By Ed Pavlic, The New York Times, Dec. 12, 2018; original article contains an additional illustrations; see also [JB - a personal note re my father's poetry, which was not "political"]
Image from article, with caption: Etheridge Knight in the 1960s. CreditIndiana Historical Society
TO FLOAT IN THE SPACE BETWEEN
A Life and Work in Conversation With the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight
By Terrance Hayes
Illustrated. 207 pp. Wave Books. Paper, $25.
“Sometimes you have to conjure an idea of ancestry, an idea of family,” Terrance Hayes writes late in “To Float in the Space Between,” the seventh book by this celebrated poet. Since his 1999 debut, “Muscular Music,” and across five other collections (including “Lighthead,” winner of a 2010 National Book Award, and his latest volume, “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin,” a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award), Hayes, now in his mid-40s, has become one of the most acclaimed poets of his generation. Hybrid and slippery as this book is — part memoir, part study of the poet’s own influences and ancestors, part meditation on poetics and selfhood — “To Float in the Space Between” is Hayes’s first full-length prose work, illustrated by sketches demonstrating the writer’s deft graphic skills.
As is the case throughout Hayes’s work, “To Float in the Space Between” is a meditation on family; from the first, Hayes has fingered the grain of black families, whether linked by blood or duty or sexual tension or aesthetic kinship. “To Float” movingly bridges these concerns. The title invokes the career of Etheridge Knight, who began writing poems in prison in the 1960s and carved out a singular career through the 1970s and ’80s. The 19 sections in Hayes’s book take their titles and focus from phrases in Knight’s most celebrated poem, “The Idea of Ancestry.” Thus this collection offers a deep textural (as opposed to textual) encounter between two important and mercurial minds.
Since the beginning of Hayes’s career, his poems have presented a syncopated and constantly shifting subject, a speaker insisting he’s agile, hip, logical, bruised, both guttural and highfalutin and who refuses to be drawn into any box of fixed dimension. Hayes’s speakers are always aware they’re being watched both by well-wishers and enemies. They’re also aware it’s often unclear which is which. So his poems shift between notions of survival and excellence in performance — and again, it’s not always clear which is which.
This shifting has frequently meant having a stand-in or alibi. At times the alibi is formal. Hayes invents forms — most famously the so-called Golden Shovel, in which one poet honors another by incorporating an existing poem into a new work. Such invention gives Hayes’s poetry a lightheaded if not always lighthearted sense of play, immersed as it is in heavy subjects like race, violence, desire and other dangerous mysteries of self and world. Despite the tragic shadows across Hayes’s playground, his first five books retained a certain upbeat ebullience.
History, however, would change the weather. In 2014, Hayes won a MacArthur fellowship. At the same time, Michael Brown’s death and the subsequent non-indictment of the police officer who killed him sparked unrest in Ferguson, Mo. (and elsewhere), concentrating national attention on the issue of police violence and corresponding with the rise of the Black Lives Matter era. The stakes intensified with Donald Trump’s election, and with protests inaugurating the #MeToo movement.
Hayes’s response was his most brilliant collection to date, “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin,” a consummate volume of 70 poems each titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin” followed by a “Sonnet Index” of first lines arranged into five additional sonnets — a formidable formal alibi, to be sure. Here Hayes unmasks the brutal and perilous need to shift positions, references and sightlines when targeted by a history that fixes cross hairs and chokeholds on the body. This collection utterly refuses to stand still, to be framed as a single thing, because it recognizes that to stand still — to embrace one unified and stable identity — is to give one’s assassin an easy target: “To be divided is to be multiplied,” Hayes writes in Sonnet 21. “Let us / Ponder how it is that you & I have remained / Alive.”
Crucially, not all the dangers come from without; selves have been formed in the American crucible, selves perfectly capable of an intricate self-harm. “Assassin, you are a mystery / To me, I say to my reflection sometimes,” Hayes writes in Sonnet 55. These poems sketch their shifts as a mixture of self-referential necessity and everyday survival: “You appear, you appear to disappear, you disappear.” At times Hayes’s shifts carry across platforms. In a short film also titled “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” released late last year, the poet dances. He wears a metallic mask, shaded in silhouette, and often in multiple exposure over Tidus’s song “Powers” that repeats its demand: “Can you show us all your power?”
“To Float in the Space Between” doesn’t show all Hayes’s powers, but it does transform the fast-twitch shift of his poems into a slower sense of drift. Reading “To Float” after Hayes’s poems feels akin to hearing Coltrane switch from “Giant Steps” (where he sometimes changes keys twice in one measure) to something like “Flamenco Sketches” (where he often remains in one scale for bar after bar after bar). If Hayes’s poems strobe, “To Float” is more tidal. Hayes eases into the flow by using Etheridge Knight’s life and career as his alibi, introducing a book “as speculative, motley and adrift as Knight himself.” Reading “To Float” is also like a dream wherein, magically, one finds oneself in a conversation with a person — maybe someone you know, maybe not — in terms that experience never affords. In the 1980s and ’90s, I had a recurring dream where I’d meet Michael Jordan somewhere, like a laundromat, and our conversation would drift slowly along as we folded our clothes. Reading “To Float” felt to me like one of those dreams: The rhythm is as pleasing as the substance itself.
Early in the book, Hayes charts his aesthetic family, the genealogy of his poetics. The question of influence becomes one of connection more than resistance, collaboration more than anxiety. Hayes reminds us that the word “influence” is at root fluid: “from medieval Latin influentia (‘inflow’), from Old French influence (‘a flow of water’).” This is a genealogy that emphasizes the paternal side. Women poets do appear, among them Wanda Coleman, Mary Karr, Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde and Gwendolyn Brooks. But mostly this is an “inflow” of poetic fathers. A reader’s conversation with “To Float” will deepen the more he or she knows about the main figures Hayes claims as poet-fathers: Knight, Langston Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Christopher Gilbert. But even if you’ve never heard of these writers, Hayes’s readings function as apt introductions. It’s a gift to encounter writers through the precisely calibrated curiosity of a wide-open searcher like this.
Hayes begs off the assignment of the biographer. This is not a book “about” Etheridge Knight, or anyone else. “I felt I had two choices,” Hayes writes: “a rigorously researched biography or a rigorously imagined biography.” He opted for the latter. “I sidestepped research for guesswork; I was reading between the lines of photographs, interviews, letters, maps, scraps of details.” For part of “To Float,” the alibi of “biography” helps Hayes avoid autobiography. But he’s as canny as ever. Consider: Early in the book, Eunice Knight-Bowens, Etheridge’s sister, tells Hayes that Etheridge was the third of seven children. Hayes shares that he “did not ask Eunice why he, and not one of his older brothers, Charles and Floydell, was named after his father.” Over a hundred pages later, Hayes confides: “My younger brother, James L. Hayes II, has my father’s name because James L. Hayes is, biologically speaking, not my father.” Instead of “guesswork,” lyrical rigor floats in the space between Knight and Hayes. He concludes: “My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache.” O.K. But whose?
Ultimately, “To Float” charts an intimate “inflow” of selves and methods. Hayes accepts that the “future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography,” then follows with a chapter, “My Genes,” in which he steps far from the spotlight of the famed poet’s stage and travels to Columbia, S.C., to investigate his paternal ancestry. Hayes meets Earthell “Butch” Tyler Jr., the father he didn’t know about until he was 18, along with a series of younger brothers and at least two of their mothers, all for the first time.
We come along as Hayes kicks it, almost, with the kinfolk (to steal a line from Knight), and we listen over his shoulder to tales of a quasi-heroic grandfather, Earthell Tyler Sr., who made a military career away from his wife even as she added children to the family while her husband was away. We learn that the senior Tyler was killed in Vietnam in 1965, awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star. Hayes — like the successful college professor and poet he is — tries to decide if he’s listening to stories of shameful abandonment or heroic valor, deciding again and again that “the truth was more layered” than available terms allow. Seeking more details that might — but probably won’t — pierce the layers in his newfound family’s legacy, Hayes embraces the through line that Butch Tyler offers about their legacy, one of openness: “He used to kiss me,” Tyler tells Hayes. “You come from a long line of loving men.”
The legacy Hayes’s search unearths is practical as well as ideal, the challenge of men who refused to make their “long line of loving” a synonym for control and ownership, of soldiers who had enough of warfare. Hayes asks was his grandfather funny, or shy, or serious? He’s told: “He was serious. But on the other hand, he was like me. He wasn’t the kind of guy to kick the door in and shoot you” for messing with his woman. Challenged and moved, and maybe changed, by what he’s found, Hayes reports: “Thinking about it on the plane home, I had to put my hand over my eyes.” Through such deeply felt and finely wrought eddies of narrative drift, “To Float in the Space Between” confronts the reader with many such moments of angular reflection and renewed recognition.
“Vital. Vital,” is how the poet Gwendolyn Brooks began her lyrical preface to Etheridge Knight’s first pamphlet of poems, “Poems From Prison.” Vital meaning living, and meaning necessary. With a similar double-edged vitality, “To Float in the Space Between” drifts into a growing chorus of autobiographical writings — including such recent books as Yrsa Daley-Ward’s “The Terrible,” Darnell Moore’s “No Ashes in the Fire” and Kiese Laymon’s “Heavy” — that put practical, stress-tested flesh on the closing sentence of Brooks’s preface: “And there is blackness, inclusive, possessed and given; freed and terrible and beautiful.”
Ed Pavlic’s latest book, the novel “Another Kind of Madness,” will be published in March.
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