, I'd be selling it.

In The Big Sea, Langston Hughes admitted that he seldom revised. And Bob Kaufman was all about spontaneity. How important is the process of revision for you?

Going back to your initial question, revision too is a matter of excavation and surprise. I don't think of it necessarily -- not primarily -- as a process by which "craft" is strengthened. One likes to believe that after a while the execution of craft will come as naturally a layup does to Jordan. The expression of emotion/intellect, on the other hand, has to be reimagined, refined, remastered with each new poem. Hence revision is a matter of re-seeing a poem's trajectory not the mechanisms that "traject" it. That's all to say given the emotional an/or intellectual difficulty of a poem, I can and have revised endlessly. Even beyond publication . . . This pleases me. It means that even if language is fixed, ideas are not. A paradox which merits both frustrated joy and joyous frustration.

In Sandra McPherson's essay "The Working Line," she questions why poets choose three-line stanzas and use empty white space, and whether four-line stanzas are symbolic of completion. She suggests that some poets may arbitrarily use stanzas. Louis Simpson argues against this, however. To paraphrase, he believes that the line is an intentional act, not an arbitrary one; that the line is guided by a poet's impulse whether it's written in verse or prose. The line trains the audience on how to peruse the poem. With all of this said, how did you determine that "Lady Sings the Blues" should be written in quatrains, and that "Woman Walking on the Road" should be written in prose?

That's asking me to remember a long way back . . . I try to think of the way stanzas look according to a poem's tone. Somehow a meditation akin to "Woman Walking on the Road" felt right without space, without too much air. The long single stanza seemed to suit its solemn tone. The stanza breaks in "Lady Sings the Blues" on the other hand seemed to fit the subject matter: the jump-cuts of film, the pacing of song, the slow unfolding of recollection. But I should say the visual presence -- the physical body -- of a poem always seems to rub against my sense of its aural presence -- the way it sounds in the air. I tend to like lines of approximately the same length whatever the subject or tone. I don't think this wanting a poem to appear "ordered" is necessarily a good or necessary thing. Just a tick of mine. An obsession I wrestle with during writing and revising.

Gwendolyn Brooks once said, "a poem doesn't belong to the poet, or the critic, but to the reader. What are your thoughts on this matter"?

I'd say it's probably foolish to disagree with Ms Brooks or anyone in her class, but I think I disagree. The poem rests in the space between poet and reader. It's a kind of negotiation between them. It belongs to no one just as language belongs to no one. (Who owns the word "blue"?) And since no one owns a poem, poet and reader share a responsibility for it: the responsibility of negotiation and engagement. It's wrong to think a reader need only show up, sit back and passively receive the poem. If that were true no poem would need to be re-read. I believe reader and poet share the poem -- am I straying from your question?

No, not at all. On a different note, I'm curious: What were you doing at the precise moments when you found out that Hip Logic was one of five manuscripts selected for the 2001 National Poetry Series, when Muscular Music was the recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award 2000 and the Whiting Writer's Award?

Oh, I don't know. Don't recall. Don't care much about recalling or knowing. That way I don't confuse winning awards and writing poems.

I know poet Eve Alexandra, a former Pitt student, fought hard with her press to get the cover art that she wanted for her first book. Since you do your own cover paintings, do you have more "pull" with editors as far as what will go on the front?

No, I've just been lucky. If a publisher thought a painting might embarrass the press (if the painting sucked, in other words), I'm sure I'd have had less freedom.

You mentioned Stephen Dobyns earlier. In Best Words, Best Order, he asserts that the poems of undergraduates are much more original than the poems of graduate students. He says that graduate students are too concerned with modeling their work after their literary ancestors. What's your take?

Yes, I could buy that. Graduate students may also be too concerned with the business end of poetry as well. And not just graduate students. Those of us trying to make a living as a poet -- the world a graduate student hopes to enter -- also wrestle with ways to maintain or continuously unearth originality. Sometimes is not the literary ancestor, but the last book a poet wrote that saps the breath of originality. A poet can give into this sort of thing and then call it style I guess. Or he can dig for that thing he knew when poetry was new . . . that thing some young poets know. As a teacher of undergrads I have to say some of them are also pretty ambitious and unoriginal -- a sad thing.

Dobyns also mentions, in what I believe to be the first chapter, that publication is a "self-deception" causing poets to write too cautiously. What advice do you have for unpublished writers concerning this matter?

We'd all like to see our poems walking alone in the world. Like children reared to be independent adults. Some parents raise a child conservatively (that is, with no exposure to the darker things awaiting them beyond the door), but you can see how that's a mistake, right? There's no way to know how best to prepare a child for the future. No way to know how to write a publishable poem -- I'm not saying safe poems don't get published. Or that sheltered children can't succeed. Just that you write the best poems you can and send them out. Sometimes they return home weeping. Sometimes they make their own way.

In an earlier question, I asked you about your amazing ability to surprise me as a reader. For example, you've written poems about David Bowie, Balthus, Diego Rivera's Dama De Blanco, as well as poems in the voices of legendary 70's protagonist Sweetback and underground hip-hop emcee, Kool Keith. You have such a wide range, yet your poems still converse with one another. By having this flexibility, is it even more difficult for you to organize a manuscript into sections?

Well, this forthcoming manuscript has about a dozen sections of four poem groupings. My subjects probably are more about my aesthetic schizophrenia than my range. But if you believe any two things set side by side create a dialogue and that it's more a matter of the kind of dialogue than whether a dialogue exists, then organizing a manuscript of poems can be a fun exercise.

In an interview, I read that when Gwendolyn Brooks submitted her first manuscript, A Street in Bronzeville, for publication Richard Wright asked her not to include "The Mother" poem because he deemed that a proper poem couldn't be written about abortion. However, she opted to keep it. Have you experienced this before? If not, has an editor ever asked you to change a title, or an ending that you've felt strongly about?

The editors of my books have pretty much left me alone where my poems and titles are concerned. That's good I guess, though I wouldn't have minded a little input here and there. But the Wright-Brooks relationship was not one of editor and poet, but of friends. And I've had friends suggest what poems to keep or not keep, what lines to cut. With the friends I trusted, I sometimes (inevitably) agreed. Other times, I didn't agree. Brooks disagreeing with Wright didn't spoil their friendship, I don't think.

What was it like participating in the first year of Cave Canem? Besides Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, who were the other faculty members?

Words don't hold some experiences. Trying to describe the first CC would make it too much like mythology . . . though maybe that's already what it's become.

Were there any guest poets?

I don't remember any other faculty members or guests that summer. Elizabeth Alexander showed up. She might have read . . . But no one was a guest then.

In what ways have you seen Cave Canem grow?

It was a family, now it's an organization. That's the way of success, I suppose. Its current stature isn't a bad thing though. CC has transformed contemporary American poetry. It would be selfish to say I wish it was still a small circle of poets, not the behemoth it's become. But I'm grateful I knew it as it used to be.

When did you first start publishing poems?

I published a poem in some small magazine when I was a college student. Then more and more into graduate school and out of it.

About what percentage of your MFA thesis went into Muscular Music?

Most of it. Same title.

Were you able to land a teaching gig immediately after you graduated from Pitt's MFA program?

No, not because of the degree. I went to Japan and taught there.

Which books have read most recently?

A Companion for Owls by Maurice Manning. Still read his first book, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions too. Been thumbing through this 383 page poem/book: The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. It's over 1500 lines of poetry with no punctuation or stanzas, written by Frank Stanford who killed himself in 1978. Read this novel: The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers… Still reading and re-reading David Berman's Actual Air. And Dean Young's last two books with Pitt. I try to always read new books and re-read the ones I've read. I believe reading matters less than re-reading.

Copyright 2005, Jonathan Moody

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.