Lighthead

by Terrance Hayes

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry

In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta­tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

Genres: Poetry, African American, Classics, Nonfiction, Contemporary, Literature, Race

95 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2010

About the author

Terrance Hayes is the author of six poetry collections, including American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, How to Be Drawn, and Lighthead, which won the National Book Award. He is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reviews

[Brown Girl Reading · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poems was recommended to me by Derek McDow and I thank him greatly. Lighthead shows poetry in very creative forms. Terrance Hayes pushes his poetry writing to the limits. Expression and meaning are the most important and he uses different types of poetry to do that. The book is separated into 4 sections which contain about 4-5 poems. The poems are all different styles - the most original is the pecha kucha, Japanese powerpoint presentation where 20 consecutive pictures are flashed for 20 seconds each while the commentary has to fit. It was developed to make presentations valid and not overblown and long. Hayes uses that in poetry form. There are also poems which have rhythm and strong vide to them. Other poems are even more out of the ordinary, for example Twenty-six Imaginary Tee Shirts, a list of phrases that could be found on a tee shirt. There are also other poems which are commentaries or responses to other artists work, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Marvin Gaye. The themes that are found in these poems vary from race, family, society, relationships, love, hate, etc. The poems will make you smile, sometimes laugh, they are shocking and sometimes dark. One thing is sure overtime you reread them you'll find something new in them and further gain respect for Hayes' incredible talent.

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very much worthy of the recognition it has received, including this year's National Book Award. Hayes' poetry is what we most hope for in the art: a natural attention to language that manifests equally in the sound and the sense of it. The auricular pleasures are both audible and subtle: "The bride of eaves or the easy bride of naves."

In one poem, Hayes plaits the old story of the four blind men trying to describe the elephant with meditations on the body and boundaries. In another, he uses Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool" to provide end-words for his lines. Though there's a pure pleasure to Hayes' inventiveness, there's also immeasurable gravitas in how that knack for invention illuminates the larger world of the collection.

[Ken]

I've been on a bit of a Terrance Hayes tear ever since I read his bio that's not a bio of Etheridge Knight. As this collection was a National Book Award Winner, I figured it'd be as good a place as any to sample his work.

What stands out most is the sheer variety. Prose poems, lyric poems with various stanza shapes and sizes, sonnets, list poems, a golden shovel poem (saluting Gwendolyn Brooks, inventor thereof), and three pecha kucha poems, according to Hayes's notes "a Japanese business presentation format wherein a presenter narrates or riffs on twenty images connected to a single theme for twenty seconds at a time." Bonus points: no "death by Power Point" experienced while reading.

If there's one thing you can say about Hayes (and you can say many), he is audaciously creative. Some of these read like wordplay carrying a bunch of lines across the poetry finish line. Man, where his head goes! All over the place. The type poems you best fasten your seat belt for, in other words.

Here's a poem about a poet most of us are familiar with: insurance executive Wallace Stevens. The notes say that Hayes wrote it in response to Stevens's two poems "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" and "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery."


Snow for Wallace Stevens

No one living a snowed-in life
can sleep without a blindfold.
Light is the lion that comes down to drink.
I know tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk
holds nearly the same sound as a bottle.
Drink and drank and drunk-a-drunk-drunk,
light is the lion that comes down.
This song is for the wise man who avenges
by building his city in snow.
For his decorations in a nigger cemetery.
How, with pipes of winter
lining his cognition, does someone learn
to bring a sentence to its knees?
Who is not more than his limitations?
Who is not the blood in a wine barrel
and the wine as well? I, too, having lost faith
in language, have placed my faith in language.
Thus, I have a capacity for love without
forgiveness. This song is for my foe,
the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patron
of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness
blue as a body made of snow.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, Terrence Hayes does something that I've never quite seen done before; he's smoothly synthesized the sound-and-emotion-oriented style of spoken-word poetry with the artful arrangement and order of more conceptual, academic poetry. For that, I have to give him some five-star love, even though a lot of the poems talk a lot about African-American identity and racism in a way that I have a hard time taking into my own experience. Yet the guy also references David Bowie, Wallace Stevens, "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Antony and the Johnsons...so it's blazingly clear that he isn't a one-trick rapper/poet.

Really though, some dazzling stuff here, particularly his invention of the "pecha kucha" form (based on a style of Japanese slideshow used for business presentations). The tension between the "slides"/stanzas and their individual titles fleshes out the concepts in an even deeper way, even beyond the surface-level puzzles that he puts forward, so that the pieces end up working on multiple levels and kind of driving you insane and force you to read them over and over, getting more and more out of them each time. There's some game-changing stuff in there.

As mentioned before, I love how omnivorous he is with his references and also with his themes; love, family, the personal vs. cultural/racial history, music...there's even some funny shit in there too!

For all the brou-ha-ha about the National Book Award committee being so ivory-tower-y, I can't fault them picking this book, at least. It's just so fluid and deft and thoughtful, and perfectly emblematic of how other cultures are slowly infiltrating and destroying the "old dead white men" paradigm of modern poetry, and re-making it into something way more strong and deep and hardy, giving it more of a fighting chance to become a significant part of more people's lives. This is a service Hayes does without being at all self-conscious, and the fruits of his labor are pretty damn miraculous.

[George Ciuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short poem book from Hayes. A great read that any poem lover will enjoy.

[rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

...but five stars plus for all of the poems about Mr. Hayes' family, especially "For Brothers of the Dragon" and "Arbor for Butch." I'll admit that I don't care for poetry that can best be described as "playful" or "irreverent" or "ironic" - which is why I generally avoid reading collections of poetry, because who is somber all of the time? - and that is why I liked rather than loved this collection as a whole.

However, over the days I've read this I've had brief moments at work or driving somewhere where I suddenly thought of Hayes' mother's "light-headed, near-comic hairdo" or the sorrow of his brother's extra 100 lbs bearing the weight of their family, or Louis Armstrong riding in the back of a cab after dark, and thought that my half-love might be uncharitable.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m currently interested in the idea of 21st century literature. I’ve been tracking down syllabi/syllabuses (yes, both are technically correct) of university classes on the subject. I’m currently reading my way through one of the better ones. That’s where I first discovered Terrance Hayes’ “Lighthead.” I was unfamiliar with Hayes and this collection even though it won the National Book Award a few years back.

Hayes’ poetry is at times playful and other times deadly serious. The poems cover everything from politics, identity, music, sex, food. He used a variety of styles and structures, including a few I either hadn’t heard of or wasn’t very familiar with such as a pecha kucha and a ghazal. He writes poems in honor of or in response to Gwendolyn Brooks, Tupac, James Dickey, Marvin Gaye, Fela Kuti, Louis Armstrong, Wallace Stevens. There are a few mythological references (I noticed Gilgamesh and several references to Orpheus).

As I always say with contemporary poetry, I’m not the biggest fan. I try to read it and wrap my head around it, but it just usually doesn’t work. There were a few standout phrases and poems (I found the one on Patton particularly interesting), but most of them were over my head and confusing. The standouts to me were a few poems that were unique and a bit humorous. In “Liner Notes for an Imaginary Playlist,” Hayes makes a playlist of fake (humorous) songs and explains them. “Twenty-Six Imaginary T-Shirts” functions in a similar way. Some of the more humorous imaginary t-shirts:

“The best way to wipe out poverty is to wipe out poor people. Signed—The GOP”

“I’m not shy, I’m sober”

“A worm slinking from the left nostril to the right above caption: May Enkidu find no peace tonight.”

[Renee Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the greatest poetry collections ive ever read. hayes at his most precise.

without a doubt “the elegant tongue” is one of my favorite poems on earth. just so genius.

“The creature is most like the serpent in Eden, / tell them, If there is goodness in your heart, it will come / to your mouth, and if that doesn’t work, tell them / In the dark it it’s not the forked tongue that does the piercing.”

“You know what I sorrow when I lay / On your back Beloved and our lovemaking / With your back to me is a form / Of departure”

this book feels so canon i like the words for it read now if you gaf about FEELING THINGS

[k-os]

I mean, wow: clearly a genius at work. I freakin loved the first two sections ("Train to Africa" and "God is an American"), but even when I didn't love a poem or section, I appreciated Hayes' project.

"Carp Poem" has my heart. As does "All the Way Live."

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Omfg

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like how Terrance Hayes keeps a distance between himself and his poems. There's an autobiographical element to many of his poems, but it's always playfully elusive, like the "Blue Terrance" poems in Wind in a Box, which is still my favorite book of his.

This book is great, too, playful and powerful as Wind in a Box, ambitious in its subject matter and its formal ground-breaking. I was especially blown away by the "Golden Shovel" poem, which uses the entirety of Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool" for its end words, twice, once to describe a story of a boy and his father at a pool hall and once for a chant delivered by a disaffected urban "we" who "sing until [their] blood is jazz."

The main form that keeps popping back up in the book is this pecha kucha-style poem. There are four, I think, pecha kucha poems, each composed of twenty stanzas of four or five lines, each stanza with a title--the stanzas act as "slides" you might see in a business presentation. They are long poems, and there's so much starting and stopping in these poems that it's hard to keep your energy going the whole time, even though there are some great individual sections within each of them. In fact, I doubt anyone else could do this form better than Hayes. I just don't think it's a great form to begin with.

But just the fact that Hayes would think to borrow the pecha kucha for his poetry shows what an inventor he is, and this book is full of that sort of alchemical crazed artistic energy.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry like this convinces me I haven't lived enough.

"Friend, sometimes the wind's scuttle makes the reeds
In the body vibrate. Sometimes the noise gives up its code
And the music is better at saying what I meant to say."
-from "Liner Notes for an Imaginary Playlist"

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes my body is a guitar, a hole waiting in wood, wires
trembling to sleep. To identify what you are, to be loved by what
you identify, I thought, This is how the blood sings into the self.
I thought what was hollow in me would be shaped into music.

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very referential, requires a large commitment on the part of the reader.

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

These poems require slowness.  You can't just race through several poems at once.  You have to read each one, one at a time, slowly.  Let yourself sink into it.  Read it again. Think hard.  Even at this deliberate pace, some of them just passed me right by.  Maybe I'm not willing to do the work required to tease out the meanings sometimes.  Maybe I don't have the right background to pick up on the allusions.  I'm not sure what the problem was, but these didn't always work for me.

Bullethead For Earthell
I don’t know what the soul mutters
in the moment before the slang
of gunshots, sweat jeweling
the brow, braggadocio jumping
from the skin, blood thrusting out
a feverish gasp, the wish for nothing
worth holding between the hands
turned up to Heaven, but I know
if it happens, you must be my grandfather
at the moment of an ambush one
morning in Vietnam’s Ia Drang Valley.
Because in the moment before death
none of the moments before that,
I know, bear the same risks.
A naked towel turned up to Heaven
on the bed with the same sprawl
of softness as the woman upon it, I realize
in the moment preceding the moment
of death, does not represent the moment
of death. It could be the broth of a spasm,
the fever of gasping, the moment of death.
It could be the fitful woman holding you
to earth as the seed leaves your body.
Even a boy with no father carries in him
the image of his father. And it must be abstract
as dream, pure theory, the moment of death.
If you are good, and even if you are not good,
the bullet enters the blood like the bony finger
of the god who put it there, and the future
scampers down to cover you. Granddaddy,
when my father, the first time I met him,
tried to recall your face, there was nothing
but smoke coaxing our history from his breath.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a lot of poetry, but I don’t often read a collection and think, “yeah, that’s a National Book Award winner” (even for collections I love) but, yeah this is.

[Dallas Swindell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems collected by Terrance Hayes into Lighthead brim with a spoken word rhyme and flow all while filling themselves up with the exchange of meditative, burning thought. These collected poems are at times surreal, at times narrative, and at times an updated pecha kucha, but the breath within each line is still singular and imaginative. It’s hard to describe exactly how Hayes packs so much emotion, humor, and sharp observation into each tightly woven poem. The result though is an expansive sense of wonder and headiness that often moves your eyes to the next line before your mind has fully grasped the weight of the words just read. Drawing from rhythmic and psychedelic shaman like Kuti and Bowie, Hayes divides words, lines, and ideas at crucial moments to pull you deeper into each poems imagery and poignancy. His poems bleed with a headiness that both expands and contracts the reader, filling your own inner mental void with the universes his ideas inhabit.

[Leeza Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly honest and thought provoking.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come.

[Kelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

For people who dig spoken word poetry but find written poetry to be stuffy or inaccessible, I present to you Lighthead by Terrence Hayes. Hayes writes about music, relationships, history, and the black experience with an energy that rivals the best spoken word pieces I've seen; the poems seem to come alive off the page. Those who love form will also be pleased as every word is carefully chosen to flow (I'm not a poetry major so I can't go into technical specifics). Hayes also seems to be the inventor of a new form of poetry (as far as I can tell) based off the Japanese presentation style of pecha kucha, which involves 20 short flashes of an idea or story presented together. It's fantastic to see it in poetic form. I definitely recommend this and so does the National Book Award, for which this was a winner.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't remember what lead me to pick this up...probably something I saw related to Poetry Month.

Just some quotes I liked:

"This is Bach according to a young man born on the Carolina coast,
This is Bach according to man whose favorite word is Amen.
This is Bach according to a man whose childhood was a shambles.
What if Keats heard jazz? What if Bach heard the blues? It's all music."
--from Liner Notes for an Imaginary Playlist

"With 'La Vie en Rose,' your heart so broken again
You doze on the cab ride home and dream the notes

To 'West End Blues,' which is what an American city sounds like
At 45 mph after dark when your eyes are closed."
--from Satchmo Returns to New Orleans

[Castles · Rating 3 out of 5]

“All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet the flowers don’t quit opening”.

Beautiful.

The book started really good, but lost its charm in the middle, only to end again pretty well.

I did notice those poems work better when reading them aloud, but other than a few brilliant lines, most of it felt to me just a little distant to really get.

“Cocktails with Orpheus” was one of my favorites in this book.

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beyond the opening poem, “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy,” which is probably Hayes’ signature piece of his career thus far, this book offers (and challenges) so much beauty to/for the reader. Fave poems: “Arbor for Butch,” “I Am A Bird Now,” “Snow for Wallace Stevens,” and “Bullethead for Earthell.”

[Veronika Tretina · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I am carrying the whimper
you can hear when the mouth is collapsed, the wisdom
of monkeys. Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.
Brothers and sisters, when you spend your nights
out on a limb, there’s a chance you’ll fall in your sleep.”

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the attention to form and the various homages to and breaks from traditional forms. Was it a little pretentious? Maybe. It’s not what I would consider one of the most accessible poetry collections I’ve read, but it’s beautiful and ambitious and probably deserved the National Book Award that it won.

[CutieChuchu(っ.❛ ᴗ ❛.)っ · Rating 4 out of 5]

"When my wind-scuffed wig mingles in halfhearted tufts
with the dust (the shock of growing old without growing);
when the shine is greased in the aesthetics of whatever
grief calls itself (grief), I know the sublime is approaching"

[Ryan Doyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. The Pechu Kucha format is so well done. A new form I plan to experiment with quite a bit.

[Phil Overeem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pecha kuchas: interesting (one inspired by Fela songs). When this guy's good, he's really good. Recommended.

[Hollis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another phenomenal collection from my favorite poet, extending some lead on whatever criteria establishes that distinction. The poems here are imaginable, thoughtful and meant to be spoken aloud, crafted with suffering and laughter in mind. Honestly, something that really establishes Hayes as distinctive is his sense of humor and breaking of decorum that his wide ranged references might establish for some - "Maybe Art's only purpose is to preserve the Self. / Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires / upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction / of the earth" (from the opener, "Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy"). Let me just quote some more random lines:

"Once my mother bought a sheepskin brush / for my father's sheepskin jacket. He held her then, / as if she were a shepherd's guitar. My love is sentimental. / It is the good news that holds us. I am still in the house / with the music that makes my brown face soft / and gives the sheep a reason to believe" (from "The Shepherd")

Ok, I just stumbled on this quote from one of his pecha kuchas, and the quote captures my relationship to the writer - "In fiction / everything happens with ease, and the easefulness kills me" (from "For Brothers of the Dragon"). Hayes' seeming ease in unraveling these poems kills me!

I think my favorite poem here is "Anchor Head," but I won't quote from that one. Look it up!

Another favorite is "Fish Head for Katrina," which reads like an incantation - "Where the dead live in the noise / Of their shotgun houses / They drift from their wards / Like fish spreading thin as a song / Diminished by its own opening / Split by faith and soaked in it / The mouth is a flooded machine."

"Anchor Head," "Fish Head for Katrina," and "I Am a Bird Now" ("After the vase is asleep with the taste / Of the bit flower its moodiness and lust") - these three poems approach a rare sort of transcendence which I cannot describe, helpless to frame the feeling that their gifted words provide. Of course, while those three are my favorites, trust that the volume is overpacked with other offerings.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

i expected to like this, i liked it even more than expected. his pecha kucha poems were among my favorites, also dog eared (in my library book, whoops) nothing, God is an american, and support the troops.

Carp Poem by Terrance Hayes

After I have parked below the spray paint caked in the granite
grooves of the Fredrick Douglass Middle School sign

where men and women sized children loiter like shadows
draped in the outsized denim, jerseys, bangles, braids, and boots

that mean I am no longer young, after I have made my way
to the New Orleans Parish Jail down the block

where the black prison guard wearing the same weariness
my prison guard father wears buzzes me in,

I follow his pistol and shield along each corridor trying not to look
at the black men boxed and bunked around me

until I reach the tiny classroom where two dozen black boys are
dressed in jumpsuits orange as the pond full of carp I saw once in Japan,

so many fat snaggle-toothed fish ganged in and lurching for food
that a lightweight tourist could have crossed the pond on their backs

so long as he had tiny rice balls or bread to drop into the water
below his footsteps which I’m thinking is how Jesus must have walked

on the lake that day, the crackers and wafer crumbs falling
from the folds of his robe, and how maybe it was the one fish

so hungry it leapt up his sleeve that he later miraculously changed
into a narrow loaf of bread, something that could stick to a believer’s ribs,

and don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer too, in the power of food at least,
having seen a footbridge of carp packed gill to gill, packed tighter

than a room of boy prisoners waiting to talk poetry with a young black poet,
packed so close they might have eaten each other had there been nothing else to eat.