Poets are people who promise to continue responding to what is actual. The poet’s first poems comprise the promise. As time passes, one admires the continuation as much as the poems. This is why a young poet may be inspired simply by watching his mentor put on her coat and walk out the classroom door: she is in motion, heading towards the world of her materials, as she vowed to do years ago. The motion is the influence, the air stirred in the space between teacher and ephebe. Let’s also imagine that the mentor’s poems provoke the young poet to attempt new registers of expression, perhaps by way of imitating something of the teacher’s style. But the young poet may also encounter moments when it seems that all he can learn from other writers is how to do the same thing over and over again. So much repetition and similarity! And none of it hints at the way forward. What does it mean to be influenced anyway?
In To Float in the Space Between, Terrence Hayes serves up a creative meditation on Influence. He is steadfast in naming the forces that have shaped him and the promise he has kept, subtitling his book “a life and work in conversation with the life and work of Etheridge Knight.” “My coming-of-age story begins unheroically with me on a college bunk reading ‘The Idea of Ancestry’ in a literature textbooks,” he writes. “It may be that poets come of age staring across a space as the speaker does in that poem.” Later, Hayes says, “It was the closest thing I’d seen to a poem about coming of age as a poet.” “The Idea of Ancestry” is among the very first poems Knight wrote during his eight-year prison term; he was released in 1968. Beginnings yield beginnings. Yet when Fran Quinn, a friend of Knight and Hayes’ professor at Coker College, invited the young poet to travel with him to Indianapolis to visit Knight, Hayes balked: “I said okay, but when the holidays neared, I backed out. I was afraid … That March Etheridge Knight passed away.”
“To float in the space between” are the final words of “The Idea of Ancestry” in which Knight addresses the photographed faces of 47 relatives taped to the wall of his cell. The flow through space toward an unreachable, ineffably powerful influence becomes the main trope of Hayes’ narrative – just as he now proceeds and returns through the uncrossed space between himself and Knight. “No poet’s origin story is contained in single experience,” he says, adding, “I realize I am not so interested in resolving the conflict between influence and invention as much as I am in acknowledging the blurred space between them.” The certainty of a generous influence, Hayes suggests, is how generously it allows for uncertainty, query, and the surge of expression.
Along the way, he cites and quotes figures such as Giambattista Vico, Cynthia Ozick, Audre Lorde, Zygmunt Bauman, Elizabeth Alexander, Saul Bellow, Wanda Coleman, Langston Hughes, Wallace Stevens and others. In Robert Lowell, Hayes sees “a liquid poet adapting and borrowing … His liquidity made his relationship to poets and poetry renewable and sustainable – but also engendered a certain ethical uncertainty.” In Knight, whose motive, he says, was sheer survival, Hayes finds a craft “fueled by craftiness and possibility, not ideology or allegiance.” The liquidity is also embodied in the variety of the book’s contents — drawings, diagrams, photos, poems by Knight, flights of prose.
Since the awarding of the National Book Award to Hayes’ Lighthead in 2004, he has been asked many times about the relationship between politics and poetry. In general, I would say that his responses reinforce the necessity of political material and communality but for the benefit of poetry more than for campaigns. He now writes, “Once, on a panel about political poetry, I said I distrusted dogma, edicts, generalities about anyone and anything – and an older co-panelist (a stalwart political poet) told me that everyone has to choose a side. Maybe he was right when it comes to living. But in art – in poetry – choosing sides and styles congeals/hardens/ends the conversation I want to have with the world.” At the same time, he notes that white poets “don’t seem especially free when it comes to writing about race.” Yet when he goes on to examine Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change,” he hears “a rarity among rarities as it attempts (successfully or not) to explore/transgress the dynamics of race without expressing explicit guilt or shame” – a more thoughtful and generous response than Hoagland has received from other critics.
In Langston Hughes, Hayes admires “that human mix of conviction and confusion, belief and bewilderment, violence and vulnerability” – the evasion of fixity, the immersion in the flow. “Selfhood becomes as open as the gaps between language,” he says, “between being and thinking, between timelessness and time.” More: “One venturing in the space between art for others and art for the self must be simultaneous, contradictory, vulnerable: slanted.” Shifting between foreground and background, Etheridge Knight flares up and dies down. But there is no hagiography here, no erecting of monuments. To Float in the Space Between circles around Knight, peering at his character and accomplishments without pursuing a biographer’s agenda. Knight often identified himself as a prison poet, just as Robert Frost liked to portray himself as a New England farmer. But Knight’s perspective extended far beyond prison, and Frost failed at raising chickens. Hayes knows that Knight was often “blowing smoke” about his background and could be prone to sentimentality in his poems. These recognitions only further enrich Hayes’ nuanced take on influence.
While reading this book, I recalled a dinner I had with Louise Glück. She told me that in early 1970, she was invited to meet the 73-year old Louise Bogan, a poet whose work and life the then 26-year old Glück regarded as key influences. But Bogan died on February the 4th. And as she told me this, Louise’s eyes welled with tears.
[Published by Wave Books on September 4, 2018. 224 pages, $25.00 hardcover]