National Poetry Month Feature: Terrance Hayes

An introduction + writing prompts from a MacArthur Fellow.

Note to readers: As a thank you for being here, today’s poetry month prompts with the venerable Terrance Hayes are available for all subscribers. If you like what you’re reading, you can always become a paid subscriber to have full access to all our poetry month posts, prompts, Questions o’ the Day, and all content past and present. Enjoy, and again, thanks for being here with us.

I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry.
—Terrance Hayes

When it comes to our country’s cache of poets, Terrance Hayes is a national treasure. Terrance and I first bonded over our love for our mutual friend, the late great poet Wanda Coleman, who, alongside Jack Hirschman, was an early writing mentor of mine. Terrance is a heavyweight in the world of poetry, having written many award-winning books and edited numerous anthologies and publications. He is a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, the former poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine, and a professor of English at New York University, as well as just a great person to drink bourbon with and shoot the shit, as they say.

Some poems I love by Terrance:
-American Sonnet for Wanda C.
-American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin
-American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous”]
-George Floyd

To round out our final week of National Poetry Month, here is a series of excellent writing prompts from the master himself (including some in the form of cartoons). Plus, at the end of the post is my Poetry Month Question o’ the Day to get those creative curiosities moving even more. Enjoy! 

Writing Prompts with Terrance Hayes 

Hi everybody, Terrance here. 

I always use actual poems in writing prompts because I believe reading leads to writing of all kinds. As long as you can find a poem, you can find a prompt and vice versa. The two poems below are excellent examples of this idea. David Berman’s poem “Now II” seemed strange when it appeared without a “Now I” in his debut collection, Actual Air. I may be the only person to catch the nod to Denis Johnson and the only person to have met them both and confirmed the connection. Berman told me he read Johnson’s “Now” from The Incognito Lounge and loved it so much he wrote his own version, “Now II.” 

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Now
by Denis Johnson

Whatever the foghorns are
the voices of feels terrible
tonight, just terrible, and here
by the window that looks out
on the waters but is blind, I
have been sleeping,
but I am awake now.
In the night I watch
how the little lights
of boats come out
to us and are lost again
in the fog wallowing on the sea:
it is as if in that absence not many
but a single light gestures
and diminishes like meaning
through speech, negligently
a dance to the calling
of the foghorns like the one
note they lend from voice
to voice. And so does my life tremble,
and when I turn from the window
and from the sea's grief, the room
fills with a dark
lushness and foliage nobody
will ever be plucked from,
and the feelings I have
must never be given speech.
Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson,
and I am almost ready to
confess it is not some awful
misunderstanding that has carried
me here, my arms full of the ghosts
of flowers, to kneel at your feet;
almost ready to see
how at each turning I chose
this way, this place and this verging
of ocean on earth with the horns claiming
I can keep on if only I step
where I cannot breathe. My coat
is leprosy and my dagger
is a lie; must I
shed them? Do I have
to end my life in order
to begin? Music, you are light.
Agony, you are only what tips
me from moment to moment, light
to light and word to word,
and I am here at the waters
because in this space between spaces
where nothing speaks,
I am what it says.

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Now II
by David Berman

I am not in the parlor of a federal brownstone.
I am not a cub scout seduced by Iron Maiden's mirror worlds.

I'm on a floor unrecognized by the elevator,
      fucked beyond understanding
      like a hacked up police tree 
on the outskirts of town.


Father, why does this night
last longer than any other night?

For God is not a secret.

And the brown girl who reads the Bible by the pool 
with a bookmark that says “ed called”
or “ed call ed,” must know that turtles 
are screwed in the snow

and that everything strains to be inevitable 
even as it's being killed forever.

And this is also a song.


O I've lied to you so much I can no longer trust you.
O Don't people wear out from the inside,

Why must we suffer this expensive silence,
aren't we meant to crest in a fury more distinguished?

Because there is my life and there is our life
       (which I know to be Your life).

Dear Lord, whom I love so much,
       I don't think I can change anymore.

I have burned all my forces at the edge of the city.
I am all dressed up to go away,

and I'm asking You now
      if You'd take me as I am.

For God is not a secret,

and this also is a song.

So my writing prompt for you, reader, is to write a “Now III.” 

What elements/qualities do both “Now” poems share? 

What is your “now”? 

I’ve also included four additional prompts unrelated to the “Now” poems, but ones I love and return to often. The prompts are illustrated with Berman’s drawings:

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Enjoy and happy writing. 

—Terrance

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Question o’ the Day: I love the idea of using existing writing to help propel us in our own creative work. What’s a line from a piece of writing—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenplay, song lyric—that you think would make an excellent starting point for a new piece of writing? Just one single line.

I’ll go first: The title for my latest book, Listening in the Dark (and, subsequently, this Substack community) was pulled from a line in the Anne Carson book, Autobiography of Red. The line asks, “What is it like to be a woman listening in the dark?” This alone could inspire a thousand ideas to write about, but for me, it felt like the perfect expression of how women’s intuition manifests and feels. Another example is The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. The opening line of the novel reads, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” What a way to capture the reader! 

So tell us: What’s just one line that’s captured you?