Hayes' new poetry challenges, honors American history
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Terrance Hayes
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In 1968, surveying the violence of that decade and indeed much of American history, the poet Robert Hayden declared that he couldn't call himself a patriot. Instead, he dubbed himself an "Americanist," meaning one who loves America so much that he or she refuses to look away from its brutality, failures and mistakes even while celebrating its promise.
In this current political climate the word "patriot" seems associated with pithy signs and abstract slogans; maybe it's time to revive the idea of being an Americanist.
Terrance Hayes' fourth collection of poetry is a celebration and castigation of American culture, one worthy of the term "Americanist." The title references the light of inspiration and the fire that pours from the heads of two teenage lynching victims in one of the opening poems. The fact that the title can do both inspiration and elegy is indicative of how meaning is contested terrain in Hayes' work.
In "All the Way Live," we met two boys staggering down Main Street dressed in drag, hitching up their skirts and trying to hang on to their wigs. They've just spray-painted words on a statue of Robert E. Lee suggesting the Southern general had a pathological fear of black people.
Mr. Hayes nests the humor of an outlandish teenage stunt with the horror of the lynching that is the result. The poem ends, "We refused to be banished,/ And ... when they set us on fire, there was light at our core."
The boys are causalities in a war over narrative. The graffiti is more than an act of vandalism; it is an assertion that two black Southern boys have as much right to comment on American history as anyone. And their comment (one that points out the sickness at the core of Southern mythology) may be more astute.
Mr. Hayes, a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, deftly quilts together different textures of language. Rants move into love poems and biting humor butts up against meditations.
This quilting is most apparent in his masterful pecha kucha poems, which are based on a Japanese presentation format in which speakers show 20 images and speak for 20 seconds on each image. The poet refashions these as poems of 20 stanzas, each four to five lines long. They are based loosely on a particular theme, but allow quite a range of subjects and types of discourse.
First Published May 23, 2010 12:00 am
