The great defenses of poetry that have come down to us through the ages, from Dante to Sidney to Shelley to Eliot, give the lie to the notion that there is any sharp distinction between the lyrical and the rhetorical, verse and prose, the creative and the expository. So why does there seem to be a newfangled, twenty-first-century superstition against mixing the two, border patrols stationed over a too-porous corpus callosum? Besides this fetishizing of creativity (as if criticism weren’t creative), there is a general air of trepidation regarding critical commentary—either the field of poetry is too big and diverse to generalize about, or reviewing is too dangerous to one’s reputation (sins of omission being riskier than sins of commission). The result is fewer books of prose by American poets. A surprising number of eminences have yet to publish a collection of essays or lectures.
Enter Maureen McLane and Terrance Hayes, who have both recently published their second collections of criticism. Born in 1967 and 1971, respectively, they are the authors of multiple books of acclaimed poetry. (Hayes’s Lighthead won the National Book Award in 2010.) Coincidentally both teach at New York University, he in creative writing and she in the English department as the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters. (Her area is English Romanticism.) My Poetics and Watch Your Language are very different books, but they have revealing points of contact. McLane begins hers with a “Proem in the Form of a Q&A”; Hayes interposes a series of “Twentieth Century Examination” questions before each of his nine sections. The effect of each is to decenter the authority of the writer, posing uncertainty—or open-endedness—as a critical virtue. (In Hayes’s case, it also dampens slightly the confrontational spirit of his revisionary project.)
Both use the cento—the poetic form that collages lines from different poets to make a choral work out of a lyric one—in these new books of criticism. Both intersperse their own poetry among their prose, which contributes to variation as well as unity: since these books are collections of disparate essays, blog posts, lectures, and other miscellany, they seek to highlight the variousness and smooth over the disjunctions, sometimes just by reminding us that the poet precedes the critic, and poets are mosaicists by nature. But it is in the rejection of Eliotic impersonality and the embrace of lyrical or subjective criticism that they most resemble each other: at a time when expertise, mastery, and authority are suspect, admitting partiality is a kind of indemnification. It’s no coincidence that both use the possessive first-person pronoun—Hayes titles a piece “My Gwendolyn Brooks,” and McLane has made the word her trademark, though it is a gesture that has now become commonplace.
My Poetics immediately recalls her 2012 collection of essays entitled My Poets. It was like no other critical study—was it a critical study? a memoir?—teeming with quotations, enlivened with unabashed schwarmerei. Though explicitly feminist, it was ecumenical: alongside Dickinson, Bishop, Stein, Moore, H.D., Louise Glück, and Fanny Howe, McLane showered affection on Chaucer, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and above all Percy Bysshe Shelley. Many of the chapters were titled with a poet’s name preceded by “my,” an allusion to two experimental books of prose by poets that became cult favorites of the 1980s: My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe and My Life by Lyn Hejinian.
In My Poets, close readings were kept short and sweet; anecdotes abounded, some of them juicy. The book unfurled as a bildungsroman, sketching McLane’s apprenticeship as reader and writer of poetry, beginning with two courses she took at Harvard in 1985: a large lecture class with Helen Vendler and a writing workshop with the poet William Corbett. This stereoscopic education—reading/writing, bird’s-eye/ground-level views—set the pattern for a poet-critic in the making. McLane even reproduced a photo of her naive notes on Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” remarking “there is a profoundly idiot-savant quality to my marginalia, proving (yet again) the dangers of knowing a little.”
The education of a poet is long and errant, yes, but with this book McLane was making a pointed effort to stay in touch with adolescent naiveté. Where would we be without it? And how would we convince further generations of adolescents that poetry was alive—on fire!—without baring our own headstrong hearts and blundering annotations? My Poets, you understood, was written not in a critical spirit but an urgently personal one, a tone of pedagogical contagion. And humor: Among other things, might Chaucer’s mot juste for a “difficult situation” or “awkward affair,” kankedort, be enough to send us back to Troilus and Criseyde of an evening? The past, she seems to say, is a trove of words that may prove useful, not least for their onomatopoeic magic.
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A dozen years later, My Poetics presents itself at the outset as a companion volume. The intertextuality of the title extends to Charles Bernstein, whose 1992 collection of essays A Poetics was, like Howe’s and Hejinian’s books, on the reading list of any self-conscious, experimental-curious would-be poet of the period. Bernstein’s title was itself a callback to one of the first works of literary criticism, affixing the indefinite article to Aristotle’s Poetics, a gesture to both the indeterminacy that was in the air (kicked off perhaps by Marjorie Perloff’s The Poetics of Indeterminacy in 1981) and, in the spirit of Derridean play, the suggestion of the negative prefix a-: apoetics. A lot can be inferred about the historical distance traversed from A to My, but Poetics itself has remained a constant—indeed now a cliché—of academic writing: my library search engine churns up a cauldron of titles having nothing to do with poetry starting with The Poetics of: Being, Becoming, Loss; Resistance, Appetite, Conspiracy; Sea, Air, and Elsewhere.
From the start, My Poetics feels like a retrogressive turn to that era, roughly the early 1980s to the late 1990s, when poetry and critical theory made strange bedfellows. Unlike My Poets, My Poetics is light on anecdote and heavy on quotes from the likes of Arendt to Althusser. Neologisms like “hypermarked” speak to a coterie audience:
In Stevens’s poems, ventures into (raids on) notionally “Black” sonics seem to function as a hypermarked “American” corrective to his explorations of French and Latin registers that some saw—and some still see—as dandyism.
Or a combination of jargon and syntax creates a structure in which meaning cannot stand, sit, or lie:
I wonder too whether this might open us to something like a prehermeneutic stance, a peculiarly sensuous askesis of deferring interpretation, not quite (or not only) an embrace of surface reading but a registering of the possibility of other, or multiple, grids for supposedly, merely, noticing: the tree under the ravens, the emergent field through which (a) ballad character walks.
This sentence comes from the essay “Compositional/Poetics,” one of five chapter headings that denote various “axes” of poetic inquiry. A reader might forgive the academese—or just maneuver around it—to imbibe McLane’s deep knowledge of the history of English poetry. Her discussion of the ballad tradition is a highlight of the book, its anonymity a foil to the individualist Romantics she loves, like Shelley. Some of the linguistic invention is fresh and accessible, as when from ballad composition she leaps to “ballad composting,” wherein ballads both recycle themselves in many variations and refer in their subject matter to human bodies and their transformations after death. In one murder ballad that goes by several names (and has ninety-seven tune variants), the body parts—breastbone, hair, finger bones—of a dead woman are repurposed into a musical instrument that reveals her murderer when it is played.
McLane reminds us that the repetitive refrain of a ballad was also called a “burden,” a word fruitful with ethical and ontological possibilities. And yet the ballad is wonderfully unburdened too—of pat psychological motive and identitarianism. It shares those qualities with myth, and in fact there is a Hellenistic variant of the Greek Echo myth in which the nymph’s body parts, buried in various hollows of the earth, make a music that mocks and haunts her murderer, Pan. I couldn’t help but wonder what McLane could have done with an essay on ballads that made use of the poet Allen Grossman (who explored the significance of Orpheus and Philomela in his 1997 collection of essays, The Long Schoolroom) rather than Alain Badiou.
In other words, I ended up feeling like I was eavesdropping on a conversation not meant for me, in a language “hypermarked” not by the lyric tradition or by the conversational vernacular but by the buzzwords of academic specialists. I felt this less in the delightful chapter on rhyme, which discussed a wider range of poets and even broke into gleefully slapdash rhyming couplets for the last eight pages, collaging hip-hop, blues, and Gertrude Stein:
Let’s rather network
our way, work
it like Missy Elliott
flip it and reverse it
This A-Way
And That A-Way
so “Lifting Belly”
might salute Leady Belly.
McLane’s essay on “notational” poetics, a discussion of the fragment as the literary device du jour, which brings together Barthes and W.S. Graham, Ezra Pound and haiku, is also usefully syncretic, aimed at makers as well as theoreticians. Her own poetry is neither academic nor coterie; it is, like her favorites Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth, nonprogrammatic. Coteries always induce irritation and impatience for those on the outside, but that’s not the only reason I balked: we need an outward not an inward turn among our best thinkers right now—and that means addressing a public beyond the academic journal.
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It falls, then, to Terrance Hayes to summon pedagogical contagion à la My Poets. Watch Your Language is a follow-up to To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (2018), a central poet in the Black Arts Movement. In that book Hayes intertwined his own poetic coming-of-age with Knight’s: both were Black men from the South (Hayes from South Carolina, Knight from Mississippi), and the generational gap put Hayes in the position of a vindicating son. Knight started writing poetry in a state prison in Indiana, where he served eight years for an armed robbery conviction in the 1960s, a fate set into motion by his service in the Korean War and a shrapnel wound that led to drug addiction. Hayes, born in more fortunate circumstances, makes it his mission to raise the visibility of Knight’s work as well as that of other African American poets whose distinctive lineage is sidelined by the prominent discourses surrounding mostly white twentieth-century movements. Watch Your Language makes good on its epigraph, taken from Toni Morrison, to “draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography.”
This involves a brisk sweep of twentieth-century American poetry. Hayes pays homage to the famous and the feted, as in “My Gwendolyn Brooks,” though he asks, “How is it that she can be the most well-known poet with the most unread poems in modern American poetry?” But his overarching mission is to shine a light on obscure figures, like the Harlem Renaissance poet William Waring Cuney and the Chicago poet (and Brooks contemporary) Margaret Danner, who it seems was more famous for championing Langston Hughes than for her own work. And for Hayes, that’s no insult. “Is a made thing ever more interesting than the maker of things? Not to me,” he avers. And: “Which matters most: the poem, the poet, or the state of poetry?”
The work that goes into teaching and reciting Black poetry to the younger generation, the work of nurturing a community, like Chicago’s South Side or Harlem, the work of “queen of the evening mothering us Black orphan poets” (as he writes of Toi Derricotte, cofounder of the Black Arts collective Cave Canem) are just as or more important than what gets printed on the page and totted up as “collected” at the end of a life. It’s a strong statement, this valuation of poets at the expense (perhaps) of poems, and the book teems with personages and their birth dates, pen sketches drawn by Hayes himself, and lyrically compressed biographies—more like prose poems than encyclopedia entries.
Hayes aims his book at an audience of neophytes and students. “Preface: How to Use This Book” sets out the terms for self-education, a perhaps lifelong autodidacticism:
Reading is a mix of telepathy and time travel. It’s a magical transference of information, knowledge, and mystery: the context, text, and subtext of a reader’s life. I consider my life evidence. My life is made possible because of my writing, but my writing is made possible because of my reading. Does reading require talent? No, reading requires stamina and time—two things that may yield the same fruit as talent.
This is excellent and uncompromising at a moment when it seems that even our educational overlords are ready to throw in the towel to AI. Hayes wants to make readers of us all, with a particular eye to his favorites but without sermonizing: “Any book that matters to a reader is literature.” Yet the book is structured like a looser, more playful textbook: in addition to the plentiful drawings and twentieth-century timelines, there are “examinations,” exhaustive quizzes without answers that sometimes sound like they come from a teacher (“What would John Keats think of jazz?”) and sometimes from a personality test (“Would you rather be the first or the best at something?”). “What are your adjectives?” is a typical creative writing craft exercise. Occasionally a striking bit of trivia leaps forth: “Did you know Ezra Pound met Emmett Till’s father in prison?”
Hayes also has fun inventing poetry board games, tarot cards, and a “Renegade Poetic Fortune-Telling Machine.” “A fear of boredom (what’s the medical term for that?) compels me to try something different every day here,” he confesses in a series of blog posts reproduced from the Poetry Foundation website. That is for sure a poet’s malady, or liability, or lability. Fear of boredom, and of being boring, also compels him to rhetorically couch his textual commentary in direct address, as in “Everyday Mojo Letters to Yusef”—that is, one of the leading lights of contemporary poetry, Yusef Komunyakaa. “To call you a Black jazz poet is to call you an elusive walking metaphor. Was it John Coltrane who said, ‘I don’t play jazz; I play John Coltrane’?” Hayes goes beyond deference—an ancient odic flourish, like Horace hailing Pindar—to self-deprecation, recalling a “brief, mediocre review” his younger self wrote on Komunyakaa’s poetry, and how the older poet “slyly did not answer the question” when Hayes interviewed him and asked, “How do you draw the line between the Private and the Public, as a poet?”
All this confessionalism can seem disingenuous. But then Hayes, in his conversational way, makes hairpin turns from Erik Satie’s Gnossienne No. 3 to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet to Van Gogh, James Baldwin, and Emily Dickinson (“she had blackbirds for eyeballs”), while improvising both a hymn to Komunyakaa’s oeuvre and to the mysterious sympathy between one poet and another, “the continuous motion between learning and knowing.”
Elsewhere the testimonial quality of Hayes’s appreciations does get in the way of his subjects. In his tribute to the late Tony Hoagland, for example, we’re told almost nothing of importance about Hoagland or his work, though Hayes forges a connection between himself and the poet through their backgrounds. (Both had fathers in the army; and like Hoagland, Hayes’s younger brother was born at Fort Bragg.) Shouldn’t we hear something about Hoagland’s poetry? Likewise we learn more about the history of the Maine coon cat than we do about Lucie Brock-Broido’s work, as though her pet (“Sweet William”) could stand for her bona fides as an artist and a person. “I could not have completed this book without a lifetime of teachers,” Hayes writes in his acknowledgments, citing both Hoagland and Brock-Broido. This is salutary, but also insidery. It’s a symptom of the age of course, the age of I and my—so I couldn’t help thinking of the anonymous ballad writers and even Homer, whom we know nothing of and who was likely not even one man. Their works have lived for centuries and for millennia without the advocacy of the writer or the personal testimony of their friends: this, too, is liberating.
There is, to my mind, an even greater weakness to Hayes’s project, and that is the lack of close readings of individual poems, particularly in his pieces on Brooks and Komunyakaa. (I’d hate to think this was a work-around for a very common problem—the inordinate red tape and high cost of permission to quote poems that are still under copyright, which is helping to dampen the discourse around the entire field.) I relish a good poem analysis; though Hayes comes up with an amusing metaphor for this—the “unboxing” videos that people post on social media—he doesn’t actually do the unboxing. Brooks’s poem “When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story” “foregrounds its everydayness in the title, for example. The poem’s animated, dash-filled syntax unfolds like bedsheets and loose limbs.” That’s all we get on Brooks’s work, though the book it comes from is “one of our great national treasures.” Enthusiasm is essential, but evidence—or the exhilarating performance of a masterful interpretation—is even better. As we say in workshop: show, don’t tell.
But it’s likely that Hayes will inspire more poets to write directly about their art, their influences, their debts. That matters: no one creates in a vacuum, and no art can afford to let the conversation around it lapse—not today, when there’s more profit, more cultural energy or cathexis, in manipulating a population into hysteria than there is in providing education and nourishment. As Frank O’Hara said: “In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.”
