So I'm really happy to welcome you
to this new annual initiative that we're
doing at the Poetry Center of the themed sub series.
The concept is pretty simple.
We take a big cultural concept or question up here,
and we lob it up next to one of poetry and poetics.
We see what happens.
So this year we have in this order, Terrance Hayes,
Kimiko Hahn, Khadijah Queen, and Adrian Matejka joining us.
Yes, joining us to talk about the overlapping possibly
conflicting, possibly mutually enabling categories
of spectacle and poetry.
This came about because over the last two years
we've found ourselves wondering about how
to navigate the 21st century as poets and as lovers of poetry.
If we read a poem and it talks about a TV show instead
of a flower, or love, or a babbling brook, then
what do we do with that?
We've been told for ages that poetry is solitary,
and it's quiet, that it's something
to write on a hillside, that true poets are introverts, not
swayed or affected by mass media, that they don't own TVs
and can't tell you a single thing about what Kanye West was
tweeting about last weekend.
That's funny if you [INAUDIBLE].
But then of course maybe poets do
have something to say about it all, about cable news,
infotainment, Wolf Blitzer, about sporting events
and their constituent bodies, about social media,
with its likes, and its shares, and its clickbait.
I just sound like Sarah Palin.
Just, clickbait.
Ah ha, you got it.
About this year's concurrent reduxs
of The X-Files and the OJ Simpson trial,
about brightly lit and widely syndicated political speeches,
caucuses, elections, wars, global health emergencies,
about Dr. Oz, or Dr. Phil, or Jerry Springer,
or 25 years of The Oprah Winfrey Show,
about the Super Bowl, or at least its halftime engagements,
about televised protests, rallies, or revolutions.
In short, our question for this series and for its poets
is this, if poetry engages with spectacle, why,
and in what ways?
To speak broadly, we'd like to suggest that poets are uniquely
positioned to show us new ways of engaging with spectacle
more creatively, with deep attention and curiosity.
To speak specifically, we're really, really lucky
that Terrance Hayes is here to talk with us about this.
Who better to start off this series than Terrance Hayes,
whose wild intertextuality has gotten to the point
that a notes and references web page for his newest book,
"How to Be Drawn" over there.
Thank you, Mark.
Mark.
That his notes and references page for "How to be Drawn"
includes Jenny Holzer installations and Willie Cole
sculptures, a music video from the 80s R&B girl group
"Climax," three links to news articles about a 2012
stabbing in New York public transit,
and among other things, Einstein's logic puzzles.
Terrance Hayes whose poems roll it all together,
silver orbs of basketballs, big bird, Marvin Gaye, Shaft,
Air Jordans, Mr T.
Terrance Hayes, whose poetry is complete and expansive,
whose brain and body, and writing, all
serve as a kind of locus of the broader world,
synthesizing it, feeling and digesting what's out there,
and becoming it, recognizing it as already a part of the self,
transforming it, making it new.
Terrance Hayes, who also happens to be a MacArthur
Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, an NEA Fellow, and United States
Artists Zell fellow, a National Book Award winner, a National
Poetry series winner, a visual artist, a diagram maker,
a former NCAA basketball player, and a professor of English
at the University of Pittsburgh.
Woo.
He's right there.
It's like, he's right there.
When asked why poetry matters, one thing that Terrance
Hayes said is quote, I think we all
benefit from talking with more than being talked
to as a television talks to us.
So here to talk with us, Terrance Hayes.