How to Draw a Perfect Circle Poem Analysis

As we know, poetry is non a transcription of experiences, but a transformation of them. In How to Be Drawn, Terrance Hayes does u.s.a. one better. He transforms transformations. And so transforms those. What results are poems at once original and daring, willful and honest. Readers volition render to this drove once again and once 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 Be Drawn.Hayes teaches writing in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of English language in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.

Nicole Sealey: From ane volume to the next, information technology seems as though y'all're conducting collection-specific experiments with form and content. Is this something you set out to do or is information technology realized in retrospect?

Terrance Hayes: I'k mostly merely thinking most the last poem and the next poem on any given twenty-four hours. So my experiments are really poem-to-poem challenges. Sometimes a challenge merits a few unlike attempts. I think in How To Be Fatigued the experiment with the "long verse form" form required multiple tries. Each department has some diversity of extended verse form: "Who Are The Tribes," "Instructions for a Seance for Vladimirs," "Self Portrait every bit the Heed of a Camera." In each, it was like trying to concord my breath underwater for every bit long as possible, like 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 Indicate Pittsburgh" aren't only longer. There are other experiments being undertaken, no?

Th: Yes, those poems are experiments, merely in the way every new poem is some manner of experiment or challenge. The longer poems were attempts to sustain an experiment in a style that differed from repeating a ready of rules. The Pecha Kucha poems from Lighthead (in How To Be Drawn, "Gentle Measures" is a Pecha Kucha), for instance, are a formal experiment repeated in separate poems. The long poems inHow To Be Drawn are extended experiments inside each verse form.

NS: Do yous worry when yous're not writing or practice you retrieve any you're doing (or not doing) is contributing to poems even so to come in ways you may not know?

Thursday: I always experience like I'm non writing enough. Or well enough. And that I am always missing nigh of what's interesting in the world. I cope with this feeling (of inadequacy) by trying to be alarm to experience. But I want the experiences I capture to go more uncomplicated records of experience. Sometimes the result is a tape of fantasy. That's the case in "Black Confederate Ghost Story". Sometimes the result is a record of meditation. That's how I think of "How to Draw a Perfect Circle." Both poems originate in bodily experiences, but in neither poem did I know what would outcome beforehand.

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

NS: I beginning heard you read "How to Draw a Perfect Circle" a few years ago, but it was only recently published. From first to final draft, how drastic are your revisions?

Th: I attempt not to rail my revisions considering they are so extensive. Information technology can exist daunting to realize a poem has gone through one hundred drafts—information technology was at least one hundred drafts with "How To Draw a Perfect Circle." I remember there was a much longer section about the cyclops and the size of his eye socket. That's at present merely a moment about an onion the size of his eyeball. When I'm not keeping count, the process feels both engaging and discouraging. Every typhoon is presumably the last draft. Until it'southward not. And so I ordinarily will sit with a poem for quite a few months before sending it out for publication. I have to be certain I'thousand washed with information technology.

NS: Per the opening poem, "What It Look Like," the speaker "care[southward] less and less about shapes of shapes because forms modify and nix is more durable than feeling." How so should one exist drawn?

Th: Variously. Every portrait is a self-portrait, I read somewhere. If practical to the "What Information technology Look Like" quote: the form a portrait takes matters less than the feeling it elicits. Or: What it looks like is not always the aforementioned every bit what it feels like.

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

NS: If you were stranded on a deserted isle, and could only take one medium with you, what would it exist? Pen and paper? A finely tuned piano? Or, canvass and paint?

TH: That's a hard one. If I were stranded on a monkish mountain, I'd carry painting supplies, if I was stranded in a cave, I'd want a pianoforte. On an island, I think it would be books. Not my own. I'd write in the sand.

NS: Which books would yous accept?

Th: The kickoff books that jump to heed are novels I've read more than a few times (Lolita, Roughshod Detectives, 1 Hundred Years of Solitude, Vocal of Solomon) only definitely one of the books would be the Oxford English Lexicon. I don't think I'd take 1 volume of poetry—unless I could accept like 100. I don't typically read one volume of poetry at a time, come up to think almost information technology.

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

Thursday: Correct now I fear this is the last book I'll write. Information technology's the way I often feel after a book is published. That's not to say I'm not writing new poems. Information technology'southward just that I write poems non books, generally. At some signal a book emerges, simply the 24-hour interval-to-twenty-four hour period work is about 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 Poetry Prize, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.

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

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