Omit the Gate: On “Watch Your Language” by Terrance Hayes

Early in Watch Your Language, his new book about poetry, Terrance Hayes asks a question that thunders for me now as I think about it: “Where does Gwendolyn Brooks go in Modern American poetry?” Brooks was, of course, a major mid-century poet, born the same year as Robert Lowell, and the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1950 for Annie Allen, her second collection of poems. If you click over to her page on the Pulitzer site, you’ll see there is a rather remarkable write-up there, which quotes a letter from Henry Seidel Canby, a Yale professor who served as one of the judges. In the letter, he explains how the committee, which also included poet and editor Alfred Kreymborg and anthologizer extraordinaire Louis Untermeyer, decided to award the prize to Brooks. She was up against stiff competition: “The finest book of poetry this year is very naturally the Complete Poems of Robert Frost,” writes Canby. He quotes Untermeyer to explain why Frost is nonetheless a poor choice:

Frost has received the award four times ... and, with the exception of a few added titles, for the same poems! A further “honor” to Frost would be not only superfluous but so repetitious as to seem silly. In addition, an award to Frost would be a confession that current poetry is so lifeless that we have to turn again to the one poet we can cite as a contemporary tradition.

There was also the selected poems of William Carlos Williams to consider, but Williams, Canby continues, “lacks self-criticism, and his total output so far is frequently distinguished by an extreme of obscurity.” Fortunately, there was another exceptional poet, one Canby called “a Negro writer of unusual ability,” whose Annie Allen is, “in our opinion, the outstanding volume of the year, if you exclude Robert Frost.”

No matter how generously you want to read that comment (they did give her the prize, and I believe their enthusiasm for Annie Allen was genuine), it’s steeped in racism. I find it hard not to hear the implication that the committee felt Brooks possessed “unusual ability” for a “Negro writer,” and that Annie Allen only rises to the top if you omit the top-seeded white men. The gatekeepers were willing, given the unusual circumstance of Frost’s many previous Pulitzers and Williams’s “extreme ... obscurity,” to let Brooks squeak through the gate—evidence, as if more was needed, that the American poetry establishment reflected the racism encoded everywhere in mid-century America: exclusionary, bigoted, and self-serving. Until fairly recently, the keepers kept the gate mostly locked in this manner.

Despite the reluctant offer of admission, from the early stages of her career Brooks went with some of the most firmly canonized white poets of her era. Thinking about Brooks beside Frost and Williams is illuminating. Like both of them, Brooks was deeply invested in vernacular speech as material for poetry; for Brooks, it was the speech of Black Americans that most interested her. Like Frost, she was a devout formalist, and like Williams, she was perennially interested in stretching those forms beyond their established limits, in seeing what they could be made to say and do in the context of Black American experience in the pressurized middle of the twentieth century. Obviously, she wasn’t the first or only poet to do this (Langston Hughes was a half-generation ahead and Robert Hayden was a peer), but she was perhaps the best and most thoroughly contemporary, the poet who most profoundly angled the tradition of English-language poetry away from white experience and toward the Black lives that are central to America and its culture. Where does Brooks go? At the very center of the conversation about American poetry. This should be an established fact, and in many quarters it is, and yet, here is Hayes, one of our best contemporary poets, and an obvious inheritor of Brooks’s legacy, still wondering why Brooks hasn’t gotten her canonical due, still committed to putting her in her proper place: “Why don’t more critics write about Brooks?” Hayes asks a couple of paragraphs later.

In part, Hayes is asking questions about categorization: What kind of poet is Brooks? In relation to which other poets can we understand her work? Hayes is also asking himself a question: where does he fit Brooks into his own story of how poetry happened  for him? This is a favorite topic among poets—what’s my conversion story? Why did I devote myself to this art form, which is so much about ambiguity and uncertainty, which, like a mirror, demands self-scrutiny, and which, at least until recently, was a rather obscure and nerdy preoccupation? Hayes’s book constitutes an extended answer to these questions and an assertion of a new model of gatekeeping in which the gate is kept open.

Watch Your Language is, first, a book about discovering poetry, and a handbook for loving poetry. It follows Hayes’s remarkable To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, an utterly original critical and biographical study that is also an account of Hayes’s life in terms of the influence Knight has exerted on it. Knight ties back to Brooks, too—“She would be essential to the American literary canon even if all she did was get Etheridge Knight writing poems in prison,” Hayes writes in the new book. To Float in the Space Between is a prototype for Watch Your Language: it combines critical and personal essays to create an enveloping portrait of Knight and his work. It’s a joyful vision of what literary criticism can be: whimsical, lyrical, personal, confrontational, fun, and funny. In addition to many close readings of Knight’s poems and anecdotes about the poet, To Float in the Space Between contains a long memoir as well as drawings, poems in imitation of and response to Knight, and other uncategorizable writings. One comes away from the book knowing as much about Hayes as about Knight and in possession of something more ephemeral: a sense of why one should read Knight, of what one might go looking for in his poems, and what one might find. To Float in the Space Between made me an instant Knight devotee. Watch Your Language applies this method to many more poets and extends its effect to a wider audience.

More than other literary genres, poetry demands a special kind of reading, a willingness to suspend one’s immediate need for comprehension. It demands a kind of faith, and the best craft books work like spiritual texts, when read alongside the poetry itself, of course. Craft books try to make the geeky, insider conversation about this esoteric art form available at any time to anyone. Teenagers and students read them as they enter into the murky atmosphere that hangs around poems; I did. Poets and readers read them to recharge, to rekindle a sleepy poetry habit, or, sometimes, to urgently seek a path to the truth, and voices that share their urgency. One reads a book like Hayes’s to feel at home in a strange land, to feel one’s enthusiasm answered and challenged, to soothe one’s uncertainty, and to excite it, in order to get more into poetry.

I can’t think of a poet from whom I would rather read a craft book than Hayes. Why? Because of where he goes in modern American poetry. Critics love to make pronouncements, so indulge me in one that will not cause controversy but is worth stating plainly anyhow: Hayes is one of our major poets, one with whom today’s poets must reckon as they forge their own sensibilities. He was one of the first poets of his generation to be decorated with American literature’s major honors: he was awarded a National Book Award when he was thirty-nine, around the publication of his breakout book Lighthead, and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014 when he was forty-three. His 2018 collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, is one of the signal poetry books of the Trump era and of the poetic outcry over the police killings of young Black men. It also may have kicked off a sonnet craze. From his position of prominence, Hayes has taken on the role of critic and popularizer of today’s major poets.

Take in this remarkable statistic: Hayes writes substantially about thirty-four poets in Watch Your Language and only a handful of them are white. This is a different tradition, a different canon from the one I was taught twenty-five years ago, and probably from the one still being taught in many of today’s classrooms. Or it’s the tradition that was always there, repressed beneath the dominant one. Why haven’t more critics written about Brooks? Racism is one obvious answer, amplified by the self-perpetuating cycle of critics—and craft book authors—omitting her from their considerations. Brooks “often goes unacknowledged the way caretakers and angels go unacknowledged,” Hayes writes. “Pulitzer or not, her attention to interior spaces—to Black interior spaces—meant her work would be overlooked by her contemporaries at every age.” But what if one posits a lineage that begins with Brooks? That’s what Hayes has done here, and it’s a big deal.

Hayes props open the gate by making this book fun, filled not only with literary essays but drawings, aphoristic quizzes, and tributes to poets that take surprising forms, including “AA All Star Poet” trading cards (each of which features a drawing and a brief impressionistic profile of a poet) and instructions for a board game in which one’s avatar is the poet Tim Seibles. There’s a script for an unboxing video featuring the selected poems of Yusef Komunyakaa and a mystery story about a missing manuscript by the beloved late poet Brigit Pegeen Kelly. The book feels electric, slightly out of its own control. The drawings, which are highly energetic if sometimes a bit weird, make the book feel homemade, personal, in-process. Its central proposition is that poetry is joyful, odd, and specific to the lives and eccentricities of its makers. Watch Your Language is, I think, the first craft book to be addressed to poetry’s internet-era readers; we expect a bit more noise.

The contemporary poet Toi Derricotte, cofounder of Cave Canem, the seminal writing workshop organized to mentor Black poets, is another of the “caretakers and angels” that Hayes is determined will not go unacknowledged. “My Gwendolyn Brooks” is actually addressed to her:

Toi, I’d given a considerable amount of thinking to the brilliant life of Gwendolyn Brooks before it occurred to me you have been my own personal Gwendolyn Brooks for the entirety of my life. You both are evidence that the secret to longevity is living a poetic life. I have had all the good fortune of a student who had never been without his best teacher.

Despite its many forms of institutionalized instruction, from MFA programs to private manuscript consultations with renowned poet-editors, poetry is still largely an oral tradition, by which I mean that it is passed down by hand from one poet to another.

Hayes keeps coming back to Derricotte, just as he keeps coming back to Brooks, his taproots and self-renewing sources of inspiration. His “AA All Star Poet” card for Derricotte is one of the warmest and most effective of these page-long evocations and tributes:

Here are some of Derricotte’s gifts to people who live by poems: An openness found nowhere else in American poetry, except maybe in the way Jean Toomer describes flowers in a storm. A humor that can be wired as John Berryman’s Dream Songs or weird as Bob Kaufman’s sardines. A daughter of undertaker & overseer, of Duke & Lady Day, of Brooks & Hayden; a niece to Lorde & Clifton; a sister to Eady & Olds; queen of the evening mothering us Black orphan poets.

Look at how definitively and concisely Hayes locates Derricotte in his tradition, stretching from the origin points of Brooks and Hayden, onto jazz legends Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday, through Lucille Clifton and Sharon Olds and onto newer poets. Think of all the books this tiny passage suggests. This is how poetry really works—it’s not powered by a bunch of scholars in PhD programs trying to wring drops of new insight out of old, dry sonnets. Poetry moves more like gossip, on tides of enthusiasm and memory, on gratitude and ambassadorship. The real canon is made in conversation.

This book is messy, but it works. It’s a miscellany. I suspect some of these pieces were written specifically for the book, but various prefaces, introductions, and talks are spread throughout, including introductions for retrospective collections by Amiri Baraka and Wanda Coleman, as well as an introduction to a reading by Cornelius Eady. Some of these pieces, such as an utterly stirring consideration of James Baldwin that served as a welcome speech to a Cave Canem conference, feel like they have found the perfect home, drawing the reader back toward the experience of when the talk was first delivered. Other pieces, like the Baraka introduction, feel dropped in, like filler. They could’ve used a bit of editing and some smoothing out of the seams between them and the rest of the book. Except there’s something meaningful in this looseness—I think Hayes wants this book to seem like something anyone could make. Why not throw in everything that counts? Why hide the seams when it is the stitching that Hayes is trying to show? He loads the book with grainy facsimiles of his notebook pages, many of them barely legible. You can put your whole self into this, Hayes seems to say, even the parts that don’t look like they fit together, the parts that don’t fit with whatever one may associate with the word poetry. Poetry is personal because, despite the mountains of criticism that you can read about it, you must always experience poems alone, even if you’re hearing them out loud at an event. It’s always the meeting of the poet’s vocabulary with your own inside the secret crucible of your head. It’s weird and hard to describe and the opposite of television, where everyone is meant to think and feel the same thing at the same time.

I wonder whether—and I sincerely hope that—this book will be huge with high schoolers, or at least poetry-huge, which is a smaller sort of huge. I get giddy imagining the view if this were the first panoramic glimpse teenagers got of the poetry landscape. My first poets were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Roethke, William Carlos Williams (especially), Lucille Clifton, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney, plus a lot of Charles Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg. These were the poets my teachers showed me, plus a couple I found on my own while lurking around my local Barnes & Noble in the evenings after school so as not to have to be at home. They were wonderful poets—they got me through, they got me excited. I wanted to become them, and in many ways I did—here I am filling pages in one of their magazines, a functional adult who sprouted from the depressive teen poetry rescued. But no matter how you slice or explain or justify the poets I read when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, the years when I needed poetry most urgently, they formed an elitist vision of what poetry could be. They were mostly white, mostly men, mostly straight, mostly old; they seemed to have always been old. Old seemed to be a qualification for poetry, as though a young poet’s first goal should be to hurry up and get less young. I’m eternally grateful for these poets and for the teachers who put their poems in front of me—they showed me so much that I needed to see, but they mostly didn’t show me the real world, and they mostly didn’t show me the America I was living in.

Imagine if I had had Watch Your Language then. I could have found Gwendolyn Brooks years earlier, her subversive formalism and unerring eye; I could have gotten ear-training from Komunyakaa. What if Hayes had told me about Reginald Shepherd or Lynda Hull or Patricia Smith then? What if, alongside Hayes, I could have imagined, at fifteen, that poetry is something you might base a board game on? “There are no restrictions on how you may interpret the words” is one of Hayes’s rules to “The Tim Seibles Bookbioboardgame.”

But I also need to pause here to acknowledge that some of this book’s most direct gazes are not directed at me. I’m white, and poetry has always presented me with plenty of pathways. That’s not to say this book isn’t for me—I think it very much is—but a sweeping survey of poetry not rooted in whiteness is long overdue for so many readers. Starting with Brooks, Hayes shows us the whole twentieth century—you can see it from here, even without an “AA All Star Poet” card for Elizabeth Bishop. I don’t think there’s ever been a book like this before. A young Black poet reading this book will see the poetic tradition—the past, as well as the present—as it really is, not one tradition at all, but many, carried forward by many kinds of people who are connected not just by scholars’ analyses, but by community. They will see that there are places like Cave Canem to visit, living poets like Sonia Sanchez and Afaa Michael Weaver to meet. They will see that, yes, some imperative part of their apprenticeship must be undertaken alone, in the wee hours, curled behind a book or notebook, but that another part of it, maybe the most important part, takes place among other poets who are young and old and middle-aged, funny and earnest and experimental and traditional. They will feel invited to poetry, and by no less a host than Terrance Hayes, one of the best and most important poets now writing. “Any book that matters to a reader is literature,” writes Hayes in his preface. The gate is flung open. Imagine if that was your introduction to poetry.