Wind in a Box

"That was his first book, yes. It’s a book that I like, but all the other books I love. Yes, he’s very musical and he plays the piano quite seriously. I had the good fortune to get to interview him at length and his musical knowledge is really quite broad. And I think all of his books have both references to individual actual musicians – Grace Jones and Marvin Gaye and Michael Jackson and David Bowie etc – but they also have references to musical genres where the examples are made up, and they are in dialogue with musical styles in a way that can’t be reduced to what we know about individual artists. He’s even written a series of poems – in his book Lighthead – about made up musicians and reviews of made up records. So, he has tremendous range in the way to use the interplay between verse composition and sound performance throughout his work. I think of him as an intellectual, so I’d be surprised to hear him describe his work in that way. I think he is trying to find ways of thinking in language that are more like the kinds of thought made possible by music composition – whether it’s improvisational music composition, or the kind of composition that you do when you are arranging a pop song, or composing a string quartet. I think there are a lot of kinds of thought that are not discursive and not propositional. And his formal versatility – his formal restlessness – and the fact that his poems are always embracing and reinventing some formal and some generic model has a lot to do with his wish to think experimentally, in ways that are non-propositional. Powell and Kasischke both have a relationship with poetic form that is always interesting tactically. Why does this line sound that way? Why did you put that phrase there? Why is there a barren rhyme here? Why are you repeating that word? There are infinite things to say about how Powell and Kasischke do in terms of their use of form, tactically, moment to moment to moment. With Hayes, the consistent and inexhaustible interest in form and technique is not just tactical but strategic. I often find myself wanting to say ‘what kind of poem does he think he is writing? Or what kind of composition?’ It might be a be-bop piece with a series of solos, or electronica, or some other musical form that he’s starting from, rather than a piece of received poetic form. But he’s interested in composition, in what kind of form I am using and how I can tweak it as poem-wide strategy. “Terrance Hayes’s games have major emotional stakes, but you have to familiarise yourself with how the game is played first” With British and Irish audiences, I like to compare him to Paul Muldoon. I think Terrance Hayes and Paul Muldoon have things in common with each other that they do not have in common with, really, almost anyone else at work in English language poetry. And it is fun to see how both of them have had their reception shaped and deformed – this also makes me mad – by parallel things. If you read Terrance Hayes and you don’t understand how deep the feeling, how deep the desire and love for others is, and you don’t see that anger and resentment at inequality – if you don’t see those emotions – then you complain that he’s dry or intellectual or just playing games. And he’s not. The games have major emotional stakes, but you have to familiarise yourself with how the game is played first. The same is true with Muldoon, whose reception is spiked with people saying that there’s no feeling there and, of course, there is. But it’s encoded feeling or mediated feeling. There are also non-black readers who read Hayes and think that it’s all about the black experience because he’s a black man 100 percent of the time. And that is part of what he writes about, but he has many subjects. Non-Irish readers can read Paul Muldoon and then say ‘oh, it’s all about Irish identity’, or ‘it’s all about growing up during the Troubles.’ And, of course, Belfast, and before that County Armagh, inform what Muldoon has written about, but it’s stupid to reduce Muldoon to Irishness or to the Troubles, which is a way that – especially outside Ireland – he is often read. I suppose, as a fan of Muldoon and Hayes, I’m describing parallels in their reception which have made me want to throw things across the room. For several years, I’ve been writing about both of them. I think that it might help Americans to see what Muldoon is trying to do, and it might help British and Irish readers to see what Hayes is trying to do, to see how much they have in common."