In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Callaloo 27.4 (2004) 1084



[Access article in PDF]

Imaginary Poems for the Old-Fashioned Future

  1. Sooner or later I'm going to have to talk about the white house and how the men there don't seem to like big butt women.
  2. There will also be a praise poem for the smartest, strongest, and/or fastest human alive should he or she live in a region with no reporters, printing presses, indoor plumbing etc.
  3. And further additional efforts to demonstrate the ways my undoubtedly brilliant mind transforms day to day happenings into stuff. (parts 1-30)
  4. A poem by someone named LesterSea. Someone named Lenore. Headline sonnets maybe. Titles ripped from the annuls of jazz bebop, no doubt.
  5. Written in seat 9A between Chicago and Traverse City. Little shacks with stoves on the big iced lake. (Fish cakes in the stoves.)
  6. Four long titled poems transcribing recipes into poems using color, shape—senses, and the pronoun I where ever there is a the.
  7. An "I love big" button somewhere. (I love you, Portly, don't let em take me...")
  8. Part I "Viscous circus"; Part II "Victory Circle"; Part III "Vicious Service" and if there be a Part IV "Very Surly"
  9. "Dwell," "Furl," maybe. Girlish laughter in the pipes. (Keep talking, we know the same people.)
  10. "The Short Age" followed by "The Us Age" followed by "The Bond Age" followed by "The Volt (or Re-volt) Age" followed by "Dose Ages," "Mile Ages" and "Out Ages." (See appendix)
  11. Definitions of Divine Imaging, Speed Lightening, and Gerimantic Racial Demography. (Pronunciations of logistic as lowgetstick; stroll as scroll)
  12. Half a dozen one hundred line attempts at resolving the poem: "I come from a long line of . . . "
  13. A stanza rhyming bric-a-brac, brick-a-black, and papa bag.
Terrance Hayes is an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He is also the author of two volumes of poems, Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999) and Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), and has been the winner of numerous awards and prizes, including Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the National Poetry Series, and the Whiting Writers Award. Wind in a Box, his third volume, will be published in 2005 by Penguin.


...

pdf

Share