Research

Multiple Choice: Terrance Hayes’s Response-Poems and the African

American Lyric ‘We’

Christopher Spaide

THE STERNEST EXPERIMENT BY THE AFRICAN AMERICAN POET Terrance

Hayes (b. 1971) bears an unassuming yet subversive title: ‘Sonnet’. Rigidly

traditional in its dimensions, ‘Sonnet’, from Hip Logic (2002), provokes,

with its enigmatic subject matter, defiance of genre conventions, and

refusal to turn:

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

We sliced the watermelon into smiles.

– and so on, for another eleven lines of immaculate iambic pentameter,

stacked into a golden rectangle. 1

How might we decipher this inflexibly

repeating line, as it refuses to deliver the forward momentum and drastic

voltas of changing heart and swerving thought that we expect to find in

any lyric poem, especially a sonnet?

From one angle, ‘Sonnet’ is a satire of received ideas and received forms,

a protest poured into concrete-poem solidity, relying on loaded words but

refusing to articulate their racist connotations: dehumanising stereotypes

This essay is part of a symposium on the pronoun ‘we’ in poetry, entitled ‘Poetry’s We’, which appears in the present issue of The Cambridge Quarterly. The four essays evolved as a group and have many shared concerns.

The author is grateful to Stephanie Burt, Bonnie Costello, Eliza Holmes, Eileen Sperry, Helen Vendler, Andrew Warren, and an anonymous reader at The Cambridge Quarterly for giving helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this essay.

1 Terrance Hayes, Hip Logic (New York 2002) p. 13.

doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfz019

VC The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly.

All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]

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about African Americans and ‘watermelon’, caricatures warping black

bodies into exaggerated ‘smiles’, the insinuation of violence in those ‘sliced’

knives. Mechanically repeated, decisively end-stopped, typographically

(if in no other way) justified, Hayes’s unvarying line plays out the historical

persistence of those racist formulations, along with that other Western

hand-me-down, the sonnet. Viewed from another angle, ‘Sonnet’ takes to

an extreme the exact repetitions of the blues stanza, a verse-form ideal for

enacting emotional deadlocks and insinuating double meanings. Singing

this extended blues is not a lonesome I but a collective We who parry the

biases of an unmentioned Them, maintaining a controlled ‘slice’ audible in

Hayes’s alliterative sweeps of w and s. Together, ‘We’ reclaim the water-

melon, reworking a racist gaze into a self-fashioned mask that hides intern-

al quarrels behind deceptive ‘smiles’.

From still another angle, ‘Sonnet’, like many of Hayes’s poems, strikes

on originality by responding to past literary and musical traditions. Besides

his sidelong glance at the iconography of minstrelsy and perhaps the min-

strel song ‘Watermelon on the Vine’ (‘Dat watermillion, smilin’ on de

vine’), 2

Hayes looks back on a long line of African American poems that

emblematise black identity as a mask, from Langston Hughes’s ‘The Jester’

(1925) (‘In one hand j I hold tragedy j And in the other j Comedy, – j Masks for the soul’)

3 to Robert Hayden’s ‘El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz’

(1967) (‘O masks and metamorphoses of Ahab, Native Son’). 4

In only six words

and a pair of assonant is, ‘Sonnet’ echoes one poem in particular, a founda-

tional lyric of the African American ‘we’: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s ‘We

Wear the Mask’ (1896).

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,

– This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties. 5

Borrowing ‘we’ and ‘smile’, Hayes domesticates Dunbar’s ‘torn and bleed-

ing hearts’ into ‘sliced’ fruit and scatters Dunbar’s ‘lies’, letter by letter,

2 For an early twentieth-century transcription of ‘Watermelon on the Vine’, see

Thomas W. Talley, Thomas W. Talley’s Negro Folk Rhymes, new expanded edn., ed. Charles K. Wolfe (Knoxville 1991) p. 94.

3 The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel

(New York 1995) p. 56. 4

Robert Hayden, Collected Poems, ed. Frederick Glaysher (New York 2013) p. 86. 5

The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ed. Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville 1993) p. 71.

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into ‘sliced’ and ‘smiles’. Both poems project double consciousness onto

the outside and inside of the mask, which Henry Louis Gates Jr. considers

a central figure for the ‘spiritual consolidation’ of black people; smiling to

outsiders, these collective speakers safeguard ‘a coded, secret, hermetic

world, a world discovered only by the initiate’. 6

Through masks of self-

conscious artifice, of traditional forms turned on their heads (Dunbar’s

adroit rondeau, Hayes’s stubborn sonnet), both speak for a ‘We’ that

resounds throughout African American poetry: a chorus challenging racist

distortions with ‘myriad subtleties’, unifying into one double-meaning

voice.

Though ‘Sonnet’ is an odd introduction to the typically lyric Hayes, it

intertwines this essay’s two subjects into one line, one pronoun. First,

‘Sonnet’ meets the expectation that poets of colour – not to mention acti-

vists, artists, athletes, politicians, and figures both private and public –

‘speak for their race’. Widely acknowledged outside poetry scholarship,

rarely mentioned within it, that expectation varies in force and proven-

ance. A matter of personal duty for some poets, it is a critical imposition

for others; for some it meets the needs of a general (or white) readership,

while for others it answers the call of African American audiences and

peers. To rise to that expectation, ‘Sonnet’ forgoes the familiar lyric ‘I’ and

adopts the plural pronoun, a marked ‘we’. In African American culture,

perhaps more than in any other expanse of American culture, the differ-

ence between speaking as an individual ‘I’ and speaking for a racially

marked collective ‘we’ has proved especially consequential, to such an

extent that Kevin Young’s literary-musical history The Grey Album (2012)

can chart the course of African American culture as one centuries-long os-

cillation between two poles, ‘I’ and ‘we’. 7

Represented visually, that oscilla-

tion might look like Give Us a Poem, Glenn Ligon’s 2007 neon sculpture (see

Figure 1). After his 1975 speech to Harvard’s graduating seniors,

Muhammad Ali was asked by an anonymous student to ‘give us a poem!’

Ali’s response, touted by Ali and others as the shortest poem in the lan-

guage, might be transcribed: ‘Me? / We!’ Light flits between the upper

and lower halves of Give Us a Poem, a visual palindrome. Blackness never

rests, shifting up and down, now in ME, now in WE.

6 Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the ‘Racial’ Self (Oxford

1987) pp. 166–7. 7

Recognising the ‘specific African American “we”’ in Dunbar, Young later deems the blues ‘the invention of a black “I” in American culture – versus the power- ful “we” of the Negro spirituals’; bebop and Hughes’s long poems (to take one further example) afford ‘a mix of soloist and group, negotiating the community to make an “I” into “we”’. Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis 2012) pp. 119–20, 154–5, 202.

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Figure 1. Glenn Ligon, Give Us a Poem, 2007, neon and Sintra PVC, 75.63 � 74.25 inches (192.1 � 188.6 cm); Collection of Studio Museum in Harlem, Photographer Credit: Farzad Owrang VC Glenn Ligon; Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth, New York, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Chantal Crousel, Paris

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In lyric poetry, this particular choice of pronoun divides expressions of

difference, dissent, and unease with categorisation from pronouncements

of solidarity, black nationalism, or the sense, to quote the title of a 1974

Lucille Clifton poem, that ‘All of Us Are All of Us’. 8

Historically, it distin-

guishes Rita Dove and Carl Phillips from Amiri Baraka and Nikki

Giovanni, or the dignifying portraiture of the early Gwendolyn Brooks

from the riotous rallies of the late Brooks, galvanised by the avowedly col-

lective Black Arts Movement (BAM). Setting aside some renowned excep-

tions – the representative ‘I’, transhistorical and transcontinental, of

Hughes’s ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, or Robert Hayden’s unmarked

‘we’ of human (or Bahá’ı́) unity – we could follow Young and group the

many unforgettable speakers of African American literature into two broad

contingents. We would find, drawn towards the pole of ‘I’, the freedman or

-woman of the slave narrative, the solitary soul singing the blues, the

Baldwinian witness, the Invisible Man, and the self-aggrandising MC;

drawn towards ‘we’, the singers of work and protest songs, choruses, con-

gregations, testifiers to a shared black experience, or activists uniting to

proclaim ‘We Shall Overcome’, ‘Yes We Can’, or ‘Black Lives Matter’.

Second, ‘Sonnet’ demonstrates Hayes’s ingenuity for foregrounding the

African American poet’s choice between ‘I’ and ‘we’, or (put more exactly)

for giving second opinions on past choices, responding to earlier poets, to

their pronouns, and to the poetics and politics that drive them. 9

To some

extent, Hayes’s ambivalence, his variegated influences (from Dunbar to

Run-DMC), and his irreverent tours through the tradition do not belong

to him alone but characterise his entire generation of African American

poets. Labelled Generation X or the hip-hop generation, that generation is

best understood as the first born since the Civil Rights Movement, unique-

ly unburdened by the schools, divides, and the literary scuffles of previous

decades: BAM, the classical alternative offered by Hayden, the radicalisation

of Brooks. Riffing on the lingo of standardised tests, the poet-scholar Evie

Shockley argues that post-Civil Rights generation poets enjoy the freedom

of ‘multiple choice’. If earlier African American poets were subjected to

what Shockley calls ‘the poetics litmus test’, ‘administered by critics, editors,

audiences, and other poets’ – certifying poets either ‘authentically black’

8 The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010, ed. Kevin Young and Michael S.

Glaser (Rochester 2012) p. 130. 9

In an alternative reading, Anthony Reed frames ‘Sonnet’ as concrete poetry, anti-lyric and resisting its own referentiality; though our approaches diverge, I agree with Reed’s ‘central claim’ that black experimental writing ‘often entails repurposing, reinterpreting, and redefining older techniques, themselves made legible through multiple traditions’. See Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore 2014) p. 33.

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or broadly ‘American’, ‘black’ or ‘avant-garde’ but never both – then the

post-Civil Rights generation can choose freely among schools and influen-

ces, verse-forms and pronouns. They can even choose ‘all of the above’. 10

Shockley’s model suits not only Hayes, not only Shockley herself, but

many of their most celebrated contemporaries. Elizabeth Alexander is best

known for convening one of American poetry’s most sincere and sonorous

‘we’s. In both ‘Rally’ (2008), her ode to then-nominee Barack Obama

(‘human beings ever tilt toward we’), and her 2009 inaugural poem ‘Praise

Song for the Day’, Alexander listens in to Obama’s democratic, anti-

essentialist ‘we’, a pronoun instilled with activist fervour and the cadences

of the black church. 11

But she just as readily troubles her pronouns, as in

her kaleidoscopic ars poetica. ‘“I” equals “we”’, she proposes in ‘Ars Poetica

#88: Sublime’, while ‘Ars Poetica #100: I Believe’ undercuts its own pon-

derous lecturing: ‘Poetry k is where we are ourselves j (though Sterling Brown said k ‘Every “I” is a dramatic “I”’)’.12 Equally self-assured with her multiple choice is former United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. In

Wade in the Water (2018) she collects forthright autobiographical lyric, verse

epistle, and ‘Declaration’, an erasure of the Declaration of Independence

which leaves behind a skeletal sketch of collective brutalisation: ‘He has

plundered our – k ravaged our – k destroyed the lives of our – k taking away our – k abolishing our most valuable – ’.

13 Smith arrests every attempt at collective pos-

session, at wishful ‘our’-ness, with a dash and a breathtaking stanza break

– cutting short the Declaration’s claims of self-possession and independ-

ence for all. When asked on a New Yorker podcast about this very ‘our’,

Smith answered far more generally: ‘I think every poem is an invitation to

forge a “we” with the speaker’. Kevin Young, the magazine’s poetry editor,

agreed: ‘I can’t think of a better definition of the lyric’. 14

10 Evie Shockley, ‘All of the Above: Multiple Choice and African American

Poetry’, in Keith Tuma (ed.), Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry (Oxford 2003) pp. 2, 8. Shockley develops these arguments further in Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City 2011).

11 The rhetorical brilliance of Obama’s ‘we’ has not escaped the notice of critics

and biographers (such as Zadie Smith and David Remnick) or Obama himself: ‘the single-most powerful word in our democracy is the word “We.” . . . That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone.’ Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches’, 7 Mar. 2015, <https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/03/07/remarks-presi dent-50th-anniversary-selma-montgomery-marches>, accessed 27 June 2019.

12 Elizabeth Alexander, Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010

(Minneapolis 2010) pp. 246, 186, 185. 13

Tracy K. Smith, Wade in the Water: Poems (Minneapolis 2018) p. 19. 14

Kevin Young, ‘Tracy K. Smith Reads Matthew Dickman’, New Yorker, Poetry Podcast episode, 15 Nov. 2017, <https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/poetry/ tracy-k-smith-reads-matthew-dickman>, accessed 27 June 2019. While my essay

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Of all the poets of the post-Civil Rights generation, Hayes has exercised

multiple choice to its most flamboyant extremes. His six protean books

imply that he aspires to be all kinds and no one kind of poet: black and un-

marked, formalist and experimentalist, Southern and American and global

and extraterrestrial, a voice of the masses and a murmur of private confes-

sion. ‘Sorry for the pun, but I’m not really like a black-and-white person’,

Hayes explains in an interview. ‘I’m kind of a gray-area, between-area

person’. 15

A poet of grey- and between-areas, of ‘not really’ and ‘like’ and

‘kind of’, Hayes gratefully extends his constitutional ambivalence to his

sense of literary history and a pluralist black poetic tradition. Introducing

The Best American Poetry 2014, he declared: ‘I am a proud mutt of poetic

influences, having been reared by seventy-five parents’. 16

Recombining

past poetic DNA, Hayes responds not only to the styles of his influences

but also to their formative contexts, their personalities and politics, and

their engagement with the dilemmas historically gripping African

American poets. And chief among those dilemmas, for this post-Civil

Rights generation poet, is the fraught choice between two lyric pronouns,

‘I’ and ‘we’. 17

This essay explores the African American lyric ‘we’, past and present,

through the bifocal lenses of Hayes’s response-poems, his irreverent

answers to such anthology pieces as Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’,

Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool’, and Baraka’s ‘Black Art’, and to poets as diver-

gent in mission and style as Langston Hughes and Audre Lorde. Taken

together, Hayes’s six books survey nearly all the varieties of the collective

centres on lyrics, an African American ‘we’ pervades extrapoetic and paratextual speech-acts as well. Take a collection’s dedication page: post-Civil Rights generation poets have written recent books ‘for the ones like us’ (Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn (2015)), ‘For us and them and them and us’ (Jamaal May, The Big Book of Exit Strategies (2016)), ‘For all of us’ (Marcus Wicker, Silencer (2017)), and ‘For Natasha and Rik j who aren’t named j but are part of every j “we” and “us” in these poems’ (Adrian Matejka, Map to the Stars (2017)).

15 Terrance Hayes, ‘Fifteen Questions, Fifteen Responses’, Terrance Hayes per-

sonal website, <http://terrancehayes.com/about/#interview>, accessed 27 June 2019.

16 Terrance Hayes, ‘Introduction’, in Terrance Hayes and David Lehman (eds.),

The Best American Poetry 2014 (New York 2014) p. xxiii. 17

Though many studies of African American and African diasporic poetry (including Gates’s) presume the centrality of a communal voice or spokesperson, the racially marked ‘we’ has received critical attention only recently. See Benjamin Friedlander, ‘Robert Hayden’s Epic of Community’, MELUS, 23/3 (Fall 1998) pp. 129–43; Eric A. Weil, ‘Personal and Public: Three First-Person Voices in African American Poetry’, in Joanne V. Gabbin (ed.), The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (Charlottesville 1999) pp. 223–38; Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior: Essays (St Paul 2004); and Bonnie Costello, The Plural of Us: Poetry and Community in Auden and Others (Princeton 2017) ch. 5.

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‘we’ – from narrowest to widest scope, racially marked and not, traditional

or innovative – available to contemporary American poets. 18

Yet Hayes,

committedly uncommitted, is a perfect foil for drawing the choice between

‘I’ and ‘we’ into the foreground, flipping between the two, and drawing

counterfactual paths. (Indeed, as my first examples suggest, nothing could

be more Hayesian than commanding a shy, withheld ‘I’ to report for

‘Negro Duty’, or goading a militant ‘we’ to dissect its own ‘floundering

interiors’.) Drawing my chief examples from three collections, I examine

three forms of response to the tradition: confrontational ‘talking back’ in

Hip Logic (2002), ‘Blue’ ventriloquism in Wind in a Box (2006), and collabor-

ation with the dead in Lighthead (2010). To conclude, I show how Hayes’s

elastic, proudly inauthentic sense of voice resolves or simply dissolves cur-

rent debates on influence, the lyric, and the reception of poets of colour.

Hayes’s most distinctive subjects are not race or the black experience per se

but questions several orders removed: what we gain or lose with the totalis-

ing phrase ‘the black experience’, how variously race can be performed or

written down, what resonates in the space between speaking for oneself

and for one’s people. His response-poems deserve attention for their own

inventions, for their revelations about a still-developing generation, and –

as they reverberate with ‘I’s and ‘we’s of modes and poets past – for manip-

ulating the acoustics of the entire African American poetic canon.

Hip Logic: ‘Talking Back’ to Robert Hayden

‘In all of my books’, Hayes confirmed in 2007, ‘there are poems written for

and about and in the styles of artists that interest me.’ True of the three

books published before 2007, true of all the books since. By his debut

Muscular Music (1999), Hayes was already conceiving of poetic growth in

terms of responding to artistic forebears, but by his own admission his ear-

liest efforts were ‘imitations’: they replicate styles with and without attribu-

tion, transcribe famous lines, and revisit established genres. 19

Muscular

Music’s most ambitious work, the eight-movement Yummy Suite, adapts

the polyphony of Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) for a late-

twentieth-century tale of Chicago gang violence. As in Montage, nearly all

the movements are scored for particular voices (‘Blues for Shavon’, ‘Local

Grocer’, ‘Little Ron’), while the first, ‘Blues’, sings to Hughes’s tune, amid

the wreckage of the exploded dreams of the elder poet’s ‘Harlem’: ‘What

happens when a dream explodes? k Does it hush?’20 When Hayes catches his 18

See the appendix below. 19

Megan Simpson, ‘“I believe all the stories of who I was”: An Interview with Terrance Hayes’, Obsidian, 8/1 (Spring/Summer 2007) pp. 130, 136.

20 Terrance Hayes, Muscular Music (Chicago 1999) p. 37.

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divided self in the act of composition, his own chattier sensibility and truer

metapoetic subjects enter focus: ‘I knew later I’d be writing these lines, j caught in that space between personal & public’, between ‘I’ and ‘we’.

21 In

his second book, Hip Logic, the mature drive to experiment – with the

African American canon, within adventuresome forms, without a fixed

sense of voice – emerges in the dedicatory poem ‘Lorde’, a cento ‘made

up of whole and partial lines in the index (under W) of The Collected Poems

of AUDRE LORDE’. 22

Buttressed, not obstructed, by its demanding

Oulipian constraints, ‘Lorde’ borrows from its namesake a poetics of

questioning (‘What’, ‘When’, ‘Who’) and of solidarity clenched within an

anaphoric ‘We’: ‘We entered silence k We have no passions left to love j We were born in a poor time’. Like his Hughesian ‘Blues’, Hip Logic begins where past

poets leave off (indeed, with the last two pages of Lorde’s posthumous

Collected Poems), but now Hayes scrambles his precedents’ words and

slants their aims. That less imitative, more confrontational approach,

finding one’s voice by ‘talking back’ to predecessors, leads to ‘For Robert

Hayden’, Hayes’s first poem to take African American poetic history as

its explicit subject.

In most accounts of that history, Robert Hayden represents several ex-

treme stances, seemingly irreconcilable: the shy memoirist haunted by his

childhood in Detroit, Michigan (‘Elegies for Paradise Valley’); the chronic-

ler of centuries of violence towards Africans and African Americans

(‘Middle Passage’; ‘Night, Death, Mississippi’); and the classicist penning

odes (‘Frederick Douglass’), elegies (‘Mourning Poem for the Queen of

Sunday’), and satires (‘Witch Doctor’) from an impersonal vantage, omit-

ting any lyric ‘I’. Uniting these stances is Hayden’s refusal to speak for a ra-

cially marked collective, a black ‘we’. ‘I’m not a joiner’, he avowed in

a 1976 interview. ‘I cherish my individuality and don’t want to be a con-

formist except (paradoxically) on my own terms. But I care about people,

respond to whatever is human.’ Small wonder that Hayden’s poems could

cherish an autobiographical ‘I’ as well as a generically human ‘we’, or that

in his history-haunted poems of racial violence, he grants a narrower col-

lective voice only to the aberrantly inhumane, ‘we’ victimisers defined

against a violated ‘them’, such as the slavers of ‘Middle Passage’ and the

lynchers of ‘Night, Death, Mississippi’. 23

And Hayden’s embrace of

21 Ibid., p. 74.

22 Hayes, Hip Logic, pp. 1, 91.

23 See the prayer in the former – ‘We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord, j safe

passage to our vessels bringing j heathen souls unto Thy chastening’ – or the recounted violence in the latter, perpetrated by an eerily ambiguous ‘we’: ‘Then we beat them, he said, j beat them till our arms was tired’. Hayden, Collected Poems, pp. 48, 16.

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indiscriminate ‘people’ clarifies his reluctance to speak for black

people alone: ‘Races are not important’, he continued, ‘but people are.’ 24

Amply aware of Hayden’s prismatic range and idiosyncratic politics,

Hayes, in his ill-tempered tribute ‘For Robert Hayden’, reduces his fore-

father to only two aspects. One is Hayden’s repudiation of the young poets

of BAM, their racially marked ‘we’, and all it represented; famously, that

repudiation reached its contentious heights at the First Fisk Black Writers’

Conference in 1966. 25

The other is the autobiographical ‘I’ of Hayden’s

‘Those Winter Sundays’ (1962), which ruefully recounts a childhood

trapped within frigid domestic routines. Even on days of rest (‘Sundays

too’) Hayden’s foster-father, a manual labourer ‘with cracked hands that

ached j from labor in the weekday weather’, ‘got up early j and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold’ to warm the house for his family.

Hayden’s pseudo-sonnet – mostly unrhymed though crackling with ks and

ds, separated into irregular stanzas of five, four, and five lines – confesses a

retrospective love for the heroic father-figure, ‘who had driven out the

cold’ but went unappreciated in life: ‘No one ever thanked him.’ Hayden’s

closing couplet, reflecting on past innocence from present experience,

poses a rhetorical question in wondering disbelief: ‘What did I know, what

did I know j of love’s austere and lonely offices?’ As its speaker awakens into those Sundays (those naive Son-days), rising out of bed (and into ma-

turity), ‘Those Winter Sundays’ becomes a poem about listening, about

speech-acts and speechlessness. The child could ‘hear the cold splintering,

breaking’; ‘When the rooms were warm, he’d call’, crossing the house’s

chilly divides and calling between the poem’s divided stanzas, its rooms.

The parallelism of two decisive participles – ‘fearing the chronic angers of

that house k Speaking indifferently to him’ – implies that the young Hayden bottled emotion and expression alike; Hayden the adult, having

escaped that traumatic house, can at last complete an ode conveying be-

lated gratitude and sustained hurt. 26

In his brazenly reductive portrait, Hayes flattens the traumatised ‘I’ and

the ‘we’-adverse poet into two sides of one coin, casting Hayden the child,

‘Speaking indifferently’ to his father, as the flipside of the mature poet,

speaking indifferently to a wider black audience. Redeploying Hayden’s

sonnet form and interrogative mood, Hayes assembles his own sonnet en-

tirely from unanswerable questions, raising provocations without standing

24 Robert Hayden, Collected Prose, ed. Frederick Glaysher (Ann Arbor 1984) p. 82.

25 For an immaculately researched account of the conference and Hayden’s

1960s, see James C. Hall, Mercy, Mercy Me: African-American Culture and the American Sixties (Oxford 2001) ch. 2.

26 Hayden, Collected Poems, p. 41.

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behind any. Hayes ‘talks back’, in both senses, aiming his sonnet at a

deceased, utterly unresponsive ‘you’:

Did your father come home after fighting

through the week at work? Did the sweat change

to salt in his ears? Was that bitter white

grain the only music he’d hear? Is this why

you were quiet when other poets sang

of the black man’s beauty? Is this why

you choked on the tonsil of Negro Duty?

Were there as many offices for pain

as love? Should a black man never be shy?

Was your father a mountain twenty

shovels couldn’t bury? Was he a train

leaving a lone column of smoke? Was he

a black magnolia singing at your feet?

Was he a blackjack smashed against your throat? 27

For all its bullying interrogation, Hayes’s response-poem takes after its

predecessor, reiterating keywords, crucial figures: the ‘father’, overbur-

dened physically and psychologically; the son, ‘choked’ or choked up;

the interpersonal struggle to ‘hear’. Both poems collage images of com-

bustion (‘banked fires’; ‘a train’), solitude (‘lonely offices’; ‘lone col-

umn’), and demolition (‘cold splintering, breaking’; ‘a blackjack

smashed’). Both are sonnets, love sonnets, elegiac sonnets, addressing

black men who remain haunting ambiguities in death. And both prod at

uneasy histories: Where Hayden revisits personal history, Hayes works

through his antagonistic account of the dilemmas of literary history, pit-

ting Hayden against ‘other poets’ who did their ‘Negro Duty’ without

inhibition.

Hayes’s fundamental change is to physicalise, to embody first tenderly

then brutally, Hayden’s sparse scene. He alchemises ‘work’ into ‘sweat’,

and crystallises sweat into the ‘bitter white k grain’ of ‘salt’, a transmutation muddling together several idioms: the bitter pill, the sceptic’s grain of salt,

27 Hayes, Hip Logic, p. 42. ‘For Robert Hayden’ from HIP LOGIC by Terrance

Hayes, copyright VC 2002 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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the stinging salt in the wound. No longer embodied in his two ‘cracked

hands’, Hayden’s father undergoes variations on the theme of blackness.

Where Hayden treated blackness as painterly embellishment, shading in

the dawn’s ‘blueblack cold’, Hayes promptly makes blackness a matter of

race, ‘the black man’ in general and ‘a black man’ in particular. Painting

four allegorical portraits, all in black, of Hayden’s father, Hayes enumera-

tes four ways that a father might influence a son’s poetry: as an insuperable

impediment (‘a mountain’ of coal ‘twenty j shovels couldn’t bury’), as a combustion engine disseminating blackness throughout poetic airs (‘a train

j leaving a lone column of smoke’), as a grounding emblem of rare, gro- tesque beauty (‘a black magnolia singing at your feet’), and finally, pitifully,

as the perpetrator of physical and emotional abuse, inhibiting full-throated

expression (‘a blackjack smashed against your throat’). The father’s meta-

morphosis into a ‘blackjack’ – a word generalising him to a black ‘Jack’, or

everyman, while hinting at younger men’s weapons – completes Hayes’s

transformation of Hayden from transcendent, impersonal poet into a

‘choked’ and ‘pain’-racked body. With that violent climax, Hayes abruptly

ends his interrogation, a whiplash volta of tone and approach that could not

be further from Hayden’s reflective diminuendo (‘What did I know, what did

I know’). Hayes’s sympathy for the elder poet – admitted, fleetingly, with the

premise-questioning line ‘Should a black man never be shy?’ – remains tacit

but implied in Hayes’s closing silence, ‘shy’ and merciful.

Throughout Hip Logic, Hayes treats the sonnet as a rectangular playing

board, fit for one-off games played with and on the tradition. Hayes’s four

tercets compress Hayden’s irregular stanzas into more constricting cham-

bers, their interlocking aba rhyme suggesting Dantean terza rima.

Redoubling his insistence with whining long is and rich rhyme (‘Is this

why’, ‘Is this why’), Hayes miniaturises poetic history’s oppositions inside

devious pairs of imperfect end-rhymes: young black poets ‘fighting’ against

a ‘white’ establishment, older poets (say, Brooks) ready to ‘change’ how

they ‘sang’, a generation adhering to ‘Negro Duty’ (rhyming internally

with ‘black man’s beauty’) aimed at one ‘shy’ temperament. Antagonisms

notwithstanding, Hayes’s nimble form ultimately pays tribute to Hayden.

Though their respective eras spurred other poets towards revolution, for

both Hayes and Hayden, traditional forms (sonnet, terza rima) and genres

(ode, elegy) retain their force as ways to look back, talk back, and finally

pay back one’s forebears.

Wind in a Box: Black Arts, Blue Ventriloquisms

Among midcentury poets who ‘sang j of the black man’s beauty’, the figure most prominently lodged in Hayes’s thinking is the prolific, ceaselessly

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provocative Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones), and specifically the

radicalised Baraka of BAM and the bombastic, accumulative poetry col-

lected in Black Magic (1969). Given his fascination with the collective voice,

Hayes was bound to gravitate towards BAM: for that movement’s central

figures, a Black Art speaking, protesting, and mourning for all African

Americans as one became the black poet’s prerogative and duty. Plural

pronouns, not timeless or universal but immediate and affirmatively black,

became watchwords for the movement, emblazoned in titles (such as Sonia

Sanchez’s We a BaddDDD People and Don L. Lee’s We Walk the Way of the

New World, both from 1970) and embedded in manifestos. ‘In a word’,

wrote Ron Karenga in 1968, a Black Art ‘must commit us to all that is US

– yesterday, today and the sunrise of tomorrow’; 28

in 1973, Lee (now

known as Haki Madhubuti) allied the movement with ‘the collective of

“we, us and our”’ (while ‘new young “stars”’ maintained ‘the individuality

of “my, me and I”’). 29

It would be overreaching to call BAM all ‘we’ and

no ‘I’, pure collective effort without any individual expression, but few

movements have so insistently celebrated commonality and unity or so

drastically decentred lyric individuality. ‘We always say’, Baraka affirmed

on the 1972 LP Black Spirits, ‘that an artist has to be collective, has to be

speaking out of all the people and to all the people.’ 30

Baraka’s most notorious invocation of a collective voice – indeed, with

its enumerated grievances, the manifesto-poem taken to speak for BAM en-

tire – is the contentious call-to-action of ‘Black Art’. Black Magic’s exclama-

tory climax, an anti-poetry ars poetica, ‘Black Art’ mounts an unsparing

assault on ineffectual, merely descriptive, majority ‘white’ poems, from its

very opening words: ‘Poems are bullshit’. From there, it articulates an ap-

peal for a ‘Black’ poem, wielding weaponised heft and disruptively effecting

change, unafraid to flaunt artlessness in the face of repressive decorum.

Deliberately, ‘Black Art’ argues none of this explicitly, since elaboration

and disengaged theorising are tactics of ‘bullshit’ poetry. Instead it lands its

points obliquely, impressionistically, via a copia of figures: ‘Black Art’ is

concretised, variously, as ‘teeth or trees or lemons piled j on a step’, ‘black ladies dying’, bodily fluids and organs, guns, fists, daggers, poison gas,

assassins, shooters, wrestlers, airplanes, and arsonists. Spurring along

28 Ron Karenga, ‘Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function’, in Woodie

King and Earl Anthony (eds.), Black Poets and Prophets: The Theory, Practice, and Esthetics of the Pan-Africanist Revolution (New York 1972) p. 178.

29 Haki R. Madhubuti, ‘Gwendolyn Brooks: Beyond the Wordmaker – The

Making of an African Poet’, in Stephen Caldwell Wright (ed.), On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation (Ann Arbor 1996) p. 92.

30 Amiri Baraka, S O S: Poems 1961–2013, expanded edn. (New York 2015) p.

545.

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Baraka’s inventiveness is his breathless verse, a variable-length, consonant-

crammed, stress-freighted line, characterised by jarring enjambments, ex-

clamatory punctuation and capitalisation, offhand profanity and lowercase

ethnic slurs, brusque parataxis, toppling-over lists, imperatives and stage

directions, and mechanistic onomatopoeia (‘Airplane poems,

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr j rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr’). ‘We want poems’, that subject-verb-object kernel, serves Baraka as a syntactic backbone. ‘Poem’ or ‘poems’ (repeated

nineteen times) anchors Baraka’s protean figures; the plural declaration

‘We want’ appears four times, always sparking a propulsive litany: ‘We

want “poems that kill.” j Assassin poems, Poems that shoot j guns.’ Baraka’s provocations are impossible to separate from his collective ‘we’,

marshalled against ‘them’ and ‘their’ poetry. Considering the poem’s imag-

ined violence, readers have good reason to keep their distance from ‘Black

Art’, from being conscripted as ‘we’ the perpetrators or cast as ‘they’ the

victims. Baraka, for his part, disavows the stance of the elevated mouth-

piece, a superpowered ‘I’. Belittling the white ‘Liberal j Spokesman’ and a compromising, compromised ‘negroleader’, Baraka wagers everything on

a plurality of figures, of effects, and of black voices, who come together

for a fortissimo close: ‘Let the world be a Black Poem j And Let All Black People Speak This Poem j Silently j or LOUD’.31

Early in Hayes’s third collection, Wind in a Box (a title tracing the

versatile formal boxes enclosing his wind, his inspiration, his hot air), is a

prankish ventriloquism titled ‘The Blue Baraka’. There, and throughout

the book’s eleven other ‘Blue’ poems – ranging from flagrant ventrilo-

quisms like ‘The Blue Borges’ or ‘The Blue Bowie’ to three contradictory

self-portraits all titled ‘The Blue Terrance’ – Hayes never disappears inside

a pitch-perfect impersonation or unrecognisable disguise. Rather, he offers

a half-heartedly ‘Blue’ persona, ‘Blue’ as in the blues, ‘blue notes’ sung

microtones away from standard pitches, melancholy or ‘blueness’, an

ambivalent middle ground between black and white, Wallace Stevens’s

‘Blue Guitar’ upon which ‘Things as they are j Are changed’,32 and Pablo Picasso’s Blue period, unifying disparate subjects under a monochromatic

wash. 33

‘Self and other’ is one black-and-white division blended into blue:

ventriloquism allows Hayes to magnify aspects of his personality otherwise

obscured by an autobiographical, supposedly ‘authentic’ speaker. ‘It’s real-

ly two voices’, Hayes explained in 2006, ‘the voice of the poet trying to

31 Ibid., pp. 149–50.

32 Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan

Richardson (New York 1997) p. 135. 33

‘Blue’, in the title ‘The Blue Baraka’, also recalls Baraka’s best-known non-fic- tion work, published under the name LeRoi Jones: Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963).

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work through the voice of some other figure who’s recognizable.’ 34

With

‘The Blue Baraka’, Hayes blends affinity and dissent, cheering on BAM’s

collective calls while laying out a case for interiority and eccentricity.

Superficially, ‘The Blue Baraka’ inverts ‘For Robert Hayden’, venturing

into the same grey area from an opposite direction; where that earlier

homage spun an inward-facing poet towards ‘the black man’s beauty’, this

ventriloquism describes black people not as a bloc but as so many ‘floun-

dering interiors’, with messy boundaries and plural self-understandings.

But ‘The Blue Baraka’ is a rowdier, more oblique response-poem. Instead

of talking back, it takes on the elder poet’s energy, even while assembling a

collective ‘we’ less polarised, and more hesitant, than Baraka’s own. To

coat ‘Black Art’ with ‘Blue’ ambivalence, Hayes reconstitutes Baraka’s sur-

faces: expansive ‘we’, percussive line, verbal and typographical extrava-

gance, a carousel of imagery spinning around syntactic solidity (‘Like’,

‘Some of us’) and insistent if indefinite abstractions (‘America’). From its

first lines, however, the Blue Baraka obeys a fuzzier logic that admits code-

switching, riffing sonic play, and free-associative swerves:

We go waaaaay back, America.

Like mutts in the bed of a pickup.

Like righteous indignations.

Like riotous ignitions. Like far right-

wing indicators blinking

white&black, white&black, white&black –

They don’t share our values, you say.

I gave you my life / you gave me

my life, America. 35

Like ‘Black Art’ with its three-word kernel (‘We want poems’), ‘The Blue

Baraka’ opens with a one-sentence formula, ‘We go waaaaay back,

America’, and solves for ‘We’ and ‘America’. 36

The Blue Baraka starts

upon the common ground between an African American ‘we’ and

America: both have mongrel, wilfully forgotten origins, like neglected

34 Jason Koo, ‘A Conversation with Terrance Hayes’, The Missouri Review, 29/4

(Winter 2006) p. 75. 35

‘The Blue Baraka’ from WIND IN A BOX by Terrance Hayes, copyright VC

2006 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

36 Already Hayes palliates Baraka, whose controversial ‘Somebody Blew Up

America’ (2002) casts America and African America as irreconcilable adversaries. See Baraka, S O S, pp. 424–33.

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‘mutts’; both are provoked by ‘righteous indignations’, sparked by ‘riotous

ignitions’. Running out, he turns to distinctions, magnetised to a polar

logic, ‘far right- j wing’ and extreme left, blinked on and off, us and them, ‘white&black’.

37 Those binaries prove vertiginously reversible, as Hayes,

veering away from Baraka’s monologic vigour and ushering in an antag-

onistic ‘you’, flips the referents of ‘we’ and ‘they’: ‘They don’t share our

values, you say’. Beneath reversible pronouns lies real imbalance. On one

side of the Blue Baraka’s lopsided scale (visually marked with a slash)

is slavery, servitude, and forced patriotism (‘I gave you my life’); on the

other, America’s withholding, its inequity, its institutional power to inter-

pellate its citizens (‘you gave me j my life’, not the expected reciprocity of ‘your life’).

Where Baraka protested that imbalance, the Blue Baraka turns inquisi-

tive, self-sceptical. Curious about his monolithic ‘we’, he taxonomises its

constituents into subgroups, each labelled ‘Some of us’. Hayes is fond of

the indefinite ‘some’, greater than the singular ‘a’ or ‘one’ but more tem-

pered than the indiscriminate ‘all’; its measured claim stakes out common-

ality but not universality, dissimilarity but not idiosyncrasy. 38

Some of us fog

up the grapes and some of us vomit

money. Some of us bag boys. Some of us

Lerois, some of us Charlie too Browns

too. Some of us black-eyed, brown-

eyed idlers. Some of us be best friends

or fried fiends, but all of us be

floundering interiors, be all these things

at once, America.

Apparently, no essence unifies this ‘we’, which includes every instantiation

of blackness plus its opposite. If ‘Some of us’ smoke marijuana (one sugges-

tion of Hayes’s coined innuendo, ‘fog j up the grapes’: the vegetal turned cloudy), the rest do not. ‘Some of us’ are so rich we ‘vomit j money’; others work menial jobs as ‘bag boys’ (or perhaps as police officers who ‘bag

37 Larry Neal’s ‘The Black Arts Movement’ (1968), often anthologised as the the-

ory to Baraka’s practice, takes this polar logic as axiomatic: ‘there are in fact and in spirit two Americas – one black, one white’. See Larry Neal, ‘The Black Arts Movement’, in Angelyn Mitchell (ed.), Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Durham, NC 1994) p. 184.

38 ‘Hip Logic’, for example, surveys a neighbourhood’s young black men and

evades stereotypical readings: ‘Some shoot the soft bloodless j heads of basketballs. . . . Some cruise with detachable faces j on the radios.’ Hayes, Hip Logic, p. 12.

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boys’). ‘Some of us’ have regal, Frenchified names (‘Leroi’, ‘the king’, colo-

nialism’s ironic vestige), while others use plain, diminutive, even demean-

ing names like ‘Charlie’ or ‘Browns’ or ‘Charlie Brown’, that comic-strip

sad sack; the allusion calls up misfortune made light of, or a childhood pop

culture where white is the norm. 39

‘Some of us’ are ‘black-eyed’ with

bruises despite being ‘brown- j eyed idlers’, out of the fray, and some have skin- and eye-tones blacker or browner than others. Lastly, ‘Some of us’

are as conspiratorial as ‘best friends’, and others as electrified as ‘fried

fiends’. But as the Blue Baraka senses that outsize passions motivate friends

and fiends alike, the poem turns: ‘but all of us be j floundering interiors’. Unlike the real Baraka, who drops every figure for his next, more alarming,

entry, the Blue Baraka is cumulative, combinatory, and pridefully self-

contradictory, seeing all of us as ‘all these things j at once’. Hayes stitches together these separate constituents, his ‘Some’s, with entanglements of

slant rhyme and near-exact repetition: fog up-vomit, bag boys-Lerois, Lerois-

Charlie, Browns-brown, eyed-idlers, friends-fiends, and, in his ultimate traversal of

the individual and the national, interiors-America.

Riskily, the next lines of ‘The Blue Baraka’ will restate nearly every

premise of Baraka’s ‘Black Art’. Policed and imprisoned by a hypocritical

white America, why wouldn’t a Black ‘we’ call for a new ‘Black World’,

with a revolutionary ‘Black Poem’ as its founding document? But in his

final sentence – call it realist, acquiescent, or simply ‘blue’ – Hayes wrests

control from Baraka’s influence. Taxonomising yet again, the Blue Baraka

sorts America’s citizens into its variously privileged demographics:

You be a white, blue and ready-made utopia

for some; you be over-cooked

and crooked, a scythe of bite marks,

an odor of orders for others. 40

America keeps its red-white-and-blue promises with no one, but ‘for some’

Americans, the nation can be a ‘utopia’ coloured ‘white’ (the pervasive skin

colour), ‘blue’ (with all its overtones), and if not ‘red’ then ‘ready-made’

(designed around a fortunate elite, whatever its egalitarian pretences).

Everything lines up perfectly against other Americans, an oppression sonic-

ally enacted with crammed-close rhyme: cooked-crooked, scythe-bite, odor-orders-

others. Hayes spring-loads a surprising resolution into that final word,

39 In the reminiscences of the first ‘Blue Terrance’, Hayes pins down the allusion

to Charles M. Schulz’s long-running strip: ‘I began an obsessive regimen of drawing j Peanuts. (Charlie Brown began with an O.)’. Terrance Hayes, Wind in a Box (New York 2006) p. 65.

40 Ibid., pp. 19–20.

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‘others’. Even as it evokes how people of colour are Othered (in modern

parlance), ‘others’ softens Baraka’s dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’,

and quietly suggest Hayes’s refusal to speak for an African American col-

lective. (Deliberately, Hayes avoids the expected, more Barakan ‘an odor

of orders for us’.) The ‘blue’ tragedy of this flurry of figures is that

America’s damage is done – historically ‘ready-made’, already ‘over-

cooked’ and bent ‘crooked’, ‘scythe’-reaped, dented with ‘bite marks’ –

and blame falls not on living individuals but on unjust structures, an un-

traceable ‘odor of orders’. Shifting his target from individual Americans

to vaporous ‘America’, Hayes avoids Baraka’s imagined violence and es-

sentialist dichotomies while maintaining every one of his ‘righteous

indignations’.

In the blue space between Baraka’s booming tones and Hayes’s ‘authen-

tic’ persona, the Blue Baraka sings in a pliable collective voice. Expanding

and contracting, inverted and recontextualised, his ‘we’ can encompass

himself and America (l. 1), majority white Americans (l. 7), African

Americans (ll. 9–15), a biblical universality (l. 23), or white Americans

again (l. 28). Unsurprisingly, given Hayes’s rejection of Baraka’s authorita-

tive rhetoric (‘an odor of orders’ of its own), none of the ensuing ‘Blue’

poems voices a racially marked ‘we’. Instead, Hayes closes the ‘Blue’ series

by sketching a bewildered ‘I’ from glancing angles, with three poems pur-

porting to represent ‘The Blue Terrance’; self-portraiture, the triptych

implies, is a bottomless pursuit for the contemporary poet. How might

Hayes make an equally strong case for a sustainable African American

‘we’?

Lighthead: Before and After Gwendolyn Brooks

That question leads to Hayes’s fourth book, Lighthead, and his most elabor-

ately ludic response-poem to date: ‘The Golden Shovel’, subtitled ‘after

Gwendolyn Brooks’, its two sections captioned ‘I. 1981’ and ‘II. 1991’.

Further removed than his confrontation with Hayden, its commentary

cooler than his ventriloquism of Baraka, ‘The Golden Shovel’ devises a

new verse-form that harmonises present-day autobiographical searching

with the ground bass of tradition; instantly influential, the poem single-

handedly inspired 2017’s The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring

Gwendolyn Brooks. 41

‘The Golden Shovel’ comes ‘after’ Brooks in at least

two senses: beyond taking ‘after’ her influence, it wonders aloud how the

pre-Civil Rights generation Brooks might resonate and even collaborate

41 Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith (eds.), The Golden Shovel Anthology:

New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, with a foreword by Terrance Hayes (Fayetteville 2017).

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with a poet generations her junior. Graphically, though, Hayes’s poem

comes before Brooks, whose words are embroidered along his poem’s right

margin. Put more exactly: Hayes’s twenty-four lines take as their end-

words the twenty-four monosyllables of Brooks’s ‘We Real Cool’ (1960),

perhaps the most anthologised postwar American poem (a delicious irony

for a poem about seven adolescents skipping school), and certainly the

most conspicuous pronouncement of ‘we’ in American poetry.

Considering how sparingly plural pronouns appear in Brooks’s early

work, the exceptional ‘we’ of ‘We Real Cool’ seems even more startling;

considering how many populate the later poetry, that ‘we’ is all the more

momentous. From the start, Brooks considered togetherness central to the

lyric, as her juvenilia attest. The sprightly couplet ‘We’, from the unpub-

lished collection Songs After Sunset (1935–6), recounts:

An old man said this thing to me:

‘The loveliest word of all is “we.”’ 42

Yet Brooks hardly ever extended that lovely ‘we’ to African Americans en

masse. Speaking of but rarely for wider collectives, the Brooks of the 1940s

and 1950s bears out Bonnie Costello’s fine distinction that ‘Brooks saw

poetry as a specific social intervention on behalf of an oppressed group’

but ‘did not embrace group identity in her poetry.’ 43

So the early Brooks

did for Chicago’s Bronzeville what Hughes did for New York City’s

Harlem, painting in narrow strokes, dignifying a marginalised community

member by member. At her furthest-ranging, she gave voice to a single

neighbourhood, a micro-demographic, or the tenants of a ‘kitchenette

building’, uniting over their dehumanisation into ‘things’: ‘We are things of

dry hours and the involuntary plan, j Grayed in, and gray.’44 The artfully framed monologues of A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Annie Allen (1949) –

with titles specifying types (‘the mother’), settings (‘a song in the front

yard’), or both (‘gay chaps at the bar’), names (‘Hattie Scott’), occasions

(‘the funeral’), or both (‘the rites for Cousin Vit’) – could not have prepared

readers for ‘We Real Cool’, that self-assured burst of nonstandard adoles-

cent English. For Brooks’s first readers, conceivably, the homogeneous

group identity of ‘We Real Cool’ implied the scolding reservations of a

poet who had long prized individuality and self-control.

42 Quoted in Erlene Stetson, ‘Songs After Sunset (1935–36): The Unpublished

Poetry of Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks’, in Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith (eds.), A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction (Urbana 1987) p. 124.

43 Bonnie Costello, ‘The Plural of Us’, Jacket2, 6 Jan. 2012, <http://jacket2.org/

article/plural-us>, accessed 27 June 2019. 44

Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago 1987) p. 20.

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Yet if we look forward, not backward, ‘We Real Cool’ forecasts Brooks’s

tumultuous 1960s, a decade of befriending younger poets and revising her

poetry and pronouns accordingly. In her introduction to the Broadside

Press anthology Jump Bad (1971), Brooks even mustered the pugilistic prose

of her admirers in BAM: ‘True black writers speak as blacks, about blacks,

to blacks.’ 45

The 1960s poetry continually oscillates between that collective

mentality and reverence for individuality; mid-career, Brooks was uniquely

driven to investigate how individuals constitute communities and how

communities shape individuals. In her transitional book In the Mecca (1968),

she assembles a montage of Chicago’s historic apartments, the Mecca

Flats, and dotingly cuts to close-ups of subgroups, such a youthful ‘Gang’

that ‘is a bunch of ones and a singlicity’. 46

If the later Brooks spoke more

comfortably, less questioningly, about a general black or African diasporic

experience, she never lost her conviction that any ‘we’ amasses dissimilar

individuals. The chapbook Riot (1969), later collected in To Disembark

(1981), recounts a provisional convergence of a plural subjecthood: ‘In a

package of minutes there is this We.’ At the poem’s ending, the riot over,

‘We go j in different directions j down the imperturbable street.’47 Revisiting ‘We Real Cool’ a decade after its publication, Brooks

compressed her compact lyric even further: ‘These are people who are es-

sentially saying, “Kilroy is here. We are.”’ 48

If ‘We Real Cool’ is a choral

performance, the existential statement ‘We are’, it is not one freeze-frame

but an entire life course charted in eight lines, from past-tense lapse (‘We j left school’) to the precarious present in the Golden Shovel, that gin-

stinking pool hall, then to a future so imminent, so inevitable, that it merits

the present tense: ‘We j Die soon.’ That accelerated life course is fixed, already determined – or so Brooks implies with her undifferentiated ‘We’

(no ‘I’ acts alone) and with her cramped couplets, evocative of nursery

rhymes, chiming cause with effect. Anyone ‘real cool’ must have ‘left

school’; if you ‘Jazz June’, you will ‘Die soon’. Even Brooks’s toneless

epigraph (‘THE POOL PLAYERS. j SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL’) implies that socially astute readers can infer the necessary knowledge about these seven

from her epithet (these are truant POOL PLAYERS, not developing STUDENTS)

and the ominous name THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. 49

Those words alone, with

45 Reprinted in Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One (Detroit 1972) p. 195.

46 Brooks, Blacks, p. 413. For a stellar reappraisal of In the Mecca’s uneasy commu-

nal voice which recognises that ‘the “we” is never without its complications and shortfalls’ (p. 55), see Alexander, The Black Interior, pp. 43–58.

47 Brooks, Blacks, pp. 479, 480.

48 Gwendolyn Brooks, Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, ed. Gloria Wade Gayles

(Jackson 2003) p. 44. 49

Brooks, Blacks, p. 331.

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their dissonant cluster of associations, foretell a precipitous two-point plot:

for GOLDEN, read wealth, ‘June’ sunshine, gaudiness, flash, artifice, surface,

preciousness, youth; for SHOVEL, try manual labour, ditches (or ‘ditching’

responsibility), the earthy, the grimy, the buried dead.

Brooks’s determinism, I believe, is what provokes Hayes, ever dedicated

to multiple choice and roomy grey areas, to write his dissenting response-

poem. However inspired by its pool-hall setting and aggrieved adolescents,

Hayes pushes back against ‘We Real Cool’; expanding on Brooks’s words

visually and narratively, he insists on the multiplicity of identities and out-

comes available to the young black men of his generation. In his first

Golden Shovel, ‘I. 1981’, Hayes reimagines all eight instances of Brooks’s

‘we’, recasting her one-dimensional adolescent clique as an intergenera-

tional duo, father and son. Here is the poem’s opening (throughout, for

easier reading, I print the end-words in bold):

When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we

cruise at twilight until we find the place the real

men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.

His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we

drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left

in them but approachlessness. This is a school

I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we

are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk

of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late. 50

In 1981 – the year Hayes turned 10, twenty-one years after ‘We Real

Cool’ first appeared – a ‘small’ not-quite-adolescent, chaperoned by his af-

fectionately named ‘Da’, visits a world where ‘real j men’ exercise one model for ‘cool’ (if emphatically heterosexual) masculinity, drinking, flirt-

ing, smoking, playing pool, and listening to jukeboxes. With its easygoing

pentameters, distanced analysis (‘But the cue sticks mean’), and clear-eyed

chronology (‘This is a school k I do not know yet’), the poem implies an adult’s retrospection even while retaining youth’s sensuous, almost

50 ‘The Golden Shovel’ from LIGHTHEAD: POEMS by Terrance Hayes, copy-

right VC 2006 by Terrance Hayes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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synesthetic, vitality. All over again, this speaker feels Da’s sock cover his

arm, catches a smile’s ‘gold-plated incantation’, rubs the pool cue’s

smoothness, and withstands the room’s ‘lurk j of smoke’. Unlike Brooks’s adolescent slang, Hayes’s diction traverses generations, from kid nicknames

to adult commandments. ‘We won’t be out late’ is a father’s reassurance,

parroted by his Wordsworthian child, preserved by this adult speaker.

Not even halfway through his reminiscence, Hayes leaves the pool hall

(supposedly dangerous, but in truth wholly comforting) for what ‘should’

be a safe domestic sphere, his neighbourhood. There, his familial ‘we’

meets a father–son foil, no sooner introduced than wrenched apart by a

violent ‘strike’, a whipped-around enjambment: ‘Standing in the middle of

the street last night we k watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike j his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight.’ Couplet by couplet, the poem’s second half cross-cuts between the two father–son

pairs:

Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we

used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing,

his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.

The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We

watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.

He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.

He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We

stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,

how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June

the boy would be locked upstate. That night we

got down on our knees in my room. If I should die

before I wake, Da said to me, it will be too soon. 51

From Brooks’s monophonic, clipped-short boasts, Hayes derives a

response-poem that resolutely testifies to open-hearted communication,

bridging generations and crossing neighbourhoods. From Da’s ‘promised’

vow to his final quoted prayer, one speech-act caroms into the next. First

Da wills away adulthood’s burdens to his son, through inheritance as well

as more abstract channels: language, song, ‘sin’. Crossing over to ‘us’, the

51 Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (New York 2010) pp. 6–7.

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neighbour’s son expresses ‘outrage’ without disclosing its origins, left to

this speaker’s speculations; maybe he does descend from Brooks’s lying,

gin-drinking adolescents, but maybe he was virtuously ‘defending his

ma’. (Again, Hayes’s free indirect discourse vaults over generational

divides. We hear this boy’s doting ‘ma’, then his father’s taunting inquisi-

tion: trying to be a man?) In the liminal space between their houses, as the

neighbour’s boy enters a wider, inclusive ‘we’, Da instructs both boys in

jazz, which can translate personal outrage into a transcendent ‘tune’. But

only ‘sometimes’, and not now; by June, this boy will be incarcerated, for

reasons the speaker does not share and may not know. The poem’s final

speech-act is at once its most dire and its most hopeful. As father and son

kneel together, Da alone, directing his speech not to God but over ‘to

me’, recites the children’s prayer ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’. Revising

the expected wish for an afterlife (‘I pray the Lord my soul to take’), Da closes

on this-worldly yearning, the wish to remain a father beside his son. And

Hayes, truncating the prayer’s metronomic tetrameters, ends with an asson-

ant spondee that recalls the thudding metre of ‘We Real Cool’. Adolescent

futures, tenuous family bonds, lives below the impending ‘shovel’: all these,

Da and this speaker ruefully admit, can be ended ‘tóo sóon’.

Undecidedly ‘in the middle of the street’, finding doublings for every

character and setting, Hayes vigilantly looks out for exceptions, alternative

takes, what-ifs. Not every child in a pool hall will sing sin: not this speaker,

led through that underworld by his Virgilian father, ‘rubbed by light’ and

familial grace, gathering sensations for future poetry. Another child from

the very same neighbourhood might not be so fortunate, but he deserves

better than being written off as the boy ‘locked upstate’. Hayes’s response-

poem is partly a rebuke of Brooks’s homogenising portrait – where

Brooks’s ‘we’ is juvenile, marginal, argumentative, flung at an implicit, un-

cool ‘them’, Hayes’s ‘we’ is intergenerational, flexible, narratorial, quietly

contrasted with fraying families – and partly a celebration of imaginatively

empathetic individuals: the son playing at sock puppets, the boy singing

his ‘outrage’, Da revisiting and revising childhood prayer. Yet Hayes’s

grey-area poem is also an ode to family, community, and the ‘tune’ that

transcends one self. To that end, it reaffirms Brooks with its wholehearted

lyric ‘we’. For Hayes as for Brooks, that plural pronoun, teetering on his

poem’s right margin, is a performative wish for collective identity in defi-

ance of interpersonal divides: ‘men’ apart from approachless ‘women’, the

neighbour against his filial ‘shadow’, the vocal Da versus his silent son (and

even this adult speaker, whose fluency arrived too late to articulate his

worry or gratitude). The Golden Shovel, Hayes’s ingenious form, enacts a

peculiar collaborative ‘we’ of its own, congregating the contemporary

Hayes and the elder Brooks, who is not only the guiding spirit of this

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poem’s manner and matter but the author of every one of its resonant end-

words. This porous form invites new possibilities, further rewritings,

whether by Hayes (whose second Golden Shovel, ‘II. 1991’, sets Brooks’s

words to a hallucinatory march) 52

or by the dozens of poets following his

lead in The Golden Shovel Anthology. Hayes’s poetry offers no more memor-

able example of the multiple choice available to today’s poets: it is no coin-

cidence that it takes the form of a response.

Coda: Authentic Inauthenticity

Taken together, Hayes’s response-poems constitute a handbook for the

post-Civil Rights generation, a compendium of verse-forms and the vary-

ing responses to the tradition they imply. Every response-poem by this

between-area poet is itself a between-area, presenting one voice inherited

from the tradition and one voice speaking in opposition: Hayden’s autobio-

graphical ‘I’ (interrogated by Hayes, singing the ‘black man’s beauty’);

Baraka’s militarised ‘we’ (pried apart by Hayes, distinguishing people from

institutions); and Brooks’s precarious adolescent ‘we’ (repurposed by

Hayes’s intergenerational, reflective ‘we’). It would violate Hayes’s virtues

– cosmopolitan taste, restless experimentation, comfort wedged in-between

– to rank any approach to the literary past above all others, but a certain

evolution stands out. Moving from homage to ventriloquism to the Golden

Shovel, Hayes has pledged to preserve more of his source material, more

faithfully, within his responses. If ‘For Robert Hayden’ (among other early,

athletic competitions with artistic fathers) supports Harold Bloom’s patri-

lineal theory of influence, then experiments like the Golden Shovel suggest

a theory not agonistic but playfully collaborative, openly referential and

reverential. 53

This evolution should in no way imply that Hayes’s own

voice has diminished. While ‘The Golden Shovel’ ranks among his most

appreciative (and most appropriative) response-poems, for readers unfamil-

iar with Brooks it could pass for a straightforward autobiographical lyric,

haphazardly rhymed, distinctively Hayesian.

A 2007 interview that finds Hayes hitting on his many inheritances

(‘I want to sleep with all forms, all styles, all schools, but I want to be

52 Ibid., pp. 7–8.

53 Unravelling the ‘cannibalistic’ logic of influence within postcolonial and Latin

American literary theory, Rachel Galvin notes: ‘As Hayes’s new poem circulates, Brooks’s poem will always circulate along with it, encapsulated within it, living a spe- cial kind of afterlife through reiteration.’ Rachel Galvin, ‘Poetry Is Theft’, Comparative Literary Studies, 51/1 (2014) p. 36. Hayes’s ‘Ars Poetica #789’ may make teasing refer- ence to Bloom: ‘My daddies have voices j like bachelors, like castigators & croon- ers. . . . Each of my daddies asks, “Are you writing j another poem about me?”’ Hayes, Hip Logic, p. 11.

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committed to none of them’) ends with his interviewer exclaiming, ‘So

you’re not in the least beholden to the idea of “authentic voice”!’ Hayes:

‘Right.’ Undecided as ever, Hayes gives two precedents for his stylistic

promiscuity: the self-contradicting, all-encompassing Walt Whitman and

the chameleonic popstar Prince. ‘Voice is there whatever you do, why

bother trying to tie it down. Whether Prince sings in a falsetto or deep bari-

tone you know it’s Prince.’ 54

Paradoxically, Hayes’s voice is most ‘authen-

tically’ his own when pushed towards ‘inauthenticity’, whether by formal

contrivance, ventriloquism and collage, or range-stretching exercises.

Short of ‘lyric’ itself, ‘voice’ has become the most contentious term in lyric

studies today, with lyric readers celebrating voice for cohering an original

and individual identity, and anti-lyric readers shaming voice for its egocen-

tric pretensions to authority. 55

Collapsing that debate into grey areas,

Hayes’s response-poems exhibit a more elastic and inviting sense of ‘voice’,

one that can just as effortlessly sing in unison with past poets, croon in

counterpoint, or croak in dissent. 56

And with his flexible ‘I’s and ‘we’s,

Hayes complicates a ‘problematic schema’ within criticism of poets of colour,

eloquently summarised by Gillian White: ‘the personal (“lyric”) subject con-

trasts with a collective, representative, but marginalized subject aligned with

urgent political concerns.’ 57

Personal and collective, ‘I’ and ‘we’: twisting these

oppositions into one-sided Möbius strips, Hayes teaches us that each side is

only one response, one line break, one sharp volta away from the other.

Hayes’s pronominal experimentation has coursed through his recent

books How to Be Drawn (2015) and American Sonnets for My Past and Future

Assassin (2018), a diary of endangered, even solipsistic existence since the

election of Donald Trump. Whether calling out history’s ‘Assassins’ or

apostrophising ‘America’, lionising US Representative Maxine Waters or

denouncing ‘Mister Trumpet’, Hayes’s American Sonnets are always em-

phatically for someone, insurgent variations on lyric address, which

Jonathan Culler deems fundamental to the genre. 58

If Hayes’s response-

poems provide newly tinted lenses through which to reread several

54 Simpson, ‘“I believe all the stories of who I was”’, pp. 135, 136.

55 For a compact summary of the recent debate over ‘voice’, see Calista McRae,

‘“Now someone’s talking”: Unpunctuation and the Deadpan Poem’, Modernism/ Modernity, 25/1 (Jan. 2018) pp. 16–17.

56 Hayes’s musical sense of poetic ‘voice’ could also refresh current debates over

the term ‘lyric’. ‘[T]he question of music is indeed central to defining the lyric’, avers Brent Hayes Edwards, who finds it ‘remarkable how seldom African diasporic litera- ture is taken up in discussions of the “new lyric studies.”’ Brent Hayes Edwards, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge 2017) p. 58.

57 Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The ‘Lyric’ Subject of Contemporary Poetry (Cambridge,

Mass. 2014) p. 268. 58

See Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, Mass. 2015) ch. 5.

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syllabuses of African American poets – Hayden, Brooks, Baraka, but also

Phillis Wheatley, Etheridge Knight, Wanda Coleman, Tupac Shakur – his

pliant plural pronouns also prepare us for shapeshifting speakers through-

out today’s most acclaimed African American poetry, such as the polyph-

ony of pronouns in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), the

conjoined McKoy twins duetting in the ‘syncopated sonnets’ of Tyehimba

Jess’s Olio (2016), and the posthumous ‘we’ of murdered black boys in

Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead (2017). We can even hear plural speakers

resounding outside poetry, in Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground

Railroad (2016) (which crests with the orator Elijah Lander’s lecture on

‘The word we’) 59

and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power

(2017). ‘I come from a long line’, Hayes professes in ‘The Heritage

Channel’, ‘of “she used to,” “he used to,” and “we,” and ennui’. 60

In verse

lines penned and scrambled, genre lines crossed and smudged, Hayes

draws on that long line’s tangled past and draws it into his generation’s

present, our poetry’s future.

59 Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad: A Novel (New York 2016) p. 286.

60 Hayes, Wind in a Box, p. 88.

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Appendix

Forms of Terrance Hayes’s ‘We’, from Narrowest to Widest

AN EROTIC,

MARITAL ‘WE’:

It’s Yoyo who says Tonguing, a form of kissing

favored among the half-lit young, is mostly overrated

and rarely practiced among married folk like us . . .61

A ‘WE’ OF

CAMARADERIE:

We made our own laws.

I want to be a Hawk,

A Dolphin, a Lion, we’d say

In stores where team logos hung

Like animal skins. 62

A FAMILIAL ‘WE’: Granddaddy,

when my father, the first time I met him,

tried to recall your face, there was nothing

but smoke coaxing our history from his breath. 63

A GENERATIONAL ‘WE’: Remember when we were young enough to remember?

Remember when we believed everything the evening told us? 64

A RACIAL ‘WE’: Color doesn’t tells us what we are & what we ain’t

Never going to be. 65

AN OPPRESSORS’ ‘WE’: To make the servant in the corner unobjectionable

Furniture, we must first make her a bundle of tree parts

Axed and worked to confidence. 66

A NATIONAL ‘WE’: At this very moment, they are fighting

about the order of things we should value: God, Family, Country –

No: Love, Justice, Money. 67

A ‘WE’ OF THE

LIVING:

Probably, ghosts are allergic to us. Our uproarious

Breathing & ruckus. Our eruptions, our disregard

For dust. 68

A UNIVERSAL ‘WE’: Trouble is one of the ways we discover the complexities

Of the soul. 69

61 ‘The Elegant Tongue’, Lighthead, p. 33.

62 ‘Touch’, Hip Logic, p. 7.

63 ‘Bullethead for Earthell’, Lighthead, pp. 73–4.

64 ‘Lighthead’s Guide to Parenting’, Lighthead, p. 80.

65 ‘William H. Johnson’, Hip Logic, p. 44.

66 ‘Antebellum House Party’, How to Be Drawn (New York 2015) p. 67.

67 ‘Elegy with Zombies for Life’, How to Be Drawn, p. 52.

68 ‘American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin’, American Sonnets for My Past

and Future Assassin (New York 2018) p. 22. 69

‘How to Be Drawn to Trouble’, How to Be Drawn, p. 7.

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