Arrangement: Lighthead by Terrance Hayes
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Wolran Kim
Mar. 2012



Terrance Hayes (1971~) is a prize-winning American poet. His fourth collection, Lighthead (2010), won the National Book Award for Poetry, and Wind in a Box (2006) was named one of the best one hundred books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. His second collection, Hip Logic (2002), won the National Poetry Series and was runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His first book of poetry, Muscular Music (1999), won both the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a young poet who attracts public attention for every published poem.

Before the beginning of the body, Hayes quoted Jorge Luis Borges’s (1899-1986) words; “It is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire,” on the first page. Borges was an Argentine novelist and poet, who has started an extreme modernism movement in South America, and this quote, makes me guess the character of his poetry. This collection is divided into four parts with subtitles: The Last Train to Africa, God Is an American, Coffin for Head of State, and Cocktails with Orpheus. There are two poems before the first section and after the last section with the titles, Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy and Airhead. The front one looks like a guide that tells the readers about a cave (the author calls this, “The Galaxy”), and the last one looks like it intentionally tries to touch the reader’s aftertaste lastly.

Ladies, gentlemen, ghosts, and children live in Hayes’s Galaxy, and this place is not for the rain falling through the roof. The author does not want to clearly build rules about this poetic place, but he says that there are troubles, metaphors for sex, mimics of lovemaking, and moonlight drips. The author says that human life is the howling of a small dog, “Small dog barking at the darkness has something to say about the way we live.” I often do not know what the differences are between my life and my dog’s life, so this passage has so much empathy.

The subtitle of the first section is “The Last Train to Africa.” The author is African-American. Does he not want to miss the last train to Africa, as if he is dreaming about native regression, and going back into the mother’s womb? The first poem, All The Way Live, starts with wit like this, “Do all dudes have one big testicle and one little tiny one?”, but the last lines finish with a serious expression about life, “Everyone was at war/ With what is meant to be alive. / That’s why we refused to be banished, / And why when they set us on fire, there was light at our core.” Hieronymus and Robert E. Lee appear in this poem, and Hieronymus was one of the great Fathers of the early Christian Church whose major work was his translation of the Scriptures from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. Robert E. Lee was an American general who led the Confederate Armies in the American Civil War. Hayes expresses the struggles of human life with a word, NEGROPHOBIA, across history and religion.

I feel the need to look at the course of African-American literature with modern poetry in the United States to discuss Hayes’s work. The U.S. was called a huge melting pot until recently. All people in the U.S. are people who have flocked to their dream of new lives, with the exception of the Native Americans. This country ruled by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP), and their values, prevail. Until now, the biggest tragedy of the U.S. was that the human identity of African-Americans was denied. However, this tragedy still has not been closed, and this issue is related to the essence of American literature rather than derived as a result of casually incidental cultures. In the strict sense, African-American is one of a complex power of root, not concerned about a white’s intention, rather than a minor ethnic group as a part of American communities.

Negro literature has grown from lament to a symbol of multi-culture, but it has been focused only on the story of slave experiences through humanity from a long history or recovery-oriented editorials about slavery. The foundation of African American literature today can be found in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, and the literary theme of black writers has kept changing through the Second Black Renaissance to the present day. Meanwhile, the black’s feeling of being victimized further deepened through the economic depression in the 1930s and political frustration and disillusionment in the 1940s. Those protest images lead to ‘literature, of blacks, by blacks, and for blacks.’ Black Power pursued the self-sought, from nigger to black, and to do so, they refused any white man’s culture which had been oppressing them. Their movement, “Searching for our roots,” was deployed to even “Let’s go back to Africa” after emerging as a problem of establishing identity. Hayes’s poem, The Last Train to Africa, shows the present status of African-American literature which is the present progressive.

This collection has some commonalities in each section, and the most unique one is ‘A pecha kucha,’ a Japanese presentation format. A pecha kucha means babbling gossip like a bird, and this event started with two foreign architects in Japan in 2003. In this format, the presenter uses only 20 slides, using each slide for 20 seconds in an actual meeting or on the network. This shows the change of recognition for a short and kernelled presentation through creative and exceptional ideas. In fact, these events are held and applied all over the world in various creative arts: photography, art, architecture, and science. Hayes also chatters a variety of 20 kinds of stories using this format, and there is a bunch of sarcasm and wit.

The first pecha kucha composed with a variety of topics and subject matters melted skillfully in this form, and this form may be the best way to mix all different stories into one poem. Each of the titles are premonition, opening scene, how fiction functions, scene at the grave, foreshadowing, dramatic arc, imagery, opening dialogue, symbolism, flashback, static characters, point of view, setting that illuminates character, allegory, connotation, deleted chapter, falling action, metaphor, allusion to theme, and resolution. Malcolm X appeared in Opening Scene and Opening Dialogue, and a white boy and a black man bring up the image of a case where three young blacks were killed by the KKK in 1964. “Y’all look like the ghosts of Malcolm X,” “I imagine the sunlight bleeding its heaviness upon their backs,” and “I am full of dirt sometimes.”These verses show human conflicts and confusion within stormy Black History and nihilism.

Hayes’s collection shows unrestricted free-forms with much more colorful contents. There are two or three line stanzas with enjambment and word-breaking, one long stanza without breaking, narrative poems, prose style, and forms with sections. The form of Hide is that one poem is printed in the middle, across two pages, and wider margins are effective in visually providing unusual inspiration. Poetry is a genre that can be performed much more freely by the poet’s ideas and intentions, unlike essays, novels, or scenarios. Thus, a picture and inspiration of a poem are much different even from the same poem, depending on how the lines and stanzas are arranged, and how the sentences are enumerated. A poet’s attempt to change the format can maximize the reader’s impressions with visual effects. On that account, Hayes’s various attempts give fun and freshness.

So many characters and personages come onstage in Lighthead. Most of them are historical African-Americans: activist, poet, artist, religious figure, historian, war hero, and from Greek mythology: Jesus, Hieronymus, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, Robert E. Lee, Elizabeth Alexander, Jebediah, Elizabeth Cotten, James Dickey, John the Baptist, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Luther Vandross, Frederick Douglass, Yolanda, Australopithecus or Adam, Etta James, General Patton, Herodotus, Dwight Eisenhower, Orpheus, and Baron Dominique Larrey. All these personages play important parts in the poetry which is cohesive with culture, society, history, religion, and ideology beyond personal sensibilities of literature.

In Lighthead, non-specific figures referred to as: a black men, black boys, a white boy, a white child, black prison guard, a young black poet, African elephant, a young black poet, single-breasted mother, stepfather, Scadenfreude, Felonious Monks, Zulu, and soul mutters, clearly show African-American literature. Also these words: negrophobia, squeaky Bible, Jazz, God, narcotic holiness, Africa Simpson, kingfish without kingdom, devil’s jewelry, Nostalgia, Pentecostal history, serpent in Eden, soul-musing bedeviler, and Negritude, are straightforward and transparent. These expressions are the products of deep thoughts through the intrinsic complexity of emotions and a rich vocabulary from a young black poet.

Another interesting poem is Three Measures of Time. This poem is divided into three parts: how my brother tells time, how my father tells time, and how my mother tells time. In his brother’s time, “By noon and the hours jumping toward dinner bells,” in his father’s time, “By knowing how the year jumps forward,” and in his mother’s time, “By none of the hours jumping at the window.” The author humorously interprets the meaning of time in three unique ways depending on the different characters in everyday life, and this method gives depth to the philosophic meaning about time.

At Twenty-Six Imaginary T-Shirts, Hayes just enumerates engraved phrases from ordinary t-shirts. These are concise statements full of wit and humor, but sharply represent social satire and people’s hearts. “Anonymous, Die and Learn, I am no food, This is Not an Exit means Do Not Enter, U.S. map above the caption: The only thing that fucks you up more than poverty is wealth, Did you call me Valentine?, You can have my husband, but please don’t mess with my man.” We sympathize and feel the comfort from these quotes because we feel that someone expressed them instead of us ourselves. Hayes’s very witty idea completes a perfect poem by just quoting them.

There are many direct expressions of African-American literature, and I quoted these lines from the entire collection unintentionally: “When I dream of the train riding our parallel spines, carrying our history. While God lick’s his kin, we sing until our blood is jazz, O Ghost, I’ll resist, When the moon’s black, I said, Be faithful. He went to work beating a prayer out of her skin, I would have run down the assassins and removed their eyes, Y’all look like the ghosts of Malcolm X, I want to work at the African-American, We weren’t going to be colored, we weren’t going to be Negro. Because a man rooted to his kin can never be a slave.” These descriptions show that the inherent sensitivity is much deeper and higher than ideology and a spirit of nationalism. The American factor in African American literature seeks the meaning of conflict through history, and must adhere to complex cultural and social aspects. We should not overlook or downplay this complexity to be able to access African-American literature as we do American literature, properly.

Lighthead is expressed cynically often: “language is for losers, intangible resist, Your light longing for lightness, narcotic holiness, How sometimes a tune is born of outrage, Schadenfreude may be the best way to name the covering of adulthood, It aches like on open book. It makes it difficult to live. When I asked God if anyone born to slaves would die a slave, He said, Sure as a rock descending a hillside, That’s why I’m not a Christian.” The public’s catharsis is effective with tragedy rather than comedy, and literary emotional depth and touchiness also delve deeper in tragedy. Modern poets’ imaginations that are related to particular places, persons and experiences of own lives, are sympathetic timelessly rather than quoting uncertain implications. Reality of life always approaches as a harsh struggle rather than a smooth one, and readers gain empathy and solace from these sarcastic expressions.

Lighthead shows the diversity of American literature by intelligent satire, humor, distance between religious piety and earthy existence, and high-grade lyric language. Hayes’ collection displays a fast-paced palpitation and free word of Futurism that happened in the early 20th century by Italian poet Marinetti. The author’s personality of modern chaos and conflict was dissolved in modern literature with black history. His post-modern irony and vague expressions extend the language of the author’s personality and assertiveness. He develops meta-narratives in ideology and history into unique poetical imaginations through his experiences and specific or non-specific personages. His personality of the African-American literature is sufficient to show the diversity of contemporary American literature, not just as a part of multi-culturalism.