Annotations for Speaker: Terrance Hayes

I don't know.

I'm pushing that metaphor all the way y'all.

But, um, we are going to do the, do we have done it three times, so I think we know how it goes.

Our poets are going to introduce each other.

Uh, we are going to get our minds repeatedly blown and we will clap for it.

Like we, you know, let them know the love.

All right, y'all, I heard you.

I didn't wanna with no socks.

Okay.

Uh, I, I got one thing really to read y'all that I've been working on for you.

But, with all this dear stuff, I feel like I should throw in my little, my deer poem from one of these books.

I think it's, can I say it's for Roger?

I'm gonna say it's for Roger.

Uh, How to Be Drawn is the book it was in.

The Deer.

Uh, I'm so glad to be here.

I knew I was gonna forget to do that.

Lauren, Joanne, I love y'all.

I could definitely hear its cries.

Alright, so let's see how this thing gonna work out here.

Uh, I just read for the rest of my time.

The two books came out last year and I have been, uh, you know, I try not to do stuff.

So I haven't sent this out.

I haven't shown it to anybody.

I, I've just been working on it.

And so it's, uh, I was telling Roger like half guzzles, so if you don't know what the guzzle is, I'm gonna say that

just means it's a caught between my brain and my heart, like caught in my throat.

If you do know what the guzzle is, it's like a half guzzle, which is like some of the rules, like the

refrain that comes through and which would be like I said to myself and then maybe said is bouncing around.

Don't worry about it.

Let's just see what happens.

Sometimes I say to myself, I said to myself, as my mother used to say in a way that made an echo of the things she said to herself and me.

Cynthia Ozick said a sentence is a kind of voice with its own suspense.

Its secret inner queries, its chance, idiosyncrasies, and soliloquy.

Gil Scott-Heron said, I am the closest thing I have to a voice of reason.

I said to the doctor, I am achy, gassy, forgetful, and I pee too much.

The doctor said, that's not illness, Terrance.

That's just aging.

If it ain't a disease, why is everybody trying to cure it?

I said to myself.

Webster said, epiphora was, exec was excessive watering of the eye and also plural for epistrophe, the

repetition of a word at the end of a successive clauses and sentences, Thelonious Monk figured it out.

The park was the first, at first name, Crystal Lake.

The guide said then for the local star, now after the company that hired the star, but I never got the name of the park because I said to myself,

the man who behaves as if he will become a statue in the park, dreams of becoming no more than a place.

The sign outside the bathroom said, wash your hand.

The sign inside the damn elevator said, out of order.

I said to my son, it is not only an imperative to wash your hands, but to exit public bathrooms without

touching any faucets or handles that may have been handled by those who did not wash their hands.

Somewhere Basquiat said, we decided the bullet must have been going very fast.

What concerns me is the enemy we face does not care about wrong or right.

They only care about winning or losing, I said to you.

When the Sufi said dance was the best way to speak with God, I decided to dance a little bit every day.

Thelonious Monk said, the genius is the one who is most himself.

Samuel Johnson said, a man of genius has seldom been ruined by himself.

Nietzsche said, talking about oneself is also a means of concealing oneself.

Defending Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara said, not the least function of poetry is to make vivid our sense of the meaning of words.

Sometimes her bling is backwards I think somebody said.

I want to turn Rothko's canvases on their side so his doorways become landscapes I said to myself.

I think knowing Mark Rothko killed himself colors how you see the paintings, I said to you.

There's just no way to know who in the room can actually sing before the singing starts

I said to myself.

Gil Scott-Heron said, no matter how far wrong you've gone, you can always turn around.

A bird flies in two directions at once.

I said to myself, toward the center and toward the border.

It's said, that it's said, Lucille Clifton was born with an extra finger, means something, I said to myself.

Every day, you are a prisoner trying to master time.

The signs in the park said, free healing, free fortune telling, free Palestine.

He said, the cops said to put my hands up after I was in handcuffs.

She said, the police said to put my hands up after I was in handcuffs.

They said the pig said to put my hands up after I was in handcuffs.

Tried and true strategies of fortitude for the self and family in the quadrants of emotional, spiritual, social, and creative life.

The name of Hamlet's dog, the Elizabethans' passions for lust.

My son is Paul Salon, my daughter of the flower of reason and mystery.

I said I would study their subjectivities myself.

A wounded heart can become infected if not allowed to heal.

My mother said the first grader's teacher said the class should call her dumb Dora for the rest of the year 'cause of something

She said.

She because of something she said, but she doesn't remember remember telling me because she said it to herself.

The people pushing along the sidewalk with no regard for others are terrible dancers, I said to myself.

She should have said the candidate's actual only campaign platform was white supremacy.

I said to you.

The power, power requires to sustain power is always trouble, I said to myself.

Peter Sellers said he had a violent aversion to the colors purple and green.

That's true.

And she was just, I don't know.

Evie Shockley, she knows all the words.

Come on, Evie.

Terrance, thanks for that beautiful reading.

Growling like a motorcycle of liberation.

Howling like the angel of field hollers at the bleachers of poetic apathy where they're always ready to make some noise, but never get in the game.

Oh, yes, she's back.

Back like she was never gone.

Still blues washing over the whitewashing of the music.

Still pinning the tail on the covert donkey of domination.

Still hissing wisdom into the imperial bath water.

Still cussing the fuck out of evil rapist punks and the friendly ones too.

She's right beneath your mama's left breast right up in the cook footed cornbread.

Still breaking out like sweat on the drummer's forehead.

Still chuckling in the backyard over her hot diasporas stew.

Can't you hear her?

Rumbling like an earthquake through the crowded blocks of watts.

Sizzling like the wind off the ancient coast of Ghana.

Honking like the traffic symphony and the hot sauce streets of New York.

Crashing onto the untamed sands of the people's beaches of Cuba.

How long has this Jane, this breath taking

Jayne Cortez been gone.

Not long.

Not long.

In fact, she's back.

Yeah.

Back for seconds.

A little more Armstrong Funk in the sunshine.

Another helping of that spicy cesarean callaloo with a bit of red pepper poet mixed in.

Another round of Big Mama Thornton blues brew, right bumblebee?

Yeah.

She's looking for a second slice of that wicked shit

Guillén cooked up.

Another bite of that African truth casserole Chano Pozo's serving from his conga.

Very fine.

Very fine.

One more taste of the scatology's fiddle Ella's still slinging around the Savoy Ballroom.

One more ride on V. Train this side of time before she takes it to her final destination.

Have you seen her?

Drinking the conjure woman's pot liquor straight out of the pot.

Sashaying across the evening sky like a bouquet of black girls' smiles.

Have you heard her?

Toxic in her gut, gut bucket lullabies into the ears of desperate children, exhausted men, and outraged women.

Sweeping the dust of corporate sponsored exploitation off the bandstand with her fire spitting lyrical jazz cleanup crew.

Have you felt her rattling your bones with the daily news of the latest pro-democracy drone strike?

Licking with sandpaper cat tongue kisses

the numbed shell of cultural desensitization to violence we call paying the bills?

Have you seen her?

Have you seen her?

How long, how long has our Jayne been gone?

Not long.

Not long.

She's no farther away than the sound of her name and her hellified poetry ringing out of our long memory throats.

And if you don't know, please go find out.

Jayne Cortez.

Um, this poem, this next poem has an epigraph.

From the Nikkiy Finney, the beloved Nikky Finney.

You know, she's a drug, she's addictive.

Um, this is called You Must Walk This Lonesome.

Say hello to moon leads you into trees as thick as folk on Easter pews.

Dark but ventured through amazing was blind but now fireflies, glittering, dangling from evergreens like Christmas oracles.

Soon you meet the river bank down by the riverside.

Water baptizes your feet.

Moon bursts back in low yellow swing low sweet chariot of cheese shines on in the river.

Cup hands and sip but never saw inside a peace be still.

Mix in your tears.

Moon distills distress like yours so nobody knows the trouble it causes.

Pull up a log and sit until your empty is full.

Your straight is wool.

Your death is yule.

Moonshine will do that.

Barter with you.

What you got for what you need.

Draw from the river like it is well with my soul.

Oh moon, you croon and home you go.

Um, and I'm gonna read one more and sit down.

Um, this poem is, uh, the final poem in Suddenly We.

It is a poem that I hope to not have to read someday.

Um, there's an epic, um, a dedication, you might say pour les deux mille plus Site-Mémorial du camp des Milles, um, which just means for the

2000 and more, um, who were held in the, the Site-Mémorial, the memorial site of the camp, uh, in Les Milles.

Les Milles is a city, a town in the south of France, and it also means the thousands.

Les Milles.

There is no poem unless, I, we can find the courage to speak.

In the middle of a vacation in the south of France, a chance to visit a World War II detention center

arises, dusty and bleak, just outside aix-en-provence, just past the scent of lavender, in an ancient heat.

The first thing you see and the last thing you visit is a boxcar.

You know what it means.

It takes the same toll on the breath, the pulse, as the rusted shackles displayed in another damned museum.

There are histories of torture preserved all around us.

Formally officially with placards and institutional funding.

Casually, quietly, unavoidably in the quality of a glance, the poverty of an existence, the demographics of a mall, a church, a prison.

In a former tile factory, we learn again how anything can be misused, how anyone can be abused.

A kiln is not a dormitory until it is.

There.

Here.

Slept people who were too Jewish to be German, too German to be French, too despised and feared to

be defended even by those who feared they, we, might soon be despised.

If I now say Palestine, have I forgotten Auschwitz?

If I say settlements, have I now forgotten camps?

If I don't say Palestine, have I forgotten Elmina, Selma, Cape Town, Haiti?

Must every place-name on earth be a shorthand for violence on a map of grief?

Orlando,

Charleston,

Wounded Knee,

Sharpeville,

Gettysburg, Tiananmen Square,

Gaza , Katyn, Plaza de Mayo, Soweto, Dominican Republic, Hiroshima, Srebrenica, Rwanda, Cambodia, Ankara, Adana, Odessa, Nanking.

Yesterday and yesterday's yesterday,

the planet pushing up sycamores and lavender, rice and plantains, fertilized with lead and blood,

with rain from poisonous clouds and the dust that becomes of the dead.

Adam, whose name means clay, was not baked in a kiln.

Eve's name means life, implies the day that follows.

Will tomorrow be a place we can name after something that grows?

What is the proper use of a wall?

There are so many histories buried in the space and silence around, within, these words.

These lines make a poor but portable museum, a set of sketches, palimpsests, faint and painfully incomplete that

map the territory of the human, with arrows pointing in every direction.

Some leading from you, some leading to you.

There is no poem unless you, we can find the courage to hear.

It's, uh, it's amazing.

There is no flattery in this.

The positively conspiratorial relationship that's here, the communal voice, and as I said yesterday, the deep sound.

Hmm, hmm hmm.

Those things mean a lot.

It was, uh, Barbara Christian, one of my favorite theorists who said, without response, art dies.

Um, this is really amazing.

Just one more minute.

This is not an event.

It is a phenomenon, and I'm using phenomenon.

Uh, not like a cliche.

It's something that really means this kind of gathering is a type that goes beyond the here and now.

I think this, the Furious Flower celebration, uh, should be more visible and more audible in continental Africa.

It is important.

Uh, my, my old teacher and the first Black African art to win the Nobel Prize, Wole Soyinka, it was

who wrote an article about 60 years ago now, the common back cloth.

He was talking about Blacks in Africa and our brothers and sisters in the diaspora.

A couple of years, uh, ago I wrote something too where I called the Atlantic Ocean, a bowl of water.

That is what it is.

Um, events like this unite us and unites us also with the world.

I want to say thank you very much to, um, Joanne Gabbing

Lauren Alleyne, and my brother, uh, Dr. Gbenga Adesina uh, for making it possible for me to come.

English is a very greedy language.

I mean, been here now for about four days.

It's been English, English, English.

Isn't English tired really of panning this burden.

I write in two languages at least.

Yoruba my mother tongue.

That's the one I was born with.

That's the one I was raised in.

And that's the one that dominates my thinking.

English came to me through the classroom, the chalk chalkboard and the teacher's can.

Now, um, it's important to say this.

What have I been doing with these two languages, or what have these languages been doing with me?

Uh, my M.A. and PhD thesis were based on this, what it means to think in one language and write in another.

The pains and the pleasure usually come related to that.

The idea of poetics and what I call differentiate aesthetics.

Western, uh, poetics or western idea of poetics has really not been able to capture, uh, all the things we are doing with literature in, uh, in Africa.

The point really is the poems, you'll be hearing based sound rather strange.

Some cases because they are interface poems deliberately.

Um, I write in Yoruba, I also write in English, but I also live and work and sleep in the interface

between these two languages and the two cultures that produced them.

In Yoruba, poetry is music.

It's essentially oral, oríkì is the word.

You can't say, emi yoo ka  oríkì, I'm going to read  oríkì, no.

Read and poem do not colocate in, in, in, in Yoruba.

It's mo fe korin  oríkì, I want to chant oríkì.

Mostly in Yoruba poetry is chant.

It's, uh, an idea of that old, old communion between the mouth and the ear.

This is why I'm going to start by asking you to join me here.

There is, there was this lady who was very beautiful and every woman in the, every man in the kingdom wanted her to be his wife.

It, the pressure was so much she decided to levitate.

She went to the sky.

When she got to the sky, she turned to the moon.

This young man kept on pursuing her.

She became a star, continued to pursue, to pursue her until eventually she evaporated into time.

It has a song.

You are going to join me in doing the song.

My own will be need to translate.

All you will join me in singing this.

need to translate Can I have it?

Translation

needed.

Invocations of the Word.

In the Word was not the Beginning.

In the Beginning was the Word.

Unwind the wind.

Give rapid legs to the crouching leaf; the horse of memory has galloped through clouds, through thunder, through roaring waters.

Throw open the door of your eyes, throw open the door of your ears.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

The wind.

The wind is word is the word is the egg from the, from the nest of a hawk and dove.

Its shell is the sheath of anger's sword.

Its yolk compostbed of bile and boon.

The Word, the Word, is the woodpecker's beak, which rattles the jungle of silence.

The cat's eye that pierces the garment of night.

The Word, the Word, is the fearless symmetry of zebra heights, the fiery hooffall of eloquent horses.

The Word, the Word, is the armpit of stone.

The groin of nodding marble.

The Word, the Word, is the madness of the moon.

The canine fury of barking tides.

The Word, the Word, is the milky teeth of coconut mountains.

The joyful tears of dawn.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

I see the Word.

Plumbing distant clouds for echoes, echoes, echoes, echoes, echoes, echoes, echoes, echoes of golden idioms.

I see the Word shaving mountainheads with the razors of reason.

I see the Word on the lips of the gun, animally red.

I see the Word in parliaments of contending tongues.

I see the Word with ears of joy, stalks of swaying rapture.

I see the Word in the dream of a dream.

The dream of the dream.

The dream of the dream.

The cloud which gathers the rain.

The rain which unchains the earth.

Abuubutan Eja okun.

Abuubutan Eja osa.

Adunnni lenu.

Ma dunni lorun.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

The Word, the Word, is the ashes of twilight.

The rainbow of vagrant skies.

The Word is rocks and roots, sand and stone, rust and dust, love and lust.

The Word is the peeping window of heady tails.

The vital valley of maiden hills.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

The Word is rain.

The Word is dust.

The Word is rain and dust.

The Word is black.

The Word is white.

The Word is black and white.

The Word is life.

The Word is death.

The Word is life and death.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

Araba ponmbe ponmbe ponmbe.

Give bony thoughts.

The flesh of airy idioms.

Let harvestsongs reap the plenitude of waiting proverbs.

In the Beginning was not the Word.

In the Word was the Beginning.

Now, um.

Among the Yoruba, the, the word so important.

Actually, that's what give rise to this title.

This is my mother's favorite saying in Yoruba, ẹyin  ọrọ, the word is an egg.

Hold it with care.

The moment it drops, you cannot gather the pieces together.

The word in, in flight, um, I'm talking about that.

And also transformations.

Uh, there's a short poem, awọn iyipada.

Um,

Transformations.

Awọn iyipada.

I stay very long in the river and I become a fish.

With a herd made of coral and fins, which tamed the distance of below depth.

I stay very long in the fish.

I become a mountain with a mist, cradled, crest, and feet capitated by grass, which sweetens dawn breast with Jasmine magic.

I stayed very long on the mountain and I become a bird

with a net of

polyglot straw and songs which stir the ears of slumbering forests.

I stay very long with the bird and I become the road.

With long, dusty eyes and limbs twining, twining, twining through the bramble like precocious pythons.

I stay very long on the road.

I become a segret lighted both ends by powerful gizards.

Ash winged firefly on nights of muffled darkness.

I stay very long with the segret and I become a clown with a wide painted face and a belly stuffed to the brim

It's terrible when people lose both, you know?

So I'm asking, uh, basically here, no crime is new as we say in Yoruba.

Um, what do you do to in any goat that you weep countless time for a repeated offense?

Africa has suffered and is still suffering.

Um, um, in 1898, 1898, 1897, there was a British Retaliatory Expedition against the kingdom of Benin.

Benin at that time was one of the flourishing areas, what is now Nigeria and Portuguese visitors earlier had

described that city, that Benin city itself as more advanced than some of the ones they saw in Portugal or whatever.

So it and art was the center, the spiritual and artistic center of that kingdom.

In fact, the king had people who made, uh, artifacts.

The British army went into the palace and took many, many of the, uh, artworks away.

One of the last, uh, correspondences I had before heading for here came from Switzerland.

Um, now there is an ex exhibition going on, uh, in Switzerland.

Now.

There was a poem I wrote, um, about one of these artifacts, the face of Co India.

In 1997,

1977, there was a festival of Black arts and, uh, and culture, my God, from different parts of the, of the Black world.

And also indigenous people like the Maori, Australia, New Zealand, and, uh, indigenous people, uh, in the US here, they, they were all in Lagos.

Now, before that, the Nigerian government wanted to use that mask as the symbol, the spiritual center of the gathering of Black people.

The British government said, no, give us.

He said, no.

What's the reason?

We are not sure it'll be safe, because we, we were asking them to lend descent to us.

Uh, diplomatic shuttle kinds of things happened at, at a point they said they were afraid it might be damaged by humidity.

It came from that humidity.

So eventually the Nigerian government had to commission somebody to make an another.

Uh, another mask.

Uh, what do you call this?

So there is a short poem here titled Africa's Memory.

Africa's Memory.

I ask for  Oluyenyetuye bronze of Ife.

The moon says it is in Bonn.

I ask for Ogidigbonyingbonyin mask of Benin.

The moon says it is in London.

I ask for the Dinkowawa stool of Ashanti.

The moon says it's in Paris.

I ask for Togongorewa bust of Zimbabwe.

The moon says it is in, in New York.

I ask, I ask, I ask, I ask for the memory of Africa.

The seasons say it is blowing in the wind.

The hunchback cannot hide his burden.

I'm not leaving yet.

No, no, no.

So, um,

nowadays, bluer than earth resounds in me.

It is time, yes, times cannot so we cannot explain the world.

Name the same as marrow beaten to blue.

Bones beyond cracking, circling the belly of the earth.

Our voices for the whole of you, shatter the glass windows of unrelenting heated houses.

If mother describes the world, a tumor.

Yes.

The broad and flat elements of borders.

Yes.

Like zodiacs?

Yes.

Mirage of a late world slung from tractor factories.

Yes.

Still hidden from the door.

A warbler is undone by singing today.

Yes.

Signal Hill cast trees.

Bagatelle.

Are we forgeries until we are foregone?

We sudden and halved.

Receding into flashes at the bus stop.

Before formalin, before law, before order, before expertise.

It is a some time-ish time for the animals.

Crossed by invisible detachment from even legs.

So high up.

As are the white ships blinking ahead, ahead of rosettes for the hungry.

Six shrubs of sea grass.

Books we tell ourselves.

A rock, a re-watering hole, flat officers of high ranks, and mother pleading with a cloth bundled on her waist.

Who might know, know where the world deepens

its temper of salted organs families shared for balance and your hands in the midst of washing.

My mother says, look how we are astonished.

By the jails, I say by the floors holding our reflections.

This wind, you know, conducts a phrase against my childish limits again to survive.

Monosyllabic as life.

My mother says, come by heart.

And I watched someone hoard these few wisdoms with which like death, I am the last to leave the room.

You know, when you're getting ready for work and you see it and you go, I'm not going today.

I gotta see this.

It's not every day a gal gets the sample a god, you know that.

Why are you being so rough on me?

I feel my eyes twisting, the lids crusting over and boiling, the pupils glowing like red coals.

Athena, woman to woman, could you have resisted him?

Would you have been able to wait for the proper place, the right moment, to jump those immortal bones?

Now my feet are tangled with hair, my ears are gone.

My back is curving and my lips have grown numb.

My garden boy just shattered at my feet.

Damnit, Athena, take away my father's gold.

Send me away to live with lepers.

Give me a pimple or two.

But my face.

To have men never again gaze at my face, growing stupid in anticipation of that first touch,

how can any woman live like that?

How can I watch their warm bodies turn to rock when their only sin was desiring me?

They just want to see me sweat.

They just want to touch my face and run their fingers through my...

my hair.

Is it moving?

In the next breath,

I'm scared, Mama.

I'm sick.

I cough all night.

Then as if he hadn't just swift whispered that weakness, he swifts to a sputter of jailhouse legalese bringing me up to date on his creaky version of hope.

Since I'd never been in jail before and since I've been staying outta trouble in here and since I've been doing everything they say and since it wasn't my gun.

But does it matter what grace the system grants if he's eating well or wrong, if the sentence runs together atop on one another, if he's crazy about his Mama,

because when dark drops and my son can no longer fight sleep, a man savagely focused will arc over him hefting a sock, swollen with dead D batteries.

Again, because of the dozens of times he swears it's about to happen

I've become an expert at visioning my son's already nicked skull collapsing and slick with itself.

200 miles away I wince and gamely wear his wound.

Two.

There's a picture of Damon snapped over 20 years ago when he was two.

It's black and white, just one unkempt moment in the life of a kid, a snap, only a mother craving, an unburdened memory could love.

His gray sweatsuit is caked with grime, his crown impossibly kinked.

Staring at the photo, I long to plunge my hands into those raucous naps.

Kiss his nose and scoop his resisting wriggle into my arms to snort that rusty meld of sugar and funk.

A voice interrupts Ma. Ma. It is 20 years later, again.

I should never have picked up the phone.

Three.

I can get in my car and drive toward him.

Filling three highway hours with Motown's, begging men, brown liquor, Aretha songs in those damned, insistent pictures of my boy, the way he used to be.

Dead, deadpan jokester, giggling gum cracker stupefied by rockets and girls.

Then without mercy, he sprouts upward.

Dons cavernous denims.

Stows away screw top wine and morphs into OG cocked cannon, baby maker, rhyme buster.

Lemming, lemming, lemming, lemming, lemming.

That last picture, the one of him I hate the most, stays with me the longest.

And most importantly, the lover of Lorna.

Mr. The Commander.

Yes.

I'm sorry.

I was just walking over there in the lobby a little bit ago, and I see, you know I just, in the back there, I see Patricia like, tap and tap and tap.

And I said, what you doing Patricia?

She said, I'm working on something.

That woman is serious.

So this is what you were doing.

That's beautiful.

Write my name.

Write my name up there.

Write my name.

Write my name up there.

Yes if I touch my finger on the golden pen.

The golden pen?

Yes, the golden pen.

If I touch my finger on golden pen and write my name up there.

A song for poets.

So thank you Joanne.

You know, and I, I thought, I thought to myself an hour?

I, I, I had only prepared 15 minutes, but I, I'll try, you know, so I'm gonna give it a shot so, you know, we'll see, we'll see what happens.

Two poems.

Fish serpent egg scorpion.

This is for my son, Kelly.

For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.