terrance hayes american sonnets analysis

In the “Lighthead” collection, his 20-stanza poems mimic the rigid format of a PechaKucha, a 20-slide business presentation style that originated in Japan, where he taught for a few years. In his book “How to Be Drawn,” a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, he puts the words of a poem about Etheridge Knight, a distinguished poet who published his first book while serving an eight-year prison sentence, inside the boxes of a police crime report. Speaking with a lilt from a South Carolina boyhood, Hayes is tall and handsome, and has the bearing of an athlete (Academic All-American in men’s basketball at Coker College) and the easy congeniality of someone who is comfortable reading his poems in settings as varied as Carnegie Hall and the New Orleans Parish jail.īoth a poet and a visual artist, Hayes is inventive with words and the form they take on a page. A 2014 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the 2010 National Book Award for his poetry collection entitled “Lighthead,” Hayes is poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine and a distinguished professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

The book is the sixth by Hayes, 47, whose poems explore in everyday language the life of black men in America. Many address his potential assassin - racial violence in this country, as well as various forces that corrode intelligence, spirit and compassion.Įxploiting the double meaning of “kill,” which can be slang for slaying an audience with pleasure, Hayes pointed out that some of the sonnets focus on what he greatly enjoys - “All the things that kill me.” Hayes wrote the collection of 70 sonnets during the first 200 days of the Trump presidency.

Terrance hayes american sonnets analysis