Visiting Writers' Series LibGuide: Terrance Hayes

'"A book of lectures by Terrance Hayes."-- Provided by publisher.
Etheridge Knight often introduced himself at poetry readings by saying, "I died in Korea from a shrapnel wound and narcotics resurrected me. I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life." He was a black man born in Corinth, Mississippi, in 1931 - a Korean War veteran, a junkie, an ex-con, a con man, a bluesman, a great poet and teacher. While Knight was incarcerated at the Indiana State Prison from 1960-1968, his writing drew the mentorship of Gwendolyn Brooks and resulted in the publication of his first collection, "Poems from Prison," in 1968 by Dudley Randall's heralded Broadside Press. Knight published three more books of poems, "Belly Song," "Born of a Woman," and "The Essential Etheridge Knight," for which he won an American Book Award. Etheridge Knight also received the Shelley Award form the Poetry Society of America, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He died in 1991 in Indianapolis. -- back cover.
"In these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation 'as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself.' Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poet's search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America." -- Publisher's website"

"The fourth collection by the author portrays the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. It sets what it means to be "light longing for lightness" against what it means to "burn with all the humanity fire strips away." Hayes navigates melancholy, irreverence, and the sublime.--Publisher information."

'"Terrance Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase. He is very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. In his first collection, Muscular Music, he took the reader through a living library of cultural icons, from Shaft and Fat Albert to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. His second collection, Hip Logic, continued these explorations of popular culture, fatherhood, cultural heritage, and loss. Wind in a Box, Hayes's resonant new collection, continues his interest in how traditions (of poetry and culture alike) can be simultaneously upended and embraced. The struggle for freedom (the wind) within containment (the box) is the unifying motif as Hayes explores how identity is shaped by race, heritage, and spirituality. This new book displays not only what the Los Angeles Times calls the range of a "bold virtuoso," but also the imaginative fervor of a poet in love with poetry."--Publisher's description."