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Tag Archives: Poetry
Lighthead by Terrance Hayes
Any review of Terrance Hayes’s stunning new collection Lighthead—which recently won the National Book Award in poetry—must inevitably address the trajectory of American poetry, for his is one of the most dynamic and versatile voices among us. Continue reading
Interview: Roger Weingarten
Your first two books, What Birds Are Worth and Ethan Benjamin Boldt, are radically different in tone and style, but both were published in May 1975. What relationship exists between those two, if any, and what role did they play in your maturation?
When Ethan Benjamin Boldt, my second book, written between ‘71-‘73 and accepted for publication in ‘74, appeared twelve days before What Birds Are Worth, my first, written between ‘67-‘70 and accepted for publication in ’71, I felt my career was a dog track where both efforts were neck and neck trying to nail the electric rabbit.
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Interview: Diya Chaudhuri
The “Birthing” poems are a series, obviously. Can you talk a little bit about this series? How many poems are there? What got you started? What space do you envision these poems take up in your work as a whole?
I did my undergraduate thesis under Natasha Trethewey, who writes those wonderfully researched books of poetry like Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard, in which she inhabits a place and a time not her own, and in which she speaks through the mouthpiece of characters other than herself. I more or less wanted to wear her poetic flesh at the time, so I tried my hand at a series of historic poems for my thesis. I actually think of them as the Partition poems, since this little triptych belongs to a larger series of poems about my father’s childhood experiences as a Hindu displaced from East Pakistan (Bangladesh) to India. I’ve revisited the project a few times since finishing the thesis – sometimes for graduate workshops, sometimes just for kicks, and once for a great seminar I took on childhood and trauma. This particular poem was written recently, in grad school. Though I don’t want to be that Indian poet (Indians are just SO. IN. this season), I’ve not been able to put this project to bed just yet. I have no idea what the experience of religious displacement is like, so I have to step outside of my corner of the world – but really, I’m stepping into an experience that I’ve inherited from my father. That interplay between what I can’t possibly know and what I feel I have a responsibility to learn and document is terribly stressful, but terribly sexy. I don’t know what space the Partition poems will ultimately take up in my work, but that space will be either terrible, stressful, or sexy. Continue reading
