Multiple Choice: Terrance Hayes’s Response-Poems and the African American Lyric ‘We’

This essay explores the African American lyric ‘we’, past and present, through the bifocal lenses of the contemporary poet Terrance Hayes. Irreverently responding in verse to Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka, Hayes mines his subject matter from the African American poet’s choices between ‘I’ and ‘we’, between speaking for oneself and speaking for one’s people. Exercising the ‘multiple choice’ of post-Civil Rights generation poets, Hayes strives for all the above. The essay examines three forms of response to the tradition: confrontational ‘talking back’ in Hip Logic, ‘Blue’ ventriloquism in Wind in the Box, and collaboration with the dead in Lighthead.

This essay is one of four appearing under the heading ‘Poetry’s We’ in The Cambridge Quarterly vol. 48 no. 3. The four essays evolved as a group and have many shared concerns.