'A poem is never about one thing... you want it to be as complicated as your feelings': Terrance Hayes at NYT

Wow! The New York Times Magazine hosts this very comprehensive, thought-provoking profile of fantastic, Pittsburgh-based legend Terrance Hayes (by Stephen Burt). If you haven't ever read Hayes's work, Burt's article is a uniquely insightful opportunity to learn more. From NYT:

Fifty students sat at bright white desks in concentric rows in the sterile new computer center at Woodland Hills High School, their eyes on the poet Terrance Hayes. At 6-foot-5, Hayes, who is 43, is easy to see from anywhere, and he seemed eminently approachable, neither teacher nor teen: bluejeans, a black sweater, a leather cellphone case clipped to his belt. He had come to the school, in a racially mixed district that serves several disadvantaged communities in Pittsburgh, to read poetry. The students — Goths, hip-hop fans in giant sweatshirts and jocks in sports jerseys — grew quiet, ready to listen.

But Hayes didn’t start out with his poems. Instead, he talked about how he came to write them: How he got from his native Columbia, S.C., to graduate study at the University of Pittsburgh; how his poems react to film (“Lady Sings the Blues”), to news (a Chicago gang murder from 1994), to music (Kendrick Lamar), to family history; and how he assembled some of those poems into books, from his first, “Muscular Music” (published in 1999), to his most recent, “How to Be Drawn” (which will be published this month).

Hayes has read at Carnegie Hall and the Library of Congress and edited the annual Best American Poetry, whose previous volumes included his work seven times. He won a National Book Award in 2010 for the collection “Lighthead” and, last year, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. In 2014, People magazine named Hayes among its candidates for Sexiest Man Alive. (“I didn’t think anyone would see it,” he told me, with characteristic understatedness.) The poet Shara McCallum, a friend of Hayes’s, said, “ ‘Famous poet’ seems like an oxymoron, but Terrance seems to deliver something for a lot of people.” When she saw him at a crowded writer’s convention two years ago, she said, “it was like groupies with Mick Jagger.”

With close-cropped hair in place of his former mohawk, Hayes has the physical ease of the basketball player he once was, the athlete’s bodily awareness that John McPhee called “a sense of where you are.” When reading verse, Hayes stood still, with squared shoulders, but when he talked about the poems, he leaned forward, his arms folded over the lectern, pointing at students and to a slide show he had prepared, projected on a screen behind him. Before reading his poem “Lady Sings the Blues,” he played an audio clip of Billie Holiday singing “Good Morning, Heartache.” (“Good morning, heartache, here we go again/Good morning, heartache, you’re the one who knew me when.”) The students watched, their faces blank. The song was plainly unfamiliar. “Does it really matter that you know this stuff?” he asked.

None of them ventured an answer. A few gazed down, perhaps checking cellphones. But many were still paying attention when he began talking about things they did know: Pittsburgh and hip-hop. “I hung out with a lot of hip-hop guys in grad school,” he said. “They would say, ‘Why you got your book — just come onstage!’ ” In response, he wrote his own hip-hop performance poem, “Ballad of Bullethead,” which begins, “I was born in metal/— my mother’s kettle/My father peddled/So we settled alone.” When he read it aloud, the students broke into applause. “You find art everywhere,” he said, before reading what he called “my only basketball poem,” “Talk,” from 2006, in which a black student reacts to a racist comment made by a white teammate. The poem begins in a middle-school locker room: “Talk/like a nigger now, my white friend, M, said.” The students gasped at the opening line [...]

Continue at The New York Times. If you're in Chicago on April 2nd, be sure to stop by the Poetry Foundation to hear Hayes deliver a lecture as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry.