"The Poet in the Enchanted Shoe Factory": An Interview with Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes. Photo by W.T. Pfefferie

This interview was conducted on July 14, 2004, by telephone, between College Station, Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Terrance Hayes lives with his family.

ROWELL: Each of your collections of poems to date has won awards. Muscular Music (1999) won two awards—the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Whiting Writers Award. Your second volume, Hip Logic (2002), was a National Poetry Series winner. And I have only mentioned a few of your awards and prizes for poetry. This is extraordinary for a new poet—that is, for a new poet to receive such a long and sustained applause for his or her first two books. What does this kind of reception mean to you as an artist at the beginning of his career?

HAYES: I tend to believe awards and poetry have very little to do with one another. What it means to make art and make a living as an artist are two different things. So, you know, I get a monetary award I'm happy to have the money but I don't mistake that for the true value of the work; I'm more interested in acknowledging my friends: the people who directly and sometimes indirectly influence the shaping of my poems. My wife has to remind me to thank the folks that award me money and the like. I appreciate the awards, but I don't think too much of them in terms of what it means to be a poet.

ROWELL: What do you mean when you say your poems relate more directly to your friends?

HAYES: The relationship between art and community is much more relevant than the relationship between art and professionalism. There should be an award for the poets who help other poets. In each of my own books, for example, the poets Joel Dias Porter, Elizabeth Alexander, Shara McCallum, and of course my poet-wife, Yona Harvey, have been thanked. (Whereas I've actually forgotten to thank a foundation or two for providing cash!) I can imagine producing the same quality of poems without the awards, but not without the help of friends like them.

ROWELL: I have no doubt that, in Muscular Music, it is the freshness of your language and the newness of your imagery, along with your orchestration of form and your ability to illuminate the most ordinary events, actions, and objects in our lives that have garnered for you such a positive reception. Will you talk about the language of your poetry?

HAYES: To talk about my use and understanding of language, I would have to talk a bit about my background. Growing up in South Carolina, I was primarily a visual artist. I helped to start the first art club at my elementary school. I was the guy who painted murals and designed T-shirts. I went to college on a basketball scholarship and majored in Fine Arts. I really wasn't thinking about language per se, but I was writing poems and I always had the encouragement of a few English teachers. One of them suggested I apply to graduate school for poetry and when I was accepted into the University of Pittsburgh, I entered their MFA program having taken only one intro to creative writing class as a college sophomore. That's all to say that, for a long time, I had no conscious relationship to language and the broader world of poetry. Consequently, I wasn't very interested in the ways my graduate school classmates were writing poems. I decided to draw from what I knew: the south, music, and art. I decided to seek out the poets who seemed to share my aesthetics—or at least who'd developed an aesthetic I could use, could imitate. I developed whatever understanding I have of language and poetry mostly through obsessive reading. I suppose then that, at...