Not a Game

“We talkin’ about practice.”
—Allen Iverson

As I read Watch Your Language (Penguin, 2023) and So To Speak (Penguin, 2023), Terrance Hayes’s new books, I found myself thinking about freedom. Both books frame creativity as a lifelong practice that can lead to a kind of liberation. Hayes recalls his time playing basketball as a teen and then in college to reverse the usual hierarchy between practice versus the game. He emphasizes how much more important repetition and failure are for fulfillment than isolated competitions, which he likens to conformity. Knowing the stereotypes about race and basketball, Hayes insists that his individuality is an ongoing procedure more than the sum of his parts as a Black man, an award-winning poet, an adventurous thinker—as anything else he may be.

This conception of freedom as a practice reminded me of the (in)famous 2002 press conference during which NBA star Allen Iverson ranted for three minutes about press scrutiny over his absence from practice given how hard he played during the game. I don’t know if Hayes wants readers to recall how Iverson’s resistance to practice reinforced his reputation as an irresponsible ghetto baller. But the connection works because Iverson wanted his commitment to the game to allay such suspicions. Hayes would have us see the “game” as sets of normative protocols that inevitably lead to such outcomes as the Philadelphia 76ers airbrushing Iverson’s tattoos from his arms when they put him on the cover of the team’s brochures. In this light, one can see that Iverson’s resistance to practice was also his resistance to being boxed in by racist expectation. Iverson’s fans appreciated how consistently he seemed to ask “How can I be free to be me?” Hayes’s new books clarify that he is likewise pursuing an answer to this urgent question. His play with form is no game. His work urges readers to see individuality as a substantive kind of freedom requiring constant assertion and defense.

Hayes knows that individuality is often conceptually aligned with the bourgeois individualism whose fulfillment sometimes requires African Americans to alienate themselves from social unity, political interests, and heritages, becoming individuals allegedly freed from stereotypes of collective pathology and from the cultural distinctiveness of their hair. Hayes insists that individuality need not be this escape from the silken ligatures of Blackness even as he proposes ways in which it must sometimes untie those knots. When the scholar Jeffrey J. Williams asked him in 2018 if he considered himself an African American poet, Hayes replied:

Yes—and many other things. I don’t think anybody is just a poet with no adjectives. I wouldn’t limit it there: I would say, yes, I’m African-American; yes, I’m Southern; yes, I’m male; yes, I’m hip-hop; yes, I’m neurotic; yes, I’m a bastard poet. It’s all these other things and the more, the better.

Stephanie Burt was thus correct to assert in 2015 that “Hayes’s poems insist, sometimes bitterly, that there is more to Hayes, and more to anyone, than what you can see or what you expect to see.” Later in the interview with Williams, Hayes stated the priority this way: “I’m interested in identity, but there’s another circle that’s closer to the self, and that’s personality.” Though this distinction may not ultimately hold, I appreciate how Hayes means to disrupt both the supposedly singular coherence of social identities such as race and the multiculturalism that can sometimes lend itself to facile claims of colorblindness or race neutrality. “I’m a dialectical thinker,” Hayes declared in the same interview. “Thesis, antithesis, and synthesizing—that certainly is my way of being in the world all the time.” Hayes calls for and pursues a practice of inhabiting the innermost facets of his imagination as it juxtaposes, deconstructs, and synthesizes.

Playing as literary criticism, Watch Your Language is presented as a model and enactment of this imaginative practice. The book opens with a preface, “How to Use This Book,” that reads almost as a parody of the kind of instructions one sometimes finds at the beginning of reading guides. Hayes suggests that “reading is a mix of telepathy and time travel” based on “stamina and time,” not talent, and that judgments about good or bad readers or writers “don’t matter when the act of reading is, like the act of writing, mostly a matter of keeping an eye on your thinking, of bearing witness, of keeping record.” Hayes does not mean to provide a definitive theory of American poetry, then, but to call readers to “watch” their own reading after watching his: “Like any guidebook, this book should leave the curious reader with more questions than answers. A theory of American poetry becomes a practice of inquiry and invention.” Therefore, “[t]his collection may be used as a guide or reference in creating your own poetic journey.”

This call for open-ended inquiry is followed by an idiosyncratic autobiographical piece, “Between Practice, 1984,” which chronicles how often the teenaged Hayes practiced dunking by himself, how failure seemed necessary to development, how he never dunked in a game, and how his coming of age revolved around grasping these insights. He concedes, “I used to think practice was preparation for the game, but now I believe the game is what happens between practice.” As much as Hayes has clear opinions about literary value, he demurs from any conventional authoritative critical posture. He wants instead to free readers to use their own imaginative authority.

Though I was wary of Watch Your Language’s evasion of the question of expertise, this idea of practice, of inquiry, as the truest and most important facet of one’s literary and imaginative life is also what moved me most. It is at the heart of how Hayes opens poetry, and thus so much of people’s social thinking, to his kind of freedom. The next entry in the book is a memoir-essay titled “Reflections and Foresight upon a Century of Poetry, 2016.” It focuses largely on the literal mistranslations of English and Mandarin that Hayes experienced on a trip to Shanghai for an exhibition of the World Poetry Forum. That confusion amplified how the poets with whom Hayes shared a panel had differing conceptions of 20th-century literary history and how the keynote Chinese poet, Guan Guan, may not have written poetry at all even as his songs and physical movement garnered the most enthusiasm from those in attendance. Hayes concludes, “The poet need not write poems if the poet becomes a poem. Is a made thing ever more interesting than the maker of things? Not to me.”

Consequently, the bulk of Hayes’s “theory” of American poetry consists of compelling prose-poem biographies of his “poet all-stars,” the “makers,” including figures such as the less-well-known Margaret Danner, Mari Evans, Bob Kaufman, and Essex Hemphill and such celebrated figures as Sonia Sanchez, Yusef Komunyakaa, Toi Derricotte, Patricia Smith, and Tony Hoagland. In some bios, Hayes impersonates the poet’s style; in others, such as the one for Komunyakaa, he uses the poet’s words to constitute his poem. The heading of each bio features Hayes’s drawing of the author, and each of the book’s nine sections begins with a page of drawings by Hayes in a timeline that frames that section with key historical moments and dates of book publications. Hayes also includes drawings of notable poets of that era, their thoughts captured in catchphrases (“Emily Dickinson / Musing on Possibility?”).

What’s more, each of the nine sections includes a series of 20 to 30 queries before the bios, 255 in all, making each section as much “exam” as argument, with challenges both to knowledge and to assumptions about reading. “What would you find if you looked for yourself in poetry every day?” “Who is the better muse to The Waste Land: T. S. Eliot or the Eliot fan who knows The Waste Land by heart?” “Ed Roberson and Thylias Moss are part of what literary movement?” “Do you feel you dwell in possibility too?” Poetry is both more and other than what a prospective reader of this book may want or expect. It is an ongoing act of the imagination, a mode of living, a creativity never entirely fulfilled in or contained by any single poem. Its utter strangeness, its untranslatability, is what Watch Your Language chronicles and endorses.

So To Speak endorses this approach too in myriad kinds of poems that show how this practice of imaginative individuality necessarily works through an estrangement from social convention. The phrase “watch your language” is echoed in the section titles—“Watch Your Mouth,” “Watch Your Step,” and “Watch Your Head”—to position poetry against social authority. Such phrases are familiar as parental injunctions to respectful discourse and as official cautions for safety. But Watch Your Language transforms that mandate into a call to attend to one’s own consciousness in relation to one’s individual engagement with the world. Such a shift diffuses or even disrupts parental and various other social authorities (teachers, prospective bosses, police officers, moral rules, bourgeois respectability) that insist on such conventional and self-abnegating behavior as, say, erasing tattoos.

So To Speak is replete with poems that play with established forms and their associated social mandates, as in Hayes’s adaptation of the Japanese slide presentation form PechaKucha, which consists of 20 sections of 20 seconds apiece. Readers are invited or induced to perceive (or even invent) “arguments” that unite Hayes’s 20 four-line poems that act as if they are sections in a professional lecture. Not a self-indulgent game, formal play goes well beyond the poet’s building puzzles for his own pleasure, though it is certainly that. Such pleasure is also enhanced when the creative practice of freedom turns social conventions into individuated art.

Hayes's collection thus offers this imaginative method as an ongoing assertion of possibility. That locution, “so to speak,” usually alerts interlocutors to use of figurative language whose literal and figurative meanings may be inadequate to the task. There is self-assertion too because speakers authorize themselves to give it a go anyway, endorsing their creativity as necessary and even illuminating. What’s more, in both books, Hayes amplifies the epigraph to Watch Your Language, which is taken from Toni Morrison’s description of her own method in her scholarly book Playing in the Dark (1992): “I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration …” Hayes observes. “Where the poems [in So To Speak] map poetic forms and expressions, [Watch Your Language] maps poetic reading and interpretation.”

Instead of the definitive directions one gets from cellphone apps, in other words, Morrison and Hayes emphasize the creativity of mapmaking. We are talking here about old-school atlases, pictures of a landscape that do not tell someone where or how to go but instead provide a capacious sense of what is available to traverse. Here, mapping is not mandate but illustration and opportunity. No wonder Hayes offers a poem titled “Map of States” that visualizes different emotional states in language and drawing. The poem ends “Almost anything you see is a map in some way. / Let your eyes fall where they may on the maps.”

One can see why I found myself contemplating freedom. I especially wondered how Hayes understands such possibility in the face of inveterate structures of conformity and unfreedom, such as literary awards or systemic racism. The poem “George Floyd” provides one compelling, ambivalent answer. It begins:

You can be a bother who dyes
his hair Dennis Rodman blue
in the face of the man kneeling in blue
in the face the music of his wrist-
watch your mouth is little more
than a door being knocked
out of the ring of fire around
the afternoon came evening’s bell
of the ball & chain around the neck
of the unarmed brother ground down

With puns on bother (brother) and dyes, the poem opens with a statement of possibility that ends in death and then elaborates on the “death” of the imagination in cliché, with oft-repeated phrases echoing the repeated deaths of Black men at the hands of white authority, hence the poem’s last line: “Emmett till the end of time.” The “belle of the ball” becomes the “bell / of the ball & chain,” the repeated sound of alarm and imprisonment associated with the hypervisibility of Black people because, as scholar Nicole Fleetwood observes, race dominates vision and erases individuality. As Blackness “circulates,” Fleetwood argues, it “fills in space between matter, between object and subject, between bodies, between looking and being looked upon. It fills in the void and is the void.” Avoiding a potentially narrow lyric voice, the poet’s orchestration of a formal protocol lines up clichéd phrases that synthesize antithetical artifacts of culture to map this broader cultural landscape, this mindset and vocabulary complicit with violence that circulates as and against Blackness. Being free here is not necessarily about ending the violence or its power or about bohemian individual withdrawal from it but being awake to it and navigating it with awareness. Not quite the vivid protest of #BlackPoetsSpeakOut but certainly its own compelling resistance.

I found Hayes’s practice most persuasive, which is to say closest to a genuine freedom, when it openly operated within and against this encompassing Blackness. “American Sonnet for Innervisions” remakes the love frame of the traditional sonnet as well as the jazz frame of poet Wanda Coleman’s original “American Sonnets,” to root multiplicity in Blackness. In the poem, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde each lend Stevie Wonder an eyeball, allowing him to see with their rigor and queerness so that “he immediately contends / With gravity, falling either to his knees or flat on / His luminous face.” Even for someone as gloriously loving and inclusive as Stevie Wonder, there is so much more to see—his “head purples with plural visions / Of blackness.”

Lorde and Baldwin become even more terrifying to white people, the poem declares, because their traumas of vision are now undeniably visible on their bodies thanks to their eye patches. Baldwin is “blue” with beauty, nonetheless, because in singing his pain, he shines with a color liberated from the racial spectrum. The poem’s title alludes to Wonder’s 1973 album but is likely meant to be even more literal in its figurativeness. Stevie Wonder could expand his own vision by seeing queerness, but all “inner visions” would be more beautiful by encompassing all that constitutes one’s inner life. Of course, the “ten / To one” odds that God prefers to be called “They & Them” complicates these effects. As the volta, or turn, in the sonnet, the assertion of those odds in the poem’s last two lines posits skepticism about the politics of pronouns, but they do not fully undermine the complexity of the inner visions, the purple plurals, of Blackness.

Of course, my priority on a plural Blackness could be its own kind of trap. To its credit, the poem scrutinizes that posture too. At its best, the cultural multiplicity touted in Black Nationalism was certainly liberating but excluded queerness. Remembering the rules of that hypermasculine game that granted me one of my eyeballs, I am thus forced to confront the terms of my own wariness about how the order of the bios of Watch Your Language ends with contemporary white poets in a way that might have implied not just chronology but priority. Hayes had to have noticed that using birthdates as a seemingly neutral method of organization would have the effect of making white surrealists seem more important to him. No use limiting himself to expected Black poets.

Indeed, that arrangement posits how surrealism—Lorde and Baldwin lending eyeballs!—and other imaginative priorities are at least as important to Hayes’s literary history as the multiple Black poets he canonizes, many of whom—Coleman, Kaufman, Russell Atkins, Lorenzo Thomas—are poets one might call bohemian or experimental. Not the expected Black poets at all but the “contested lineages” that include poets such as Amiri Baraka, who was famously diminished in Charles Henry Rowell’s influential anthology Angles of Ascent (2013). Hayes has said that he likes the “American sonnet” form for its multiple voltas, its multiple turns against its own logic, allowing him to resist residing in any consistent aesthetic, moral, or political position. This ambivalence or mobility, so to speak, is frustrating but productively so.

Like Hayes, and because of some of his artistry, then, I had to “shudder at all that’s covered by my blind spots, biases, and limitations.” I was sometimes blind to how individual poems, such as the two titled “Strange As the Rules of Grammar,” are meant to be records of a train of thought rather than the resolutions I sought. And I certainly did not grasp a priority on kindness until I read “A Poetics of Practice Keynote” at the end of Watch Your Language. In that essay, I saw how ambivalence may indeed be liberating in part because it requires an important kind of acceptance. Citing a racist question once asked of him at a poetry reading—whether his basketball career made him poetic—Hayes meditates on what being Black and poetic means and what kindness might mean in the face of such stereotyping. Gwendolyn Brooks becomes his model here as she embraced the 1960s radical poets despite their harsh politics and hermetic Blackness. As Hayes observes, “to the notion of inherent poetic blackness, [Brooks] adds a notion of kindness.” He goes on to say, “It is not niceness. Niceness is superficial, civil, cosmetic. Kindness is closer to the bone; truth is in the marrow of kindness.” The essay suggests that a mode of care resides in embracing how one is of the same “kind” as another and that a more genuine relation than niceness or bigotry can emerge as a result.

There can even be a “cruel kindness,” Hayes avers. I presume this allows me to notice that, in poems such as “Gertrude Badu,” Hayes’s female characters, including his mother, sometimes seem to be objects even when they are subjects, not always as mobile as his male speakers, not always as close to the bone. In this case, the poem is primarily about the poet’s admiration of and anxiety about female cool, even as it claims to be about the title character’s full subjectivity. Cruel kindness allows me to wonder aloud about why Hayes's public defense of Tony Hoagland’s “risk” after Hoagland’s public diss of Claudia Rankine in response to her public letter about the racial thinking in his poem “The Change” asks to attribute the racial flaw to the poem, not the poet, the “made thing,” not the “maker.” The prose-poem bio of Hoagland in Watch Your Language compares the controversy with Rankine—unmentioned in the poem but clearly implied—to science fiction films in which people are led to an alternative realm and a parable of a white man leading Black children to a swimming hole at a lake. Calling for perspective on the power of art, the poem ends, “Do you feel apologies have no value in this climate? Are your children dumbstruck & afraid? Tony Hoagland rests in peace.” What distinguishes perspective from evasion? What must one forgive to be free? In the face of Hayes’s commitments to “transgression” and “transcendence,” how freeing is it to point out what might be his blind spots?

No matter what resistance I felt, one thing is beautifully clear: these books make the best case I have observed in a while for seeing individuality as a practice that can be freeing for Black people. It is the emphasis on ongoing, articulate self-awareness that matters. Rejecting static notions of identity may vindicate Hayes for insulating himself from certain modes of convention or scrutiny by making the poem more about itself than about its subject. The puzzles Hayes’s poems sometimes present are hard to track since he has read way more poetry (and different poetry) than many of us, but he is not flaunting it so much as claiming a part in a poetic conversation. And that conversation is meant to cultivate the best aspects of “personality,” which skewers “identity,” its rigid categories, and its consequent social unfreedom. Knowing all of this, I am sad to admit that I sometimes wanted more directness. Still, as I read and reread and read again, I kept coming back to how hard it was for Iverson to make himself understood. I realized that maybe, like him, like Hayes, I just need more practice.