Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, Wind in a Box, and Muscular Music, as well as other books of poetry. Hayes is the recipient of many honors and awards including a Whiting Writers Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series award, a Pushcart Prize, a Best American Poetry selection, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a grant from the Guggenheim Foudation.

Published Date: June 1, 2011

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This interview originally occurred at the 2011 AWP Annual Conference in Washington, DC. The recording features Brian Broder and Terrence Hayes.

Brian Broder:

Hello, and welcome to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs podcast. I'm Brian Broder, and I'm here at the 2011 AWP Annual Conference in Washington, DC with poet Terrence Hayes. Terrence Hayes is the author of four collections of poetry, including most recently, Lighthead, which won the National Book Award. A previous collection, Wind in a Box was named one of the best 100 books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. His other books of poetry are Hip Logic, which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and Muscular Music, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His other honors include a Pushcart Prize, several best American Poetry Selections, a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He's professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives with his family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Terrence Hayes, welcome.

Terrance Hayes:

Thanks, man. Yeah, I should have told you, you could just say, here's Terrace. He's from Pittsburgh. That's so much stuff to say. No one really caress about it, to tell you the truth, including myself.

Brian Broder:

Nah, no, you're wrong. You're wrong. Would you mind starting off by reading a poem?

Terrance Hayes:

Sure. This is the first poem in Lighthead. It's called Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy. Ladies and Gentlemen, ghost and Children of the State. I'm here because I could never get the hang of time. This hour, for example, would be like all the others were it not for the rain falling through the roof. I'd better not be too explicit. My night is careless with itself, troublesome as a woman wearing no bra in winter. I believe everything is a metaphor for sex. Lovemaking mimics the act of departure, moonlight drips from the leaves. You can spend your whole life doing no more than preparing for life and thinking, is this all there is? Thus, I am here where poets come to drink a dark, strong poison with tiny shards of ice, something to loosen my primate tongue, and its syllables of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.

The small dog barking at the darkness has something to say about the way we live. I'd rather have what my daddy calls scrimp. He says, discreet and means the street just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive. That's poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm. An arrangement of derangements. I'll eat you to live. That's poetry.

I wish I glowed like a brown-skinned pregnant woman. I wish I could weep the way my teacher did as he read us, Molly Bloom's Soliloquy of Yes. When I kiss my wife, sometimes I taste her caution, but let's not talk about that. Maybe art's only purpose is to preserve the self. Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction of the earth. Other times I fall in love with a word like somberness or moonlight juicing naked branches.

All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet the flowers don't quit opening. I am here carrying the whimper you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash. Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights out on a limb, there's a chance you'll fall in your sleep.

Brian Broder:

Great, thanks.

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah.

Brian Broder:

So in Lighthead, that poem, of course, is the first in Lighthead, you've created a number of characters who speak different poems throughout the book, Anchorhead, Tankhead, Guzzlehead, Airhead, all kind of head cases, and of course, Lighthead himself. Do you consider these characters to be separate persona distinct from the I who speaks the rest of the poems in the book? Are they alter egos or stand-ins for the poet himself?

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah, maybe they're sorts of alter egos. In the previous book, Wind in the Box I had a series of speakers that were sort of like these blue figures, like the blue Borges, the Blue Bowie, blue [inaudible 00:04:56]-

Brian Broder:

[inaudible 00:04:56]

Terrance Hayes:

Blue Baraka ... right. And inevitably there was the Blue Terrance, and I thought of all of those as kinds of persona poems, although not all of them were even in first person.

Brian Broder:

Yeah.

Terrance Hayes:

This is maybe an extension of that idea, but, in some ways, decentralizing the idea of attaching it to a persona. So it's Terrance, or it's Bowie or it's Borges, and instead thinking about what is Lighthead, what is Anchorhead? What does it mean to be heavy headed? What does it mean to be tank headed? So I am thinking about it as a kind of persona, and they just allow me to explore things that I'm really thinking about. It's a device to sort of free up free myself as sort of the obligations of personal narrative and autobiography sometimes, I think.

Brian Broder:

Sure, yeah. And moving into, did you find that moving into these characters kind of ... you mentioned allowed you to kind of escape autobiography and personal narrative? How did you kind of differentiate between the different Lighthead, et cetera? Did you find it hard to jump from one to the next? And also, did you write those poems in the same period of time, or-

Terrance Hayes:

Right. No, I mean, the Lighthead poem, the first poem in the book, the one that I read is actually the last that I wrote.

So I was sort of playing around with them, and I wasn't sure what would happen, which is the way I prefer to write. And then there were other poems. There's a poem called Tank Head, which is, it's a poem to someone who works at amusement park, and their job is to be General Patton. So they had to wear this big head. And so that poem had some other title at some point. But as I was organizing the book, I thought, oh, you know what, that could be like a head poem too. I mean, literally because you're inside this big bobblehead of Patton.

And then another poem, which is about Hurricane Katrina, and it's called Fish Head for Katrina. And again, the same sort of idea where I was playing around with that sort of what does the term bring to mind? But I hadn't thought of them as a sequence even, because obviously the difference between a poem that I described called Tank Head and then Katrina, or even the Lighthead poems, I was not seeing them necessarily as a sequence. I just kept sort of circling back to the same idea of head cases, as you said. That was a thing that I couldn't shake as a sort of a possibility for the poem.

Brian Broder:

Yeah.

Terrance Hayes:

I feel like they're sort of spread out through the book. You'll find them, but there's no real, they're not as organized in the book as some of the other poems might be or the other sort of forms that I'm exploring. They just sort of show up where they fit.

Brian Broder:

So do you think of these characters, excuse me, as kind of counterpoints, the iconic historical figures in that book and other books too? You mentioned that the Blue Terrance, the Blue Borges, sort of think of those, put those in the same sort of light, and I am thinking there's Wallace Stevens appears in Lighthead, Harriet Tubman, et cetera, et cetera. So do you think of them as kind of counterpoints to these icons or who actually lived?

Terrance Hayes:

Right. Yeah. I think there's some overlap again, which is why I brought up the Patton figure. I'll say this, the sort of fun thing that happens to me in the midst of just exploring a fairly general idea, because all I need is just something to get me going. And then at the end, I look at my obsessions, and it's like, oh, I got a bunch of these head poems, and then I can see another poem that didn't have a kind of head poem. And I say, oh, that'll fit. That's really, I'm pretending that it's not, but it really is. So it's only sort of in retrospect that I give it even a kind of intellectual or aesthetic sort of frame, the way we're talking about it now. But one of the poems where there's this wonderful overlap for me that is just, it's just an happy accident, would be the Coffin for Head of State.

Brian Broder:

Mm-hmm.

Terrance Hayes:

So, again, that one doesn't say explicitly, it's a Lighthead poem or it's a Fishhead poem. And then it's also ... that poem is a longer version of this form I'm exploring throughout the book, but it's a Coffin for Head of State. So embedded in that sort of title is the head of state, which goes back to what is the state of your head? So what a writer feels is like, well, am I going to really spell that out? Am I going to make that a clear idea to hold the book together, or am I just going to let it be? And nine times out of 10, I will just say, oh, that tickles me that there's that relationship. But I don't know if everybody will get it on a first or second reading, if they'll get it if they're not listening to this interview, that sort of thing.

But, so those kinds of moments do arise for me, and I do have some sort of intellectual joy in seeing those connections, but I don't feel that same pressure to make it sort of the point of the collection. So it's that kind of thing where you'll come across it and you'll say, is that on purpose? This is Coffin for Head of State, and what does that have to do with these other head poems? And I like that moment that happens.

Brian Broder:

Was Coffin for Head of State written during the Bush administration or the Obama?

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah.

Brian Broder:

Okay.

Terrance Hayes:

It was, it was. And I've gotten into some trouble, ironically, good trouble in a way. We just talking about the way things changed from book to book, obviously. I mean, the last book was in 2006, so obviously we were sort in the midst of a different kind of political moment, or we were having a new political reality for the country,

And I was working through it like everybody else. But even when Hurricane Katrina happened, not too long after that, there were requests from people in journals, do you have a Katrina poem? Is what people were asking me. And I lived in New Orleans a few years before that, before moving to Pennsylvania. So I said, oh, eventually there'll be one. It's that kind of thing eventually. And so here it is now in this book, that that poem appears, but that is sort of the way that I process things. So even to say, yes, Coffin for Head of State is very much a sort of response to a period that we were living in, but it is a response to it that has the work over.

Maybe that's what metaphor does for us. It sort of lets us step a little bit outside of time so that I can deal with it not as a sort of reaction to the moment, but a reflection on the moment or on the period. So again, to talk about what's hidden and what's obvious. So that's how I felt about the poem. So I feel like the poem is mostly couched in metaphor, and you can sort of see what's happening, but not, I didn't think it was explicit, but I've read that poem, and on more than one occasion, I've gotten a response like, oh, that's a pretty mean poem about the Bush ... it was always people who didn't share my political views, obviously, who felt nervy enough to come up and approach me. But I'm always like, oh, you got that? I didn't think you were going to see it. And then I'm like, I'm glad it pissed you off.

Brian Broder:

Yeah. That's right.

Terrance Hayes:

So that's been good. People have said, oh, the book is angry, and it's political. And I just think, oh, it's just me trying to be me. It's just the things that I've been reflecting on. I don't even think I reduce it to pure anger or pure love. I mean, I think that's some of what's in, even the poem I read, the Lighthead poem, it's a little bit of melancholy. There's a little bit of the sublime, there's a little bit of happiness, but all those things overlap, and I'm fine with that kind of-

Brian Broder:

As they do in life.

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Brian Broder:

So do you find it daunting or difficult to write directly about historical moments, especially historical moments that we are living in currently? You mentioned Katrina, et cetera, and so it seems like a germ was planted in your mind somewhere, and you had to wait a while, or did you consciously try to coax it out?

Terrance Hayes:

I mean, I think that it still goes back to reflection. The poems are born out of just ideas that keep coming back to me more than me trying to dig up things because there's lots of poems that I would like to write. I mean, in the midst somewhere. I mean, I always have poems and people see the poems that float up, but beneath those poems that float to the surface is a sea of failed poems. So in response to that, I'm thinking about this poem about Frederick Douglas that I kept trying to work and kept trying to work, and eventually I abandoned it, but it just has something to do with Frederick Douglas as a kind of superhero, is what I was thinking about. And so similarly, somewhere in that train of thought, I must've gotten to say Harriet Tubman, but the poems are born out of really being in a place and having a response to something or having something happen, and then thinking about what that is.

And so I do think of myself as a person who's very interested in history. I mean, obviously I think a person that reads a lot or is interested in literature, there's going to be some component of interest in history connected to that. So that just means that I'm often thinking back on Wallace Stevens because I'm reading Wallace Stevens, and so when I sit down and write about Wallace Stevens, I'm thinking about the poem capturing that sense again, that sense of love without forgiveness and saying, not though, do I hate him or do I not hate him? Those kinds of things. But really trying to capture that sort of engagement with him. And so that's my relationship to a lot of the historical things, the political things that show up. I'm really just trying to create a kind of transparent sense of my relationship to these things. And then the more clarity is there, the more transparent it is. I sort of feel like the more successful I am in showing what's complex about those things.

Brian Broder:

Yeah. Absolutely. Also, family history is something you write about, the birth of your son, the estrangement of your father, your brother, also figures prominently in your poems. How does a poet make art out of autobiographical material? Or maybe how does this poet?

Terrance Hayes:

Sure. Well, let me see if I can talk about that. It comes back as a sort of natural subject, and in fact, I would like to do it less, but I know as a person who just is, again, reflective and thinking about what does this mean?

Brian Broder:

And also obsessions these [inaudible 00:14:49]-

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah, absolutely. That's what I was going to say too. So the last poem in this long form, it's called Arbor for Butch. It wasn't the first [inaudible 00:15:01] in that form that I wrote, but it was the first sort of one that succeeded, and it's the one that I had been really struggling with to find the right form for it. But without going into the formal dimensions of that poem, I really sort of thought that once I met my biological father, and I met him maybe seven years ago, something like that, that part of the reason I wanted to meet him was to move beyond what I feel an obsession of my poem, which is the idea of male figures, father figures, et cetera, et cetera. I thought, when I meet this guy, then I'll be ready to move into a new territory as a poet. And of course, I don't even know if that is possible because I've met him, and it just really just opened up all these other doors as opposed to bringing some sense of closure.

So that's to say part of the reason I'm interested in family is because in some sense I think, oh, I'm working through things, but it's just like, it doesn't end. In fact, I would say this is an interesting sort of way of thinking about poems, and I think this is how I got to it, which is to say, I think we often think you write your Wallace Stevens poem and then you're done. You figured them out. Everybody can see it. Now let's move on to the next subject.

And it's a weird way that many poets, and even I think myself, will have a tendency to sort of take on everything as a kind of object that you handle, and then you put behind you, and then you handle. So you're just constantly moving through the store, only touching everything once. So I think, but family doesn't really allow that. So it's like you can say I wrote one mama poem, but really, you're probably going to need to write quite a few more because the relationship is so complex and so meaty. And so for me, I think it's interesting to think about that in terms of figures, in terms of saying, for me, someone like David Bowie, there's a Bowie poem in Wind in a Box, but I think about David Bowie all the time. So it's like, well, I can't not think about David Bowie just because I wrote a poem about him. So in this book, there's a poem called God is an American. And that's a line from David Bowie-

Brian Broder:

[inaudible 00:16:57].

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah, that's right. That's right. But again, it's like, well, if you've been-

Brian Broder:

I'm afraid of Americans-

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah, right. I'm a afraid of Americans. That's what I love. So you would had to know Bowie and know that I was interested in him to know that. But that's one of the ways that I'm dealing with this. Well, I'm not going to not keep writing about David Bowie. I don't have to write the same thing. I don't have to come at it with the same angle, but I do have to sort of still deal with him because he's floating across the head space. And so I think that, again, the lesson in that for me is connected to the idea of not really being able to outrun the subject matter of family in particular. Because even if you're going to the poems for some sense of comprehension, the way that people interact, you find it that comprehension is always temporary. It's like, oh, I have it today, but tomorrow I'll be lost again.

Brian Broder:

Tomorrow you're a new person anyway.

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah, that's right. That's right. It keeps slipping away, and I think that's all right. That's what you're chasing, I guess.

Brian Broder:

That's great. And you mentioned the [inaudible 00:17:56], is that ...? Anyway, the popular Japanese business presentation methodology? How did you arrive at this form and-

Terrance Hayes:

Right. Well, can I tell the whole story?

Brian Broder:

Yeah, of course.

Terrance Hayes:

I'm asking myself because it's such a long story, you're saying, yeah, but you don't know how long the story is. Well, there is a short version-

Brian Broder:

If it [inaudible 00:18:17]-

Terrance Hayes:

I know. That's right. That's right. Well, the short version of one part of it is just, I wound up at one of those presentations. I was invited to do one of the presentations. And the deal for the presentation was that they give everybody a topic. They did on this night, and then you just show up with the subject. And so the topic was open systems, and so they said, oh, so send us the slides that you think revolve around open systems, and then you'll have your 20 seconds to go through the slides. And there was a lot of other people invited on this night. There's this guy, who's well-known actually outside of Pittsburgh, John Federman, he's actually in the Levi commercials now, but he was there, the Mayor Braddock, a musician, a jazz musician, and a bunch of architects.

And so the people who put it together were doing something around ... they were architects who sort of come up with the idea. So then I thought, open systems, language is an open system. This is becoming the long version of the story.

Brian Broder:

That's okay.

Terrance Hayes:

So I thought, oh, yeah, language is an open system. This is cool. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get my favorite poems. I think I had more than 20 poems. I think I had 50. And I'm going to take the most intense parts of those poems, and I'm going to weave them together and make one poem. So I had Adrian Rich in there, and I had Jack Gilbert. It's Jack Gilbert, particularly intense poet I love. Baraka's poem, Black Arts Poems of Bullshit Unless They Shoot, come At You. Crazy stuff.

So I'm taking all of the most sort of provocative and intense moments, the most beautiful lines, and then I weave them into this poem. It takes a lot of work. It's a collage. And so I'm working on it feverishly. I stop all of my work, and at some point, my wife says, you don't think it's just a slideshow? It sounds like a slide show. And I say, no, no, no. It's much more radical. It's much more radical than that.

And so we get there, and the first person that goes up is an architect, and she has her slide button, and she says, open systems in the dictionary, open systems are, and she's clicking through, and I'm like, oh, I my God, the sweat starts running down my face. I've completely done this wrong.

Brian Broder:

Oh, God.

Terrance Hayes:

And so I get up, and fortunately for me, I feel anxiety, but okay, I'm going to go out, so maybe I'm the third person. And the first two, there's a little bit of difference, but not enough to make me feel comfortable. And so I go and I present, and it is, it's very intense. The kids are completely quiet. Everybody in the audience. And so I sit down, and I said to my wife, I did that all wrong.

She's like, no, that was really intense. Everybody's speechless. I mean, I just have read excerpts of the best poems in the last century, all together, consecutively. So, for seven minutes. And then later on as it unfolded, I realized that part of what they wanted was that diversity because the musician actually had audio. And he's like, oh, music, jazz is an open system that you can improvise. And my point was just that language is malleable, that it changes, and that things like juxtaposition create a narrative so that you don't have to force narrative on anything. We just free associate and we'll fill in the blanks.

Brian Broder:

Like the wasteland.

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah, yeah. So I thought, well, I could just take random poems and then put them in a certain order, and you'll hear a narrative.

Brian Broder:

These fragments, you have short a poem.

Terrance Hayes:

That's right. So at the end of that, I said to my wife, man, I did find that very intense. I could feel it. And I was sweating, and I thought, man, I wish I could do that with my own poems. And that was it. I just started trying to figure out how to make it work, and I wrote a bunch of them that didn't work.

But in particular, the first successful one is Arbor for Butch. And I sweat sometimes when I read it. But I was looking for that kind of, again, that sense of movement that was for, but also sort of lyric at the same time. So obviously there's characters in that one, some of them, they're very different across the book. So some are more fragmented and lyric than others. That one's more narrative. I think it was because it was at the start of the process for me, but I put it at the back of the book. I don't know why I did it at the moment. So then the second part of that story, I'll make this, the short part, is that this summer we went to Japan because the people who ... they started doing it, this design, two people in design, and neither one of them are Japanese, but they set up maybe in 2003. One is British and one is German.

And so we went to Tokyo, and I met them, and I talked to them. And so they said to me, it's [inaudible 00:22:37], but I think it's [inaudible 00:22:39]. It's a lone word. And so the figures for [inaudible 00:22:43] mean picture. It's a Japanese person saying, picture, can I take your picture? Your [inaudible 00:22:49]. But the slang for it is chitchat.

Brian Broder:

Right. That's right. Yep.

Terrance Hayes:

So I'm always conflicted because I think, well, you might be right. It's like trying to convince someone about, well, it is trying to convince someone about slang, and I'm just trying to be literal with it. But I like that it's picture, even though [inaudible 00:23:05] is really the pronunciation. So I've just decided, I'm going to say it the way that I want to say it.

But they were very cool. They were very sweet people and excited about it. And the event that I went to also, again, it's both organized and also sort of spontaneous, which is what I really love about writing, in fact, the sense of that kind of immediacy, but it's contemplated. And so I think the actual performances, nurture that kind of space, that create that kind of space.

Brian Broder:

When you were assembling those poems, putting them together, weaving them, stitching them, how did you write them? Did you have just a bunch of lines one day and a bunch of lines another day? Did you write them all at once? Did you-

Terrance Hayes:

Right. Well, they were all very different. I mean, I think with the poem about meeting my father, it was just such a big experience that I knew that it wasn't, in some ways, it wasn't going to be a poem either. And in fact, I did write an essay about that experience. And so I thought, well, the essay still was sort of not able to get fully into what it meant, like emotionally or this overlapping feelings about history and relationship that I had my son there and these other things. So I just thought that that poem was too big. So I'd been writing through that, and then I just sort of chiseled it down and reorganized it. And with the [inaudible 00:24:29] poem, I just thought it was this wonderful idea of the Coffin for Head of State. I feel like that poem grew very much out of my sense of [inaudible 00:24:37] relationship to the political state.

So I thought, I do want to approach that subject. And then to organize it. I just used snippets of all of his songs. I mean, I got all of his music, so I was just literally trying to write a poem that was sort of in the spirit of the music that I was listening to. So each of the 20 sections, just like if you go back and he listen to this track, you may get some sense of the feeling or the texture of that moment. So that, again, completely different response to it. The one about Malcolm X and my brother for Brothers of the Dragon was me really wanting to write a novel. I think that's such a great story. The story being that part of the reason that Malcolm X got into the nation was because his brothers had been there, and this is so left out of the narrative, the full narrative of his life. But of course, when he decided that he didn't want to be with Elijah Muhammad, and he thought that there was problems with it, his brothers stayed.

Brian Broder:

Yeah.

Terrance Hayes:

So essentially there was a rift in the family, and I always thought about that guilt that those brothers would feel might send them to try to find out what really happened to him. And I had this whole vision of sort of a detective novel. I talked to some friends who were writers, and I said, look, man, I'm going to give you this idea, and then you could just give me credit, just say, inspired by Terrance Hayes. I don't want any of the money. I don't want to do any book tours. I just want you to do this.

Brian Broder:

This novel should be written.

Terrance Hayes:

Yes. And this is what I really love about poetry. And then I thought, well, the only way I can really get that out is to just do a poem about it, about this imaginary novel that I could write. And so again, that's a sort of localized response to it. But in working all that out, really thinking about the nature of family kinship and really brotherhood again, which is a subject I think that I keep coming back to. I got to my relationship to my brother. I just have one brother. In fact, there's a side note, someone, I don't think this is the poem they were talking about, but someone said, oh, I like that poem you have about the two boys. And I was like, all my poems are about two boys. There's always two guys doing something in my poem. They're taking an adventure, they're running somewhere. So again, the Brothers of the Dragon, it's really about two brothers.

Brian Broder:

So you mentioned David Bowie earlier, and of course many musicians come up in your work across all of your books. So what role does music play in your life and poetry? How has music affected your writing? Of course, it obviously affects it through subject matter.

Terrance Hayes:

Sure, sure. Yeah, I wouldn't be the first person to say, I wish I was a musician, and I messed around on the piano. Part of what ... the most exciting thing about me for music is this sort of sense of communicating things fairly quickly without language. So I'm not thinking about song lyrics, I'm just thinking about the way that music works as a direct line to one's feeling.

And people are so open to that because I guess there's no language involved. We just are so much more trusting of what we experience when we hear music than when we hear language. So that essential rift is the thing that makes me constantly envious about what musicians can do. So I'm always thinking about ways to make something like that happen and work. And I mean, as a person who listens to so many different kinds of music, I think that's really where my interest in different kinds of poems come from. So in the [inaudible 00:27:59] poem, if I'm thinking about, well, it is the same artist and it's generally the same genre, but to think about a different tone across those pieces. So I feel like so much of what I'm interested in doing as a writer is connected to what I would want to do if I was a musician, which is to be broad and to be restless and try to change things, but try to make people feel things.

There's the poet, Michael S. Harper says, you still want the people to dance at the end of the day. And I think that there's some truth in that too. I am interested in having a real impact that isn't all, sort of, cerebral or all completely meditative, but I think if you just do the parallel with music, that's completely possible. I think both those things can happen in the space of one song. So it just feels like an appropriate metaphor for the way that I want to be as a writer, in essence, and that's why I'm constantly just drawing from it as a person who just listens to it all the time.

Brian Broder:

So do you think about poetry as something to be heard? And you mentioned that great quote from Harper. Obviously when you do readings, people aren't going to be dancing in the aisles unless you're really good-

Terrance Hayes:

Right, right. Start singing maybe.

Brian Broder:

Right, right. So do you think of poetry as a kind of performance, even if a reader, as most people receive poetry, is alone in a room?

Terrance Hayes:

No, that's interesting. I would say first, the short answer is that it changes from poem to poem. I mean, I have written ... actually, this is interesting. With prose, sometimes I'm thinking about things that will never be meant to be heard out loud. So the problem comes when the time is to actually read it. But with poetry, I'm often thinking that I know at some point I'm going to have to put it in the air, and if it doesn't go in the air, that means it's not ready is essentially what I think. My sense of it is that it just really sort of depends on what the piece is. You just sort of wait to see what individual poems are going to ask you for.

Brian Broder:

Yeah.

Terrance Hayes:

Think about this though.

Brian Broder:

Throughout your career, you've taught at a number of colleges and universities, including Carnegie Mellon, where you work now, how has teaching affected your work as a poet, if at all?

Terrance Hayes:

I do like to perform. So when I was younger, in graduate school, I hung out with lots of guys who were rappers. And so one of the things that they always had a problem with with me was that I always wanted to read from the paper. So I would get up, and I would read it and try to be expressive, but obviously it wasn't the same degree of having memorized poem, and they were doing these things. And so at one point, I just said to them, well, I just sort of think that I want people to know that it's written down, so I do value it as a sort of oral experience, and I do value putting it into the air, but it's also very important for me to let people see me reading it because it really should be read. And so to not have any paper and say, oh, just relax and watch me watch the poet, as opposed to saying, look at the poem.

Here's a book, here's a piece of paper, and they sort of bought that. It was also that I just was afraid to memorize anything but that idea of saying, yes, it is an oral quality, but why would I not just memorize the poems? It is to say to underscore that it is something that has to be read. I mean, it's not just that you should hear it, you do have to read it, and you have to reread it many times to get that quality.

How that relates to teaching is that I do like the sense of being up in front. I do like the performative part of it because I think it's all a performance, even when the people are pretending that they're completely spontaneous or they're completely shy, it's all a kind of performance. And so my wife has said to me like, oh, you could be in Hollywood or something like that, but really I couldn't, unless they only let me talk about what I'm interested in, which is very narrow, like music. I'll get on the stage and you just say, talk about music. I could go for an hour. Poetry, I could go for three days. And in everything else, I'm completely like, oh, I don't know what to say. I'm stumbling through the performance.

So teaching is the only space that that happens. It's a space that I can control, and I can read something and be excited about it and say, I'm going to put that on my syllabus. I'm going to make that a conversation. And so that's really what I love about it. And I don't even think that that's necessarily connected to the work itself. It's just more connected to my excitement about other people's work. And so teaching keeps me in touch with that.

So I don't look for connections. I mean, when I give my students writing prompts, I don't do them. Anything that sort of happens that might, in another space, be a catalyst for me, I try to avoid it because really I want to just sort of take it in, and I want to guide, and I think it's sort of a different side of the brain, but it's the side that I really love. It's like the reader side, the sort of exploratory side, not the making side. So that's why I really do really, I mean, to a sort of excessive degree, I love teaching because it just sort of feels like the place around most of me as a person who loves literature.

Brian Broder:

Yeah. What do you think you would do if you couldn't teach?

Terrance Hayes:

Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I think I would still be teaching. I'd probably have more kids. I could teach them. I would make my classroom,

Brian Broder:

Right, the ultimate. Exactly.

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah, yeah. So I don't know. Yeah, I guess I would say, what did I think I was going to do? I think I decided that I was going to teach even before I knew it, so that I had this English ... I mean, when I think about, was there ever a moment where I imagined doing something else, but when I was in high school, and my parents didn't graduate from high school, and so education wasn't necessarily anybody that was thinking about. It would've been enough for me to graduate from high school to have been sort of an achievement. And so that was sort of my target. I wasn't thinking about anything after that.

I thought I could probably get to college on a basketball scholarship, but in my senior year, and I had been writing, and I'd been in advanced classes, but it almost didn't register. I would get there, and I always felt like, why did they put me in this class? It was always rich white kids who were smart, but it was English. And I had friends who were good in math, and I thought, well, that means something. I don't know what it means to be in an advanced, AP English class, but I was always the weird one in the group. But I had a teacher who was very encouraging. At some point, I checked out of the class because, again, in some ways, I liked reading, but I was reading on my own. And so I would do the work in class, but I wasn't completely in it.

Brian Broder:

Yeah.

Terrance Hayes:

And, so this teacher, she gave me a ... well, I found that I was getting ready to make a D, and I did well in school. So it was the first time, and I knew it was because it was my senior year, and I was dating this girl, and I was not coming in, and I just sort of didn't see what the point of it was. I said to her, and this is the first time it ever came out, I said to her, I think I might be like a teacher. I think I might be an English teacher. I was completely trying to sell her on, you don't want to give me a bad grade because I think I want to do what you do.

I was completely hustling her. But of course, it was the truth. I had no idea. I had no idea that what I was saying was true. And before that moment, I'd never really given that much thought to it. And in fact, I was a painter, so I was still thinking, I'm going to go to school, and I did go to college and major in painting. So I was really thinking it was never going to be true. But of course, I got to college, and I had another professor who I was really connected to and was really important to me. He was in English, and again, I just took his classes because I liked him. I wasn't thinking, oh, I'm going to do a double major or switch my major. It was just almost inadvertent that I find myself in a position to be like, oh, wow. Hey, I'm teaching. And I like it because primarily what I liked was reading. Even if it meant that I wasn't going to be paying attention to class, I just thought, well, nobody's going to give me a job for that.

Brian Broder:

Yeah, right.

Terrance Hayes:

Little did I know-

Brian Broder:

This is too fun. Do you still paint?

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah, I do. Not as much as I would. I mean, these days I really need to paint because I just need to get completely out of the space. But my schedule was so busy I couldn't take a class, but I typically will take a studio class once or twice a year just to generate stuff. But yeah, I mean, still paint sometimes. I think if I could get out of this, I would maybe figure that out again. But I think it's too late now, but I still mess around.

Brian Broder:

Good, good. Well, finally, you won the National Book Award in the genre of poetry last year. Could you talk a little about this experience? Did you hear you'd won for the first time at the ceremony when Cornelius, ED, announced your name or-

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah. I didn't know anything about it. And in fact, the process for that is that they don't decide until that afternoon. So the thing is that, and this is sort of a funny thing to say, and I think it's still soon, so maybe my mind will change, but I still felt like, oh, they were wrong. I wouldn't have given it to me. It's just too much. It's been so overwhelming in a good way, but I'm not a person who wants to eat all the candy in the candy store at one time. Okay, one piece is good. So this is, it's too much candy, but I had no idea that it was going to be me, based on the award and based on the people that were competing. So they'd sent an email, the organizers, and said, everyone should prepare about a two minute speech in case you win.

And so I didn't. So, I wasn't sweating. We got there right before the ceremony. We're out running around. My wife's looking for a dress or something. I never gave it one thought, one moment of what I might say. And then even when we got into the space, I was really excited to see everybody and just sort of starstruck. And I really was sure that it was going to be CD Wright. She's a great writer. I've taught her, a big fan of her work, and I think this book is good. And so when Cornelius got up, and he said, at some point he said, unanimous decision. And so I was shocked because I said to myself, I thought at least Cornelius would've voted for me. I didn't think I was going to win, but I can't believe no one voted for me for this book. And, of course, he's like, unanimous, it's Terrance.

Brian Broder:

It's you.

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah. So I was being shocked, like, really? And so I wasn't prepared, so I just went up and took two minutes, if that, it wasn't-

Brian Broder:

It was less.

Terrance Hayes:

20 seconds, really. I was thinking, did I say two minutes, something like 20 seconds just to be like, thanks, thank my wife. But I wasn't prepared for that, and I haven't really been prepared for everything that comes. And so it's been good. And of course, it's a hard thing to, sort of, what people say is, oh, I can't complain. I say, I could complain, but I know I shouldn't complain. And so it, I mean, that's sort of the size of it though. It's that kind of big overwhelming thing where in the midst of it, I feel like, oh no, this is wrong. This is wrong. They should've just ... I would've been happy with being a finalist. And that's true, really, as everybody says, it's such an obvious and appropriate thing to say, which is this is not why I do it. And that's true.

I was saying to my students the other day as they were quiet, I said to them, you think because I'm talking that I like to talk. I don't actually like to talk. I'm just good at it. I really like to listen, and I like to dialogue. But what happens is people think like, oh, he seems to be doing okay. He must be really happy with this whole thing. And I think, no, I'm not happy with it, so I just want to be in my room. I just want to be alone and be quiet.

Brian Broder:

Right.

Terrance Hayes:

But that's sort of the double-edge of the whole process, because clearly I can come out, and I can talk and put on a good show, but I still sort of feel like, oh, no, no, I just would like to go home and be quiet.

Brian Broder:

Well, Terrence Hayes, thank you for coming in and talking with us for awhile.

Terrance Hayes:

Yeah.

Brian Broder:

Thanks a lot.

Speaker 1:

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