[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XI: Insistence)”]
Terrance Hayes ended a 2006 post for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, by writing that “it is possible to value two very different things at once. No reader should want a poet to be one thing. No poet should want to be one thing; to have one style.” He concludes: “[W]e’re looking for the child of Gertrude Stein and Billy Collins; the child of Lucille Clifton and Wallace Stevens. Imagine those children. Imagine their poems.”
Here, Stein seems to stand for a destabilizing style and a consensus perception of extreme inaccessibility, where Collins stands for a lack of syntactic resistance and a consensus perception of extreme accessibility. I quoted Hayes similarly in a previous post in this series: “I suspect if we look under Gertrude Stein’s bed we’ll find a sonnet or two.” Whether or not Hayes would call Stein an influence, he reckons with her impact, and, crucially, doesn’t see her avant garde legacy as one that is divorced from other strands of poetic tradition and practice, even those that might appear most at odds with it. Aesthetically, in Hayes’s first comment above, Clifton can represent a spare style and a poetics of engagement, while Stevens can represent a near-baroque density of linguistic music and an immersion in (escape into?) imagination.
I celebrate these couplings along with Hayes on aesthetic grounds, but I have to admit to the physical discomfort the thought of these pairings gives me. Though the “children” of these arrangements are obviously figurative, his examples provoke a consideration of poet as well as poem, pushing us to reckon with that discomfort. If my discomfort on Stein’s behalf in this arrangement isn’t obvious, you can get up to speed here. (Stein’s love notes with her life partner Alice B. Toklas reveal Stein as husband and “king,” among other intimate epithets – “Mr. Cuddle-Wuddle” being my favorite. Alice was “wifey” and “Baby Precious.”) As for my discomfort on Clifton’s behalf (mother of six literal children), my mind immediately leaps to Stevens’s racism, a term that is often linked to the seemingly oxymoronic term “casual.” How do you “casually” dismiss an entire group of fellow human beings as less-than? That numerous writers reference Stevens’s “casual” bigotry seems like a way of saying that it wasn’t like he was out there actively championing the white supremacist cause, though using racist epithets in his writing and conversation doesn’t feel particularly passive to me. Major Jackson reflects on Stevens’s infamous use of a racial slur in referring to Gwendolyn Brooks here.
Of course, my discomfort on Stein’s behalf is a bit too binary; just because I don’t wish a heteronormative coupling on her even figuratively doesn’t mean that Stein emerges from history as a paragon of political and social forward-thinkingness. You don’t have to scratch the surface of that first generation of Modernists to find some very confused politics at best, and outright Fascism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, or racism at worst. Does not expecting or wanting a poet to be “one thing” aesthetically mean we’re okay with a person whose writing we admire thinking or acting in ways we do not? In choosing to pair contemporary poets with Modernist poets in his example, Hayes invites this question as well.
The short answer, for me at least, is an unequivocal: “No, we’re not okay with it.” The longer answer is one that Hayes has also explored in his thinking – about Wallace Stevens, in particular. While embracing poets who contain multitudes aesthetically doesn’t mean we can’t hold them accountable for their words and actions personally, socially, and politically, the willingness to wrestle with uncertainty and complication in our relationships with literature and writers (and with the world) seems to Hayes to be a strength to be cultivated in both capacities. Hayes’s poem “Snow for Wallace Stevens” embodies this wrestling. Wesley Rothman’s 2013 reflection on Hayes’s poem “Snow for Wallace Stevens” further explores the poem and the subject. In Dean Rader’s longer 2016 piece for poets.org, “Invisible Priest: Contemporary American Poetry and the Echo of Stevens,” Rader notes Hayes’s “anger, engagement, homage,” writing, “I wonder if the poet [emphasis mine] loves Stevens without forgiving him. I wondered this so much I had to ask him [Hayes],” who responds:
In my poem, “Snow for Wallace Stevens,” I write, “Thus, I have a capacity for love without / forgiveness.” That pretty much captures my feelings for Stevens. Most certainly he is an influence. Just as an alcoholic father can be an influence . . . Of course his racism is an issue – I don’t believe he thought black folks could write poems, comprehend poems, care for poems. But that’s not what both scares and influences me most about Stevens. It’s the remoteness his brand of imagination engenders. He champions the kind of imagination that makes all else secondary.
Hayes’s poem “American Sonnet for Wanda C.,” from his previous collection How to Be Drawn, is the obvious precursor to his American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin series, along with the sonnets that appear throughout his collections. I believe the less obvious precursor is “Snow for Wallace Stevens,” this poem of “love without / forgiveness” from his 2010 collection Lighthead. Of the new series, Hayes has said, “They’re sonnets for people who are trying to threaten me or my America or the progress we’ve made, but they’re still sonnets. They are love poems to my enemy.” Of “Snow for Wallace Stevens,” Hayes has said, “The contradictory gesture of singing for a foe is meant to be ironic and sincere. It’s maybe more complicated [emphasis mine] than ambivalent. It’s another moment of trying to capture paradoxical impulses.” In terms of form, it may be 22 lines, but in terms of its personal dialectic, I now read “Snow for Wallace Stevens” as Hayes’s proto-“American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.”
[Continued in “American Sonnets (Part XIII: The Hinges)”]