How to Draw a Perfect Circle Terrance Hayes
As we know, poetry is non a transcription of experiences, but a transformation of them. In How to Be Fatigued, Terrance Hayes does us ane better. He transforms transformations. And and then transforms those. What results are poems at one time original and daring, willful and honest. Readers will return to this collection over again and once more and leave its pages annealed, challenged, and often cleaved.
Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry: Muscular Music, Hip Logic, Wind In a Box,Lighthead and, most recently How To Be Fatigued.Hayes teaches writing in the University of Pittsburgh'due south Section of English in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
Nicole Sealey: From one book to the next, it seems as though y'all're conducting collection-specific experiments with form and content. Is this something you gear up out to exercise or is information technology realized in hindsight?
Terrance Hayes: I'one thousand more often than not but thinking nearly the last poem and the next verse form on whatever given day. And then my experiments are really verse form-to-poem challenges. Sometimes a challenge merits a few dissimilar attempts. I think in How To Be Drawn the experiment with the "long poem" form required multiple tries. Each section has some variety of extended verse form: "Who Are The Tribes," "Instructions for a Seance for Vladimirs," "Self Portrait equally the Mind of a Photographic camera." In each, it was similar trying to hold my jiff underwater for equally long as possible, like seeing how long I could concur the air inside a verse form
NS: "Who Are the Tribes," "Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Mode of a Offense Report," "Reconstructed Reconstruction" and "Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh" aren't only longer. In that location are other experiments being undertaken, no?
TH: Yeah, those poems are experiments, simply in the way every new verse form is some manner of experiment or claiming. The longer poems were attempts to sustain an experiment in a way that differed from repeating a set of rules. The Pecha Kucha poems from Lighthead (in How To Be Drawn, "Gentle Measures" is a Pecha Kucha), for case, are a formal experiment repeated in separate poems. The long poems inHow To Exist Drawn are extended experiments inside each verse form.
NS: Do you worry when you're non writing or do you think any you're doing (or non doing) is contributing to poems yet to come in means you may not know?
TH: I always feel like I'm non writing enough. Or well enough. And that I am ever missing most of what's interesting in the globe. I cope with this feeling (of inadequacy) past trying to be alarm to feel. Just I want the experiences I capture to become more simple records of feel. Sometimes the outcome is a record of fantasy. That's the case in "Black Amalgamated Ghost Story". Sometimes the result is a record of meditation. That'due south how I think of "How to Depict a Perfect Circle." Both poems originate in actual experiences, but in neither verse form did I know what would result beforehand.
[pullquote align="correct" cite="Terrance Hayes" link="" color="#FBC900″ class="" size=""]It was like trying to agree my breath underwater for as long every bit possible, like seeing how long I could concord the air inside a poem.[/pullquote]
NS: I kickoff heard you read "How to Draw a Perfect Circumvolve" a few years ago, just it was only recently published. From first to final typhoon, how desperate are your revisions?
Thursday: I try non to rails my revisions because they are so extensive. It can exist daunting to realize a poem has gone through 1 hundred drafts—it was at least i hundred drafts with "How To Draw a Perfect Circle." I call back in that location was a much longer section most the cyclops and the size of his middle socket. That's now just a moment about an onion the size of his eyeball. When I'm not keeping count, the procedure feels both engaging and discouraging. Every typhoon is presumably the terminal draft. Until it's not. And so I usually will sit with a verse form for quite a few months earlier sending it out for publication. I accept to be sure I'm done with it.
NS: Per the opening verse form, "What Information technology Look Like," the speaker "intendance[s] less and less about shapes of shapes considering forms change and nil is more durable than feeling." How so should one be drawn?
Thursday: Variously. Every portrait is a self-portrait, I read somewhere. If applied to the "What It Expect Like" quote: the form a portrait takes matters less than the feeling information technology elicits. Or: What it looks like is not always the same as what it feels like.
[pullquote align="left" cite="Terrance Hayes" link="" color="#FBC900″ course="" size=""]Every draft is presumably the last draft. Until information technology'due south not.[/pullquote]
NS: If yous were stranded on a deserted island, and could just take one medium with y'all, what would it be? Pen and newspaper? A finely tuned pianoforte? Or, sheet and paint?
Th: That's a hard 1. If I were stranded on a monkish mountain, I'd carry painting supplies, if I was stranded in a cave, I'd want a piano. On an island, I think information technology would exist books. Not my ain. I'd write in the sand.
NS: Which books would you accept?
Thursday: The first books that jump to heed are novels I've read more than a few times (Lolita, Cruel Detectives, Ane Hundred Years of Solitude, Song of Solomon) but definitely 1 of the books would be the Oxford English Dictionary. I don't think I'd take one book of poetry—unless I could accept similar 100. I don't typically read one book of poetry at a time, come to think about it.
NS: From book to book, does "verse" get whatever easier?
Thursday: Right now I fear this is the last book I'll write. It's the way I often experience later on a book is published. That's not to say I'm not writing new poems. It's just that I write poems not books, mostly. At some point a book emerges, merely the day-to-solar day work is about unmarried poems. The challenges are found in the poems.
Nicole Sealey is the author of The Beast After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.
Source: https://www.nationalbook.org/terrance-hayes-interviewed-by-nicole-sealey/
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