Hayes, Terrance

Terrance Hayes (c) Kathy Ryan

Terrance Hayes, born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1971, is the author of seven poetry collections, including “So to Speak” (Penguin Books 2023), “American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin” (Penguin Books 2018) and “Lighthead” (Penguin Books 2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry. As a critic, he published “Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry” (Penguin Books 2023). Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Whiting Foundation, and is a professor of English at New York University.

Festival Content

BERLIN POETRY LECTURE 2024 – TERRANCE HAYES

Introduction to an Illustrated Timeline of Poetic Influence – The Poetics of Context, Text, and Subtext

Kuppelhalle | 9/7 € Tickets

“Reading is a mix of telepathy and time travel. […] I consider my life evidence. My life is made possible because of my writing, but my writing is made possible because of my reading.” In Watch Your Language, it is not just the poet who is speaking, it is above all the poetry aficionado Terrance Hayes (born 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina) who is speaking. In short essays, illustrations, poems, diagrams, and game instructions, Hayes traces his life in reading and calls for alertness towards language. In doing so, he presents one possible compendium of American poetry from the previous century and a glowing tribute to the writers he admires—James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Wanda Coleman and Yusef Komunyakaa, to name but a few. Hayes does not address his role models with dry biographical accounts but with eclectic portraits teeming with poetic ingenuity. The essay on Russell Atkins, for example, states: “Art should encourage expenditures of beasts buried with candelabras burning elaborately underground.”

Hayes, Terrance

POETRY TALK: TERRANCE HAYES

Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully

Atelierraum | 7/5 € Tickets

Terrance Hayes (born 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina) is one of the biggest names in contemporary US American poetry. He has published seven collections of poetry, including the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, Lighthead (Penguin Books 2010), and American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin Books 2018), a crown of sonnets that was begun after Donald Trump was elected president. In this volume, Hayes was influenced by Wanda Coleman and breaks the sonnet form apart with twists and turns and playful ambiguities: “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.” And in his latest volume So To Speak (Penguin Books 2023), Hayes updates rigid poetic forms such as sonnets, ghazals, and sestinas in didactic poems such as “DIY Sestina: What Does This Piece Remind You Of?” This poem is preceded by a tabular template to write descriptions of images in the sestina form. Hayes also uses this resistance to the prescribed formal constraints and norms as a way to produce the content. He frequently collages the voices and experiences of Black artists and from African American history, uniting poetic potential with an exploration of the self: “If you see suffering’s potential as art, is it art or suffering? / If you see life’s potential as art, is it artful or artificial living?”

Hayes, Terrance