NCTE Verse - Terrance Hayes

Poetry highlights in honor of National Poetry Month!

Poet of the Day: Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow and currently a professor of English at New York University. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry. Hayes is the creator of the “Golden Shovel” form in tribute to the late Gwendolyn Brooks.

Image credit: Creator: Hannah Ensor Copyright: Courtesy of The University of Arizona Poetry Center.

This poet belongs in our classrooms because . . .

Terrance Hayes’s poetry belongs in our classrooms because of his inventiveness with form and truth telling in his poetry.

A Poem by Terrance Hayes

Excerpt from American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

“I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison”

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,

Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.

I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat

Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.

I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold

While your better selves watch from the bleachers.

I make you both gym & crow here.

Resources for Terrance Hayes's work

The collection American Sonnet from my Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018) is bold and unique with every sonnet titled the same as the collection. It addresses modern politics and performs ars poetica in a way only Hayes can.

The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017) has a forward by Hayes regarding the form he created to pay homage to Brooks.

Classroom Connections

Here are three ideas for teaching Terrance Hayes in your classroom:

Most British Literature classes have a section of the syllabus devoted to sonnets. Complicate your canonical sonnet unit with this lesson plan and resources titled “Teaching Sonnets Today” where Hayes’ American Sonnets from my Past and Future Assassin figures prominently. Explore the questions: What makes a sonnet a sonnet? What makes a sonnet an American sonnet?

Listen to the 12-minute Poetry Magazine Podcast as two editors discuss Hayes’s poetry (with clips of Hayes reading his work). Having students listen to scholars talk about poetry is a valuable exercise. This would be a great addition to the current demand for engaging online lessons.

Explore the “Golden Shovel” form—invented by Hayes in tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks and her iconic poem “We Real Cool: Seven at the Golden Shovel”—with this Wakelet collection curated by @MelAlterSmith. Just wait for the ah-ha moment that always happens with students with this lesson.

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Adrian Nester is an English teacher and department chair in rural Virginia with 18 years experience. She writes about her experiences as a teacher, reader, and parent at adriantnester.com . She is also a contributor at aplithelp.com and teachlivingpoets.com .