I love his lines “I too have lost faith in language have placed my faith in language. Terrance Hayes has a knack for connecting the present to the past, for wading in the pools of literary history, feeling their swirling eddy’s, but then making the current his own. We best be careful as we venture back in literature to not let the whiteness of the page on which the words are set blind us to the whiteness of the privilege of the writer’s life that for many have persisted into the present. One of the sins of white privilege, particularly in the realm of poetry, is the reverence placed on the tradition of affluent white men of means who are held up as the pantheon of poetic tradition, without recognizing their legacy of poetry is tainted by the ease with which they found a publisher and an audience, the ease they were afforded recognition, while there were equally as many gifted voices of people of color that went unnoticed, unrewarded, unpublished, unheard. One of the purposes of art is to hold ourselves and other artist’s accountable, for their genius and their failures or limitations. Is it not true that if we were to assemble enough of our life’s work and thoughts in one place, and dug through it carefully, we would find it would be an erector set of contradictions, or at least an odd creation with parts of it out of place? Are we to throw out everything a person creates because the worst of it is worse than we expect of them or that they expect of themselves? Is that not the nature of being human? Maybe it’s impossible to walk a straight line on a round planet forever twirling endlessly in two trajectories, one a slanted axis the very nature of it dizzying, causing us to lose our balance once in a while and go akimbo. The clean shaven, gray-suited, gray patron In language have placed my faith in language. This song is for the wise man who avengesĪnd the wine as well? I too, having lost faith I know tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk Light is the lion that comes down to drink.
― Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin Snow For Wallace Stevens Suffering and ascendance require the same work.” “When the wound is deep, the healing is heroic.
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