How To Draw A Perfect Circle Poem Analysis

Every bit we know, verse is non a transcription of experiences, but a transformation of them. In How to Be Fatigued, Terrance Hayes does us one better. He transforms transformations. And then transforms those. What results are poems at one time original and daring, willful and honest. Readers will render to this collection again and again and get out its pages annealed, challenged, and often broken.

Terrance Hayes is the writer of five collections of poetry: Muscular Music, Hip Logic, Wind In a Box,Lighthead and, most recently How To Exist Drawn.Hayes teaches writing in the University of Pittsburgh's Section of English language in the Kenneth P. Dietrich Schoolhouse of Arts and Sciences.

Nicole Sealey: From 1 book to the adjacent, it seems as though you're conducting collection-specific experiments with form and content. Is this something you gear up out to do or is it realized in retrospect?

Terrance Hayes: I'm mostly simply thinking about the last poem and the next poem on whatever given day. So my experiments are really poem-to-poem challenges. Sometimes a challenge merits a few different attempts. I think in How To Exist Drawn the experiment with the "long poem" form required multiple tries. Each section has some variety of extended poem: "Who Are The Tribes," "Instructions for a Seance for Vladimirs," "Self Portrait as the Mind of a Camera." In each, it was like trying to hold my breath underwater for equally long equally possible, similar seeing how long I could hold the air inside a poem

NS: "Who Are the Tribes," "Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime Report," "Reconstructed Reconstruction" and "Some Maps to Point Pittsburgh" aren't only longer. There are other experiments being undertaken, no?

Thursday: Yeah, those poems are experiments, but in the way every new verse form is some manner of experiment or claiming. The longer poems were attempts to sustain an experiment in a style that differed from repeating a fix of rules. The Pecha Kucha poems from Lighthead (in How To Exist Fatigued, "Gentle Measures" is a Pecha Kucha), for case, are a formal experiment repeated in separate poems. The long poems inHow To Exist Drawn are extended experiments within each poem.

NS: Do you lot worry when you're non writing or practise yous recollect whatever you're doing (or not doing) is contributing to poems yet to come in ways y'all may not know?

TH: I always feel like I'm not writing plenty. Or well enough. And that I am e'er missing most of what's interesting in the globe. I cope with this feeling (of inadequacy) by trying to be alert to experience. But I desire the experiences I capture to become more than unproblematic records of experience. Sometimes the result is a tape of fantasy. That's the instance in "Black Amalgamated Ghost Story". Sometimes the result is a tape of meditation. That'south how I call up of "How to Draw a Perfect Circle." Both poems originate in bodily experiences, but in neither poem did I know what would event beforehand.

[pullquote align="right" cite="Terrance Hayes" link="" color="#FBC900″ class="" size=""]It was like trying to hold my breath underwater for equally long as possible, like seeing how long I could hold the air inside a poem.[/pullquote]

NS: I offset heard y'all read "How to Draw a Perfect Circumvolve" a few years ago, but it was only recently published. From commencement to final draft, how drastic are your revisions?

Thursday: I endeavor non to track my revisions because they are and then extensive. It can be daunting to realize a poem has gone through one hundred drafts—it was at least one hundred drafts with "How To Draw a Perfect Circle." I recall there was a much longer department about the cyclops and the size of his centre socket. That's now just a moment nigh an onion the size of his eyeball. When I'm not keeping count, the process feels both engaging and discouraging. Every draft is presumably the final typhoon. Until it's not. So I usually volition sit with a verse form for quite a few months before sending it out for publication. I have to be sure I'chiliad done with it.

NS: Per the opening verse form, "What Information technology Wait Similar," the speaker "intendance[southward] less and less almost shapes of shapes because forms change and nada is more durable than feeling." How then should one be fatigued?

Th: Variously. Every portrait is a self-portrait, I read somewhere. If applied to the "What It Look Like" quote: the form a portrait takes matters less than the feeling it elicits. Or: What it looks like is non e'er the aforementioned as what information technology feels similar.

[pullquote align="left" cite="Terrance Hayes" link="" color="#FBC900″ grade="" size=""]Every typhoon is presumably the final draft. Until it's not.[/pullquote]

NS: If yous were stranded on a deserted island, and could only have one medium with you, what would it be? Pen and paper? A finely tuned piano? Or, canvas and paint?

TH: That's a difficult 1. If I were stranded on a monkish mountain, I'd carry painting supplies, if I was stranded in a cavern, I'd want a piano. On an isle, I think information technology would be books. Not my own. I'd write in the sand.

NS: Which books would you take?

TH: The first books that jump to mind are novels I've read more than a few times (Lolita, Brutal Detectives, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Song of Solomon) simply definitely 1 of the books would be the Oxford English Lexicon. I don't think I'd take one book of poesy—unless I could take like 100. I don't typically read one volume of poetry at a fourth dimension, come to think nigh it.

NS: From book to book, does "poesy" get whatever easier?

TH: Right now I fright this is the last volume I'll write. Information technology'southward the way I often experience later on a book is published. That's not to say I'g not writing new poems. Information technology's simply that I write poems not books, more often than not. At some point a book emerges, but the day-to-day work is near single poems. The challenges are found in the poems.

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Verse Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.

How To Draw A Perfect Circle Poem Analysis,

Source: https://www.nationalbook.org/terrance-hayes-interviewed-by-nicole-sealey/

Posted by: presleynant1976.blogspot.com

Share this post