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Christopher Spaide on Terrance Hayes ("The Golden Shovel")
1.9k Plays1 year ago
What a thrill it was to talk with Christopher Spaide about one of the great poems of this century, Terrance Hayes's "The Golden Shovel."
This is a two-for-one Close Readings experience, since you can't talk about the Hayes poem without also discussing the Gwendolyn Brooks poem that his is "after," "We Real Cool."
Christopher Spaide is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he focuses on poetry, ecopoetics, American literature, and Asian American literature. His academic writing on poetry (as well as music and comics) appears in American Literary History, The Cambridge Quarterly, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, ELH, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and several edited collections. His essays and reviews and his poems appear in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, Colorado Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and honors from Harvard University, the James Merrill House, and the Keasbey Foundation.
As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a rating and review, and make sure you're following us. Share Close Readings with a friend! And subscribe to the newsletter, where you'll get more thoughts from me and links to things that come up during the episodes.
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Transcript
Introduction to Chris Spade and The Golden Shovel
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's my great pleasure to have Christopher Spade on the episode today. Chris is one of the great up-and-coming poetry critics out there, and
00:00:19
Speaker
I was telling Chris just before we started recording that when I thought of doing this podcast, Chris was one of the names that was immediately floating in my mind as an ideal person to have on.
00:00:35
Speaker
And I think we'll all discover why that is within the next hour. So the poet, the poem rather that Chris has chosen for us to think about today is The Golden Shovel by the poet Terrence Hayes. And that poem we will see
00:00:56
Speaker
contains within it another poem. And so this will be an interesting experiment for Close Readings, a chance to think about one poem that has at its heart another.
Accessing The Golden Shovel
00:01:09
Speaker
So just as a reminder, you'll be able to find a link to the Terrence Hayes poem, The Golden Shovel,
00:01:15
Speaker
In the episode notes, you'll be able to find it also in the newsletter that goes out along with the episode. And I'll tweet it out as well when the episode appears. So look for it there.
Chris Spade's Background and Work
00:01:30
Speaker
Let me tell you more though about our guest today before we get going with the poem. So Chris Spade is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he focuses on modern and contemporary American poetry.
00:01:45
Speaker
He's working on a book project right now with the title, Lyric Togetherness. And that book, which I've had the great pleasure to see bits of here and there, and more on that in a minute, is concerned with plural pronouns and collective voices in American poetry from 1945 to the present.
00:02:11
Speaker
And it is going to be an important and crucial book for poetry studies and for people who care about what it means in poetry to have a kind of collective experience.
00:02:31
Speaker
Chris's essays and reviews and poems have appeared in all kinds of places. He's a shockingly prolific writer, and I am astounded at how much work Chris has already produced, but they have appeared in places like college literature, where actually Chris contributed to a special issue that I edited with my friend Robert Volpicelli, Bob Volpicelli.
00:02:59
Speaker
That special issue was on the topic of poetry networks, and Chris gave us just the staggeringly learned and wide-ranging essay on the poet, Adrienne Rich, but other things besides, and you should look for that article. I'll link to it for you. But Chris's work has also appeared in places like the New Yorker, in plowshares, in poetry, in the Suwannee Review, and in the Yale Review.
Connection Through James Merrill House
00:03:31
Speaker
And Chris has received fellowships and honors from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, from the Keesbee Foundation, and from the James Merrill House, where Chris was a 2022-2023 writer in residence. So this is another point of contact between
00:03:51
Speaker
our guest today and me, I was a writer in residence at the Merrill House as well and maybe even there will be occasion to talk about that shared experience during today's conversation.
Chris Spade's Analytical Approach to Poetry
00:04:05
Speaker
But as I was saying a moment ago, I met Chris and I've just used air quotes, which you can't see, of course, but I met Chris when I read a proposal that he sent in for a call for papers that Bob Fulpicelli and I put out for the special issue on poetry networks. And it was one of the easiest calls we had to make that we were
00:04:26
Speaker
going to accept this proposal and ask for this paper, and then I got the great fortune to edit, to work with Chris, though he didn't need my editorial intervention at all, really. It's an amazingly polished piece that he submitted.
00:04:42
Speaker
And I was so impressed there and I've been so impressed just elsewhere by this capacity Chris has to talk not just about one poem or one poet, but to think in a kind of generous and generative way about a mode that poetry can seek out
00:05:04
Speaker
The examples seem to be right at his fingertips. And he is able to allow readers to see how poems from across periods, poems from a whole variety of poets are speaking to each other and illuminating each other in the work that he does. And he does that without sacrificing attention to particular poems or
00:05:33
Speaker
without smoothing out interesting topographical variations between poems and poets. And you wind up, when you read Chris's work, trusting him, trusting him to guide you through a poetic landscape and to do it with erudition and sensitivity and a light touch with humor even.
Choosing The Golden Shovel and Contemporary Voices
00:05:55
Speaker
And I think that critical mode is just authentically part of
00:05:59
Speaker
Chris's intellectual project, I mean, it seems, I guess what I'm saying is that the way Chris writes about poetry seems related to his interest in poetry, that is an interest in plurality and collectivity and in what it is to have a consciousness that isn't simply an I, but that might also be a we. I mean, what it is to talk about an object of study
00:06:24
Speaker
in a way that doesn't simply render it as an it, but might render it as a they or a them or an us even. And that disposition of Chris's is reflected in his choice of poem for today. So remember, or for those of you who are new to the podcast, and how dare you, by the way, I expect you all to be completists by now,
00:06:53
Speaker
Remember, what I do is to invite someone I want to talk to onto the podcast, and then I let the choice of poem be entirely theirs. For some guests, this has been a source of great consternation because they think, how could I choose just one poem? And while Chris has cleverly discovered that you don't have to choose just one poem, you can choose one poem that contains within it, in this case, literally, another poem. And so I was delighted by the choice
00:07:23
Speaker
Terrence Hayes is, as we'll learn today, one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry. And The Golden Shovel is just a marvelous and astounding poem, and already in its short life, now just more than a decade or so old, already a very influential poem.
00:07:48
Speaker
So this is a really exciting episode for me to have and I have just the right guest to talk about this wonderful poem with today. Chris Spade, how are you doing?
00:07:58
Speaker
I'm good. I'm not that of embarrassment. That was an outrageously nice introduction. And thank you for saying those things. And just deflated a bit and also compliment your wonderful editing. When I did turn in the first draft of my Audrey Enrich essay, it had a really great
00:08:19
Speaker
typo. I mean, that kind of typo you kind of wish was real, where I was quoting W.H. Auden's famous line, we must love one another or die. And I instead wrote, we must love on another or die, which sounds like it could be, I don't know, a refrain of like some goth sexy dance anthem. I don't know. Did I catch this? I don't remember it.
00:08:42
Speaker
I think you were kind enough to not bring it up and I found it on my own. And I lived with that mortification and it has born fruit today in me telling the story of your podcast. But thanks so much for having me. I'm such a fan of the podcast. As I mentioned to you, I think I've listened to every episode and I've at least memorized one or two poems that came up on it because I wanted to carry them around with me.
00:09:09
Speaker
Oh, that's so wonderful to hear. Probably as it sounds, I was walking around over the holidays with my family saying the line, prayer the churches banquet angels age, which is a great way to get people to know what to do. The shampoo of my bishop is one I picked up and then just learning so much about other poets and poems and ways of looking at them. It's been really fantastic.
00:09:34
Speaker
Well, thank you. That means a lot to me. It's been lovely now to see a number of episodes, you know, racked or whatever in the archive that we're putting together here. And just to think of the sort of haphazard anthology that we're forming here of poems, but also of ways of reading poems, of ways of talking about poems. And
00:09:58
Speaker
I think I've not had much to do with it myself. This is the podcast. It's meant to feature the guests, but they've done this marvelous work, and together we've made something. It's quite exciting for me. So let's talk about Terrence Hayes. And as I like to do at the beginning of an episode, I think we ought to
00:10:22
Speaker
share the poem with our listeners or let them hear it. And this is one circumstance in which we have a recording of Hayes reading the poem. People who are curious, and I would recommend this in fact,
00:10:39
Speaker
Perhaps because the poem is so recent and because Hayes is prominent enough and desired after, you know, guests at poetry festivals and that kind of thing, you'll easily be able to find several recordings of Hayes reading this poem. And each one of them is interesting and with slight variations in its own ways. I mean, I don't really mean like variations in the text, though, sort of, you know, people occasionally
00:11:06
Speaker
slip up or change things around in interesting ways in live performance. But I mean more in the sort of way poets will preface a poem or contextualize it or the mood or the tone of the performance. So look for those. And what I might do with Chris's help is to give you links to a couple of interesting performances, not just the one we're about to hear. The one we're about to hear
00:11:30
Speaker
was a recording that Hayes made during a visit to Harvard, actually, where Chris currently is, but back in 2010. So I'll provide a link, but we'll listen to Hayes reading the poem. And I guess one thing that's worth saying before we listen is that
00:11:52
Speaker
If you look at the poem, The Golden Shovel, in the book Lighthead, where it was first published in book form, you'll notice that it's a poem in two parts. There's a Roman numeral I that's given the subhead 1981, and then a Roman numeral II that has the subhead 1991, so 10 years later.
00:12:14
Speaker
And I think this is true, and Chris is, yes, Chris, have I got this right, that Hayes tends to seem to read the first part much more often than the second. Yeah.
00:12:26
Speaker
When he read it circa Lighthead and would preface it and give the explanation of how he came to it, which we'll hear in the recording too, he usually launches into this one and doesn't mention that there's a second part. Or what he does is he kind of gives the sense that it's an infinitely reproducible, recreatable form.
00:12:47
Speaker
So he wrote two that ended up in the book, but he says he wrote a few others. And as maybe we'll talk about later, many people now have written their own Golden Shovels. Right. So that's worth saying too. Or at least I hope that we will come back to that idea that the Golden Shovel, which Hayes takes as his title, it's a title that he's taking as we'll see from the subtitle, I guess, of the Gwendolyn Brooks poem that his poem is in dialogue with.
00:13:19
Speaker
that term has become the name for a form of poem that other poets have produced. All right, so let's listen to Hayes Reed and then we'll talk about it. Here's Terrence Hayes. The Golden Shovel is a poem that's in dialogue with Gwendolyn Brooks and I use We Real Cool, which is a poem that everybody knows. I essentially like just
00:13:48
Speaker
wrote her poem sort of vertically, and then I just wrote towards it. So the poem, We Real Cool, is buried in it. So if you were to look at this poem on the page, you know, you would see it in a couple of it, so you could read her poem down the side. But you shouldn't pay attention to any of that. The Golden Shovel. So in her poem, the Golden Shovel is the name of the bar that the guys go to. Everybody knows that poem, too. We Real Cool, We Left School, We Lurk Late, We Strike Straight. So that's the name of the bar. And you know, my dad would take me to
00:14:19
Speaker
pool halls when I was young, even though I can't play pool, but I was there. The Golden Shovel. When I am so small, dad's sock covers my arm. We cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.
00:14:40
Speaker
His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we drift by women on bar stools with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is a school I do not know yet, but the cue sticks mean we are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk of smoke thin to song. We won't be out late.
00:15:02
Speaker
Standing in the middle of the street last night, we watched the moonlit lawns and the neighbor strike his son in the face, a shadow not straight. Dad promised to leave me everything, the shovel we used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing, his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin. The boys' sneakers were light on the road.
00:15:26
Speaker
We watched him run to us looking wounded and thin. He'd been caught lying or drinking his father's gin. He'd been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We stood in the road and my father talked about jazz, how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June, the boy would be locked up state. That night, we got down on our knees in my room. If I should die before I wake, Dad said to me, it would be too soon.
00:15:57
Speaker
So that was Terrence Hayes reading The Golden Shovel. Chris, I just want to ask you in a very general way, like, what do you notice? This is a poem you've read many, many times. I know it's a poem you've written about.
00:16:16
Speaker
So you've studied this poem, but you've just heard it again. And what thoughts were running through your mind as you listened? What do you notice about this particular performance of it? Well, it is a poem I have read a ton, and it's a poem that I've been revisiting as we approach recording this episode.
00:16:38
Speaker
And it still yields surprises for me and it still offers mysteries. There are phrases and word choices in this poem that I think I, some of them I think I got a hold on today walking to my office or trying to recycle the poem in my head and play it over. But what jumps out to me about that recording is this very modest joke he has when he's introducing the poem. We'll probably get into some
00:17:06
Speaker
high level stratospheric topics. When we talk about this poem, we'll talk about, I don't know, literary history. We'll talk about how poets influence other poets, how poets carry forward other poets work. And he gets a bit into that and then he says, but you don't need to worry about that. I know. And then
00:17:24
Speaker
I mean, he's being modest, but it is kind of true that he's written this poem that does this virtuosic formal trick of including another poem. And it totally also just works as a story. It works as a narrative, which is a hard thing to do. I mean, I think
00:17:39
Speaker
maybe we assume that sincerity and the tones of naturalness come easily, but it's an artifice that takes a lot of work to make. It's almost as though when he set himself the formal requirements for this poem, it wasn't just
00:17:55
Speaker
I'll let me do this cool trick. I'll put the words of real cool down the margin and I'll fill those in. You have to set himself the assignment. Oh, sorry. No, please. You first. I was just going to say he set himself the assignment of maybe I'll try to make it sound like it happened. I'll try to convey the tones, the narrative gestures.
00:18:13
Speaker
of someone telling a story from his childhood, maybe passing it along to a son. Yeah. I was thinking of the line from Yeats's poem, Adam's Curse, where the speaker says, I said a line will take us hours maybe, yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, all our stitching and unstitching has been not, right? The idea that the line may take hours, but it wants to sound
00:18:39
Speaker
natural, as you were just saying, and that that requires a kind of labor. But I want to, yeah, so I was struck by the same thing in the intro, his kind of sheepish description of the technique that goes into this act, and then a dismissal, but you don't need to know about all that. And I'm intrigued also by your
00:19:07
Speaker
not simply dismissing that moment of self-deprecation as a kind of pose, but in thinking, well, in some way that's right. You don't need to worry about all that.
00:19:23
Speaker
That's interesting to me, but I think we might be doing our audience here a disservice if we didn't maybe begin just by describing, and in particular since, well, a couple of things. I've noticed that when Hayes introduces this poem, and you could hear it even in the recording that we had just now,
00:19:48
Speaker
he says things like, oh, you all know the We Real Cool poem, and he gives it the most kind of flippant, we real cool, we love school. He doesn't even finish it this time, right?
00:20:01
Speaker
And yeah, that is a very anthologized poem. It is as far as poems go. It's a poem that children are likely to have encountered in school at some point. We can talk more about it in a minute. But I think it might be a mistake for us to assume that everybody listening to us right now knows that poem. So that's one thing.
00:20:23
Speaker
And then the other thing, of course, is just that, well, if people are listening and not looking, you might very easily miss the trick that he's done. He describes it briefly, but maybe we could describe it a little more fully. Chris, could you explain what the form of the golden shovel is or what's interesting about it or what it is that, you know, just sort of setting the scene for us here. What has Hayes done with the text that he's working from?
00:20:53
Speaker
Yeah, I'd love to do that. And now I guess I really have to confront the fact that I've gamed the system of this podcast. And I'm talking about two poems at once. Should we listen to the Brooks? Because I have a recording. Is now the time? That'd be great. It is kind of like bang for your buck, some of the greatest poetry you can get per second in American poetry. So let's take a listen. OK, it's very brief. But so if you don't know We Real Cool, the poem by Gwendolyn Brooks,
00:21:23
Speaker
Listen up, you're about to hear it. Obviously, there will also be a link to this poem. But then Chris is going to tell us, which I think, unless you were looking at the page and paying attention to what Hayes said about it, you might miss the fact, you might miss the thing that Hayes has done with this text. So this is Gwendolyn Brooks. And it's a poem she wrote, what, 1960? Is that right? Yeah, published 1960. Okay, here's Gwendolyn Brooks.
00:21:50
Speaker
We real cool. The pool players seven at the golden shovel. We real cool. We left school. We learnt lately. Strike straight. We sing sin. We then gen. We jazz. June. We die soon. And that's it. Okay. That's it. Yeah. Well, um, all right, Chris, tell us what Hayes has done.
00:22:19
Speaker
So what Hayes has done is he's taken what I think may very well be the most anthologized American poem in the 20th century. I know people have kind of tried to count this. He's taken We Real Cool, a poem that is taught in schools everywhere, which is kind of a delicious irony because it is a poem about kids who leave school. He's taken this poem that's 24 words, all mana syllables,
00:22:46
Speaker
written in a choral voice of seven pool players at a pool hall called The Golden Shovel. A poem where these speakers together kind of give an accounting of their life. They very proudly and unabashedly speak in a vernacular, non-standard English. It is not a poem called We Are Real Cool, which would be a totally square poem.
00:23:11
Speaker
they brag about how they've left normative places of safety and education, they lurk late, they strike straight. I mean, it's almost hard to talk about the poem without reciting it because it's such an economic, choral self-presentation. It's a poem that ends abruptly after these kind of
00:23:33
Speaker
comic panel images of their life. We jazz June, and then in a perfect rhyme that feels almost deterministic, that it can't be avoided. We die soon, which I find very haunting that it's in the present tense. It is that we will die soon. It's so inevitable. We die soon. So what is Hay's done with this? He's taken these 24 memorable, memorized words.
00:23:58
Speaker
For the moment he set aside the subtitle, which is The Pool Player's Seven at the Golden Shovel, but he'll use that in a way as garnish. And he takes the 24 words of Gwendolyn Brooks' poem and he kind of strings them down the right margin of a page.
00:24:15
Speaker
Almost as though it's occurring to me now, if you were writing a poem in rhyme, if you're writing a sonnet, you might come up with the end rhymes first. Right. Or if you put a sestina or something. Exactly. Right. You'd want to plug those words in at the end. Yeah. A sestina, I mean, assuming you got your first six lines in order, you know what the next 33 lines are going to end with and you know kind of where those endings will fall. So Hayes takes
00:24:42
Speaker
I guess the horizontal path of Brooks' poem, and he lays them vertically on the right margin, and then he fills in lines such that each line will end with one of the words from Brooks' poem. So the first line ends with the word we, the second line ends with the word real, the third line ends with the word cool, and so on. Exactly, yeah. Right.
00:25:08
Speaker
It's funny, in a few accounts of writing the poem, he refers to this as an exercise, which I think is a very, like, canny genre for this. It's an exercise that a poet would do, kind of, I don't know, to stretch and flex your poetic muscles. It's also kind of a school exercise. Here's a poem I was taught in school. Here's a poem I think I know. What can I make out of it that's different, that both borrows from and adapts the material I'm working with?
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, it's something you could absolutely imagine setting before a child and saying, write a poem whose lines end with these words, and they could come up with all kinds of things.
00:25:55
Speaker
And I've heard Hayes say that part of the genesis of this poem, too, had to do with that kind of scene, in fact, that he had tasked his son, was it, with memorizing the Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and for that reason it was on his mind or something, and then he started playing around with it, yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, for a poem about fathers and sons, it kind of has an amazing father-son or even grandfather-father-son origin story.
00:26:25
Speaker
He mentions in the intro to the recording we just heard that the opening scene is calling on memories of going to pool halls with his father. I think it's actually his stepfather. He is his father.
00:26:40
Speaker
And then the other part of the origin that comes out in a few readings and in his forward to an anthology we might mention later, Hayes mentions he wants his kids to learn poetry. So he picks, he's an older daughter. He assigns her a Langston Hughes poem. A five-year-old son, he assigns him We Real Cool. And they develop this nightly ritual before bed. Let's get these words out. Let's sing along to We Real Cool. Almost as though they were the prayer at the end of this poem.
00:27:10
Speaker
Exactly, yeah, yeah. There's a, well, yeah, the story that he offers of the poem's conception, it shows up in the poem, I think in a few ways. Yeah, okay. Well, so then after doing this with his son a bunch, I think he got the idea.
00:27:25
Speaker
Well, maybe not only the son will memorize a poem, but the father will get a poem out of it. And he started tinkering with this form. So I was going to say, I was going to preface my next comment by saying, okay, but before we leave the Brooks poem entirely behind, but it occurs to me that we won't ever really leave the Brooks poem entirely behind because we'll always have its words.
00:27:46
Speaker
Exact swimming around in our conversation today. I guess I just wanna. This is kind of an observation of mine that I'm not sure what to do with, but I think you might have something to teach me about, which is that.
00:28:04
Speaker
We've described the way the line endings look in the Hayes poem, right? Just I asked you to do that. Well, I asked you to explain what Hayes was doing with the Brooks poem. And in order to do that, you had to tell us what the right hand side of Hayes' poem looks like.
00:28:21
Speaker
One of the more conspicuous things about the Brooks poem is what its right-hand margin looks like, right? So you hear it in her recording and in the way she tended to read this poem, which is that
00:28:37
Speaker
So if her poem goes, we real cool, we left school, that's kind of how Hayes read it in that sort of rhythm. Almost nursery rhyme-like. Right. She doesn't read it that way. She does not, no, yeah. The whees come at the end of her, those are in terminal positions for her, all except for the first we, right? Every other we comes in that sort of terminal position, is that right? Yeah. So there's something,
00:29:05
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, there's something kind of funny about what she's either doing within jam there because those wheeze are all heavily enjammed, right? The subject of the sentence apart from the rest of the sentence and the we being this kind of bell that keeps ringing almost like a typewriter getting to the end of the line, you know, and then before advancing down to the next.
00:29:31
Speaker
So I don't know what the question for you here is, Chris, but it's something to do with like, what's going on with the right hand margin? And does it have something to do with, well, I don't know, you tell me with temporality or with rhythm or with
00:29:50
Speaker
destination rather than origin, or I don't know, what does that make you think of? Oh wow, I think it's all those things. So you might have to also teach me about it. It is, yeah, it's one of the most distinctive strings of enjambance in American poetry that I can think of.
00:30:09
Speaker
You could imagine a version of the poem that is formatted the way that Hayes offers it. That's very neat and orderly and the sentences end with periods and the lines end with those sentences. Instead, what she's given us is a poem that's shifted ever so slightly off kilter with very odd rhythmic and grammatical and emotional ramifications.
00:30:32
Speaker
So after the first we real cool, every other we is kind of just perched on the edge of white space. These are subjects that don't know their predicates. That's beautiful.
00:30:46
Speaker
don't receive a stress. They don't come at the first, they don't receive primacy of place in the line. There's this quote of Brooks that I really love about this wee. And she was asked about this poem throughout her life. It became kind of like a greatest hit that people would, you know, it was her free bird, except a very short free bird. But one account of the wee that I really like is from her first autobiography report from part one.
00:31:15
Speaker
where she writes, and there's a good pun, a meaningful pun in this. The ending wheeze and we real cool are tiny, wispy, weakly argumentative, kill Roy is here announcements. The boys have no accented sense of themselves, yet they are aware of a semi defined personal importance. And then she has this, I love this, it's kind of like, I don't know, musical directions on the score, she says, say the we softly.
00:31:43
Speaker
The pun is that there's no, yeah, there's no metrical accent on the word we. It's as though personal identity or even group identity is kind of pushed below the outrageous and eye-catching activities these pool players get up to. Should we say what Kilroy was here means for people who don't know? Yeah, and there's some of her other statements about the poem. She puts it in similar and varying terms. Kilroy is here.
00:32:12
Speaker
I don't know. Now I don't know if I can explain it. It was kind of a graffiti written by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. That's right. Yeah. And World War II, actually, I think. World War II, I'm sorry. Yeah, is where it begins. And I guess its meaning is maybe hard to explain, but it does sort of, I guess,
00:32:32
Speaker
What it isn't, I guess, is somebody writing their own name in a place. It is the sort of entering into this kind of group identity and a mere assertion of presence, right? And of a presence that is no longer present, right? Of a kind of past presence whose residue is still there. Right, almost epitaphic, almost. Yeah. Yeah. Inscriptive. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So now I have a question that maybe is a transition
00:33:01
Speaker
that will more directly take us into the Hayes poem, which it's time I think we do. Under the title of the Golden Shovel, Hayes writes that his poem is, quote, after Gwendolyn Brooks. That's all it says in the book. And I want you to talk to us about what the word after means. Yeah, sure. So,
00:33:26
Speaker
I think this usage really shows up in poetry more than anywhere else. I didn't know if I found it anywhere. But he's writing after her in two senses. And he's also writing before her in one sense. He's writing after her chronologically. She is a poet born in, I think, I don't know, now I'm on the spot, 1914? Yeah, that sounds about right. I don't know. We'll look it up. Yeah.
00:33:53
Speaker
Um, now I'm going to be one year guests who looks things up. Oh, 1917 horrible. I'm really sorry. How dare you? She's a poet whose first books come out during world war two, who is already winning Pulitzer prizes, the Pulitzer prize in her thirties. And then around the civil rights movement is really vivified and learns from a lot of younger poets. Um, and so her books in the sixties will be dedicated to figures like Amiri Baraka.
00:34:21
Speaker
to James Baldwin whom she mentored and taught. She's a poet who lives through the civil rights movement and is changed by it and is maybe drawn to younger figures like the figures in this poem because of the social ferment of those times. Terrence Hayes is born, I know this one, in 1971. He is a post-civil rights era poet or at least
00:34:46
Speaker
after the events, if not the aftermath of those years. And he's someone who is given many models for how to be a Black poet. Brooks is one of them, Baraka and the Black Arts Movement and his comrades and compatriots in that group is another
00:35:05
Speaker
model, Robert Hayden, a poet who Hayes responds to a lot, is yet another model. So one thing I think the poem is trying to figure out is how do I write after these poets can't I'm
00:35:20
Speaker
carry their traditions forward while also finding moments for descent and variation and eccentricity. The second way it's after her is this is the usage that shows up in poetry. If you're signaling that your poem is taking after a specific poet or poem, then you say you're after them. And maybe that too is you're kind of lining yourself up in the tradition.
00:35:42
Speaker
So a kind of citational practice or something where a scholar might say. The way it's written before her is that all of his words, all the words he contributes to the poem will show up before her word right at the end.
00:35:59
Speaker
I've thought about this poem a lot, and I've kind of yet to come up with one good way, and I think there's maybe no one good way to explain the relation between these two poets and these two poems. What you just said, Chris, it makes me think that the thing he could have done that he didn't do, that would have at least superficially been like the thing that he did do, is to write it like an acrostic poem or something, sort of string her words down the left-hand margin,
00:36:26
Speaker
And there, what you've just shown me is that what he would have been doing is writing after her in a third sense. But instead of that, it's like he's writing the sort of prehistory of her. He's writing a prequel, in other words. Exactly. She literally gets the last word in every line. I mean, I guess that's one way he's set it up. I mean, one way
00:36:49
Speaker
Pays is an extremely musical poet and has written great poems on everyone from David Bowie to Kool Keith to Kendrick Lamar. And his poems have their own musicality. Oh yeah, and we'll get into it in this one. One way I think of how these two poems are interacting is that
00:37:06
Speaker
Hayes's words are kind of like the hi-hat, the clicking hi-hat you hear a lot. And then Gwendolyn Brooks's word is like the kick drum of before. And that's where the two line up is on her salvage to use words.
00:37:22
Speaker
yeah that's great the word he uses and well maybe we can come back to this at the very end the word he uses to describe the relation is her poem is buried in his poem right um which again i i mean maybe speaks to the peculiar decision of putting the poem on the right it's really kind of pushed in there it's not prominently displayed
00:37:41
Speaker
up front. Right. Buried makes me think of, well, like, I don't think he means it, or maybe he does in the sense of like, you know, the way the dead are buried. I think that's, I mean, yeah. It also, I mean, the other way, sorry, the only other thing I would say is like, treasure is also buried. Yeah.
00:38:01
Speaker
Well, and also it's a poem called The Golden Shovel. Yeah. I think it was a poem about digging things up and storing things, side things, and what lasts. We've made it almost 40 minutes into the podcast and we haven't talked about the first line of the poem yet. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, so, I mean, it seems to me that right from the beginning, in a poem that is formally, and in every other way, thinking about questions of inheritance and so on,
00:38:29
Speaker
the poem begins by positioning the poet in relation as a small person in relation to his father's immensity or something. So, yeah, you want to talk just about the opening lines of the poem, Chris, and what you're seeing and what we should notice about them?
00:38:49
Speaker
Maybe I'll just read this one, this sentence out again. Just because it helps us understand, or it teaches us maybe how to read the poem. When I am so small, Daz Sock covers my arm. We cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean. Bloodshot and translucent with cool. So there, things line up enough that you can hear the cool in the brush line be real cool.
00:39:16
Speaker
Now that he's taught us that, he's not going to make it that easy again. When I first noticed in these lines, especially as I've revisited the poem this week,
00:39:27
Speaker
is I know exactly what kind of difference between father and son he's talking about. I remember putting my dad's socks in my arm. This playful gesture kind of like sock puppets. It is a poem about following after people. And it is a very funny gesture of not quite walking in someone's shoes, I think, to put a sock on your arm. I'm going to follow after you, but I'm going to do it in a playful, disproportionate way.
00:39:54
Speaker
I wonder even there's this long tradition among poets of punning on feet as a kind of rhythmical unit of measurement. And this might be a funny sort of displacement of that, like putting his hands in where someone's feet once were.
00:40:13
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, it's that I mean, I think it works because it's both this the clever place we jump to and it kind of has the sensuous vitality that you can kind of just immediately imagine. Right. And he calls his father not his father or his dad, but his dad. Yeah. Yeah. This is like more familiar or something. I don't know. More familiar. And I think more Southern. We got this far in the poem.
00:40:38
Speaker
without, I guess, explicitly saying things like this. And maybe that's for the best for reasons I can explain. But Hayes is a Black poet. He's a man. He's from South Carolina. And he feels very ambivalent about these things or ambivalent for any one of them to stand for all of who he is or for any one understanding of any of these things to stand for who he is.
00:41:03
Speaker
This is one place where I think the Southernness comes out because I don't call my dad. Actually, I had to hear him read this poem a few times to know how to pronounce it, which maybe proves how much of a Northerner I am.
00:41:17
Speaker
It's like dad with the final D dropped, right? That's what it sounds like. And it suggests up front, it suggests such familiarity and warmth. It suggests a warmth with the person and maybe a warmth with whoever's listening that you know when I say dad, you know who I'm talking about. But there's also a kind of mixing of temporal point of view between, you know, mixing of the adult poet who's having the memory and the boy
00:41:46
Speaker
whom the memory is about. Exactly, yeah. It does very cool narrative tricks. In 1981, it would have been 10. Yeah, exactly. So yes, when we get to the pool hall, we can kind of see Hayes dipping in and out or weaving between his childhood memories and his kind of distant current narratorial vantage. We find the place the real men lean.
00:42:11
Speaker
I love that what, I mean, already he's kind of troubling what makes a man or a real man by breaking the line on real. And I love what, I think actually there's something very accurate in it. What makes a real man is that he leans. It brings to mind images like, I don't know, like posters for the color of money or the hustler or movies with a cool pool player. And that is a pose of coolness.
00:42:40
Speaker
But I think it's also a poem about people who lean on each other. Already we have a son who's kind of leaning on his father's experiences and who is going to be led through a world of adulthood with his father and through his father's experience. But it is a spooky place because the real men are not
00:43:01
Speaker
They're not cool in, I don't know, the ways we might expect. They're cool in an almost ghostly, not quite alive way. They're bloodshot and they're translucent. Bloodshot with its, I don't know, maybe violent words nested inside, blood and shot, translucent with cool. I mean, I guess it's kind of cool to be translucent, but it doesn't have like the physical immediacy of the first line of having a sock on your arm.
00:43:30
Speaker
Well, leaning as opposed is a way, I mean, it's not standing there with your chest puffed out, right? It is a way of standing that is halfway towards lying down, or maybe not halfway, but a quarter of the way or something, depending on the angle of the lean, so that there is something kind of, I mean, what makes it cool to lean
00:43:52
Speaker
is the appearance of nonchalance that's kind of mixed with the stature of, you know, a big person's kind of asserting of their space. And Hayes has something like that affect when he reads the poem. He's like leaning against the podium or something.
00:44:17
Speaker
Yeah, he is a tall guy. He is, yeah, leaning on the podium. And now I mean, it's not bringing to mind.
00:44:23
Speaker
all like the leaners and loafers in American poetry. Oh, yeah. That's great. Whitman. Yeah. It is, I think, to not get too bogged down word by word. And I do think it's kind of a word perfect poem. You really can. Right. You can lean on it about any word and find great things. I think already the poem is showing us how it's taking figures and scenes from Brooks' poem and it's drawing its alternate paths.
00:44:49
Speaker
This is not a poem where the first men, the first boys we meet are yelling or are exultantly shouting, we real cool. The men we see, they're leaning, they're keeping their distance. We're actually not going to hear any words for until maybe the middle of the poem. The next sentence again, we're gonna, I'll just read it out. Please. We're gonna
00:45:11
Speaker
find another group of people who are kind of, they're okay, they've got things covered. His smile, this is his father's smile, his smile is a gold plated incantation as we drift by women on bar stools with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is a school I do not know yet.
00:45:33
Speaker
His smile's a gold-plated incantation. I think in this world that's a bit underworld-ish, a bit spooky. His father's smile is like the warding off spell. He's not translucent. He's glittery and shiny with gold. And he's leading his son into this world where there's
00:45:52
Speaker
adult men and women, they're drinking, they're smoking. But it's not dangerous. Maybe the gold calls us back to the golden shovel of the title and of the name of the bar or the pool hall in the Brooks poem. But now it's on his father's tooth, a gold plated tooth or something. I guess, right? Yeah. I mean, you're
00:46:14
Speaker
revealing to me how perfect an image it is because of the shape of a shovel on the outside and a tooth kind of at the similar curve. Like a miniature version of the same thing. Yeah, yeah. The line, this is a school, and then we got not just a line break, but a stanza break, a break between couplets. This is a school I do not know yet. One thing that I'm thinking about, Chris, is in the reading we heard,
00:46:45
Speaker
from Hayes earlier, it was a reading, as so many readings of poetry are, that was being done at a school, and not just any school, but Harvard University, right? In the Brooks poem, it seems like the attitude that's being evinced or articulated by that we
00:47:11
Speaker
is one that is dismissive of the kind of education that you get in school. We left school, right? We're here instead of being in school. And I don't want us to presume, I mean, this line, this is a school I do not know yet,
00:47:36
Speaker
seems to have some sympathies with that position that I just described in the Brooks poem, but I don't want to presume that it's identical to it or that it's quite orienting itself in the same way to the institutions that are our schools in say this country or others like it. So what, yeah, like what's the attitude towards school that you're getting in that line or I don't know, any observations you have about that line, I'd really appreciate.
00:48:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's a line that does a maneuver we've mentioned before where we've been at child eye level. We've walked past the bar schools, stools. We've seen women who aren't approaching us. We aren't approaching them. And then we're going to zoom to the present tense to this clear-eyed sense of one person's growth. This is a school I do not know yet.
00:48:29
Speaker
One day, maybe I will learn what it's like to be an adolescent or adult in a pool hall. I'll learn, maybe I'll learn to flirt, maybe I'll learn to hang out. I'll learn to hang out with people like me or unlike me. I think what it does, and in one way, I guess I would call it a deviation from the Brooks poem, is it really does consider this a place of learning, a place of, I don't know, self-fashioning and growth. This is a school.
00:48:59
Speaker
if you leave the line at that before the line break, you get a very affirmative sense of, I mean, this is a place that helped make me me. It turns out, as we'll move through the poem, we'll see a really stark contrast. It turns out the pool hall is maybe the safest and most educational place we'll see, well, maybe until the room at the end. But areas that we would think aren't transgressive, that we would think are safe and protective, can have violence erupt within them.
00:49:28
Speaker
To me, it seems like a very clever way to reverse what we think about transgression and the need to leave school to grow up. I think that's all beautifully said and just right. And so, you know, if in the Brooks poem,
00:49:45
Speaker
the we there, like the pool hall is a rejection of school. This is instead like another version of school or a different school differently imagined maybe. But yeah, it might even be a better school. I mean, it's a school where you learn how to to interact with other people. But I was going to identify difference. Well, it's maybe a school where you learn to make a we that's crosses generations and crosses difference.
00:50:11
Speaker
So much of what, well, and I mean, that is in a way sort of for a 10 year old who enters a new building, you know, a 10 year old who has been probably to one or two or three different schools in their life and has had to graduate from one to the other, from kindergarten to preschool or, you know, from preschool to kindergarten, from kindergarten to elementary school and maybe to junior high or something, you know, middle school.
00:50:36
Speaker
entering a new building thinks like, it must be a school. I don't know this one yet. At some emotional level. It's a new level in the video game of my life. I'll level up here in some way. Then we get a line that really confuses me.
00:50:54
Speaker
I mean, it's beautiful, but I don't understand it. And so as I've thought about this poem, I've always been drawn to it. But the cue sticks mean we are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk of smoke thin to song.
00:51:11
Speaker
So the butt there suggests that whatever is about to come is contradicting what had come before or is qualifying it in some important way. I don't get that. I also don't get what the cue sticks mean we are rubbed by light might mean. I mean, obviously, that sounds like poetic language to me. And so
00:51:31
Speaker
maybe I'm grasping needlessly after a precise kind of meaning. But can you help us make some kind of interesting sense of those lines? Yeah, sure. And I also would like to get to the rest of that line, because it's a very unassuming moment, but it's one of my favorite parts in that moment. We'll take us there. So this is a school I do not know yet. And then all of a sudden, as you mentioned, we go into a different register. It's the
00:52:01
Speaker
the tone and the tactics of arguing or playing something over in your head with the word, but. And then we also have, I think the language, I guess of like literary interpretation, but the cue sticks mean, we are now kind of not only taking things in, but we're trying to understand what they'll mean for us, what an image means, what an experience means.
00:52:27
Speaker
The cue sticks mean we are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk of smoke thinned to song. We won't be out late is the rest of that line. What I think is happening here is Hayes has kind of stepped back from the moment
00:52:46
Speaker
this autobiographical experience, or at least his speaker has. And he's wondering what of it stuck around for him, what meant something to him as a 10 year old. And I think it's this really vibrant and almost synesthetic sense of sense impressions he had there.
00:53:03
Speaker
already we've seen a bit of this we've seen shiny gold plates we've seen bloodshot men but now we have this really immediate tactile sense of i don't have a pool cue so i'm going to use my iphone of of rubbing something nobody can see you anyway chris okay so as you all know i keep a pool cue in my office and um
00:53:23
Speaker
I think he's remembering kind of the glint off of the cue. He knows kind of the feeling of it. That's something he can recollect decades on. And he even can recollect the thing that's supposed to be bad about a pool hall like this, the second hand smoke. He can remember that kind of dissipating and turning into something.
00:53:43
Speaker
that transcends it, that it thins to song. I just love the sonic way. Like go to every thinness beat. Yeah, exactly. He does this beautifully or he enacts it beautifully with the sounds of that phrase where we get these kind of hacking, coughing Ks and they turn into these nice nasal ends, the lurk of smoke thinned to song.
00:54:03
Speaker
The bit I love is then he says, we won't be out late right afterwards, which to me is something that no 10-year-old has ever said. Unless you're, I don't know, like a cartoon character like Nancy or Sligo, you don't say things like that. I think it's one of a few moments in this poem where adult language is seeping into this kid. He's hearing his dad say to his mom, don't worry, we won't be out late.
00:54:29
Speaker
It turns out that this is all we're going to see of the pool hall. And we've gone through an experience which maybe posed possibilities for danger or transgression. And it turned out to be song-like. It turned out the smoke in it thinned away. And then just one last thing. The word light will show up a few times in the poem. One says lit.
00:54:53
Speaker
This does feel like, I don't know, maybe poetry 101, a too easy correspondence. But I do think the poem is wondering where it can find light, where it can find grace, where it can find illumination. It is ending up in a book called Light Head, which does play with that word and image a lot. And so maybe the last way to explain these lines is he's had this experience in a
00:55:15
Speaker
dimly lit nighttime pool hall. Where was the light? And it turned out it was right in his hand. It was actually something very immediate. Well, light had suggests both
00:55:28
Speaker
maybe a kind of enlightenment or illuminated state of consciousness, but of course also a state of disorientation or vertigo or something to be lightheaded. I want to confess to my own disorientation at this that comes at this moment in the poem, so we won't be out late, and then the poem sort of shifts scenes
00:55:51
Speaker
standing in the middle of the street last night, we watched the moon that lawns and a neighbor strike his son in the face. So we got a description of that scene a bit more or some thinking about that scene. And the disorientation I want to confess to is that I don't know how many readings of the poem it took me to process that that scene wasn't temporarily after they come home from the pool hall or something.
00:56:20
Speaker
right right yeah or that's so you know that's it actually seems to be before it or i don't know what it is before it i think reference to you know last with respect to what the the night previous to to the night at the at the pool hall i guess i don't know i think it is the night previous yeah to the night at the pool hall it's maybe almost a retroactive explanation of why why did we go to the pool hall why am i spending this father-son time
00:56:46
Speaker
Yeah. It's because I saw a different kind of father sometime. Yeah. It's because there was this... So yes, talk to us about this scene we got next. Yeah. Well, it is one of the
00:57:00
Speaker
amazing deceptions of the poem is that it gets you to think it's about a pool hall and then after nine lines we're not going to be there anymore. I'm standing in the middle of the street last night, it's very oddly cinematic with these moonlit lawns and we see in stark contrast a neighbor strike his son in the face, a shadow knocked straight.
00:57:21
Speaker
As I mentioned, I don't know, maybe 15 minutes back, Hayes is someone who thrives, I think, on uncertainties and ambivalence and knowing that there's always alternate paths for his poems to take, and not only his poems, but for people to take, for black Americans to take, for a black poet to take. And this poem, I think it handles that in a few ways. And one is that there will be doublings of pretty much everything we see. So after we've had this,
00:57:49
Speaker
seen in the pool hall with a father and son, we're gonna see a very different, a shadow version of a father and a son, where instead of wearing my dad's sock on my arm and playing pool together and lining up in all these ways, we have a we or we have a father-son duo that's antagonistic. Even as the son is his father's shadow, he needs to be in the eyes of his father, knocked straight.
00:58:19
Speaker
how that, I think your confusion is something worth holding onto because how we get from something that seems like such a perfect father-son moment to its exact opposite, I think is something the poem wants us to wrestle with. And the characters in the poem will try to wrestle with too. So maybe I can just read the very next lines, which also kind of take us to yet another scene or yet another interaction between a father and a son. So right after the shadow knocks straight, we have this,
00:58:49
Speaker
Dad promised to leave me everything. The shovel we used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing, his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin. So again, how did we get from that? How did we get from witnessing a moment of violence to
00:59:09
Speaker
Oh, um, the first big, I guess, speech act in a character in the poem, he's, my dad is promising to leave me things, leave me things when, when, what? I think it's, I mean, I think Hayes is giving us that stereotypical, much described and represented moment when you have to explain to your kids what death is.
00:59:33
Speaker
it comes up we were kind of told secretly or told I don't know obliquely because a dog has died the shovel we used to bury the dog but then once you get that one practical object out of the way we get the the floodgates open up and we we learned about all the things that fathers can leave to sons the words he loved to sing
00:59:56
Speaker
I don't know, putting an asterisk on this moment because it's a meta moment of handing down words in a poem that's using handed down words. Then his rusted pistol, so his father is someone who has capacities to harm but also to defend.
01:00:15
Speaker
Um, he has a pistol, but he's not taking care of it, which is, tells you, I think a lot about someone's relationship to those things. His squeaky Bible, I'd love to talk to you about squeaky Bible. Um, so we have, I don't know, again, I kind of literary thing handed down the written word.
01:00:33
Speaker
It could be squeaky clean. It could be squeaky because it's been used all the time and the binding is making a noise. I would think a binding that is making noise is a binding that hasn't been used. Yeah. But it's squeaky because it's new, you know? Exactly. Oh, yeah. When I mentioned that there are things in the poem that I finally felt like I got a handle on today, one of them was the word squeaky, actually. What did you get a handle on?
01:01:02
Speaker
Well, for some reason, when I read the poem this week, it immediately brought to mind like a hotel Bible. Do you know how they kind of have that plasticky outside? Gideon's Bible. Yeah, exactly. I don't know when that started. I tried to Google plasticky. I Googled squeaky Bible, actually, and I got nothing.
01:01:23
Speaker
Well, my primary association with Gideon's Bible is the Beatles' rocky raccoon, you know? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, okay, so squeaky. His sin. His sin. That doesn't get an adjective. It kind of just... We had rusted pistol, squeaky Bible, and then I think his sin, which lands at the end of a line, is something I think the poem wants us to sit with.
01:01:48
Speaker
Maybe it's gesturing towards, you know, in the whatever Judeo-Christian tradition, the sin that we've all inherited from our first father, so the story goes. But it seems maybe more particular and yet mysterious. I mean, we don't know anything on the basis of this poem anyway about the nature of the sin. This doesn't seem like a father who's
01:02:17
Speaker
been obviously sinful in some way that the poem is recording or complaining about or elegizing. He hasn't. And actually, if all we had was the first nine lines, he'd seem like a kind of awesome dad. Yeah. He takes you to the pool hall instead of doing your homework. But he brings you home not too late. Right. But then I think after we're exposed to this alternate path to a way things could have gone with the neighbor and his son,
01:02:45
Speaker
It seems to me to open up something in The Father where suddenly he's not the silent smiling figure he was in lines three and four. He's someone who's kind of offering a lot and in the moment trying to come up with something to say to his son about what's going to happen after he dies.
01:03:04
Speaker
Dad promised to leave me everything. At first sounds like a kind of gesture of generosity. You're going to get it all. But then it maybe sounds like an inevitability, for better or for worse.
01:03:26
Speaker
you will be left with all of me. Not because I've written you into my will, but because you're my son. And that's what happens between fathers and sons. Yeah. And I think the way you've just opened up that line for us, it maybe explains the jump to that line after watching a father hit a son.
01:03:54
Speaker
I think one thing the poem, and I think this very sympathetic dad is trying to figure out right now, is
01:04:03
Speaker
Do things like violence get passed down? Do things like trauma get handed down? Is what my son just witnessed this moment of familial friction or just straight up violence? Is it something that will get left behind? Well, the boy or I don't know, the adult poet then returns to that scene of violence, right? So after this sort of brief interlude that has to do with the inheritance from death,
01:04:31
Speaker
We're back to the boys' sneakers, we're light on the road. And Hayes, I'm sort of using Hayes here as a placeholder for whether it's the sort of adult poet, the child that the adult poet once was, or some
01:04:50
Speaker
composite of the two is speculating about what might have led to the scene of violence that had just been witnessed. What should we notice about those lines, Chris, that lead up to, but maybe don't quite yet include the very final lines of the poem, which Shirley will want to talk about before we're done?
01:05:15
Speaker
Yeah, here, I'll read them just very quick, because I do really like them. And they show off, I think, a very distinctively hazy move. Before I read the sneakers line, I do think another thing Squeaky is doing is rhyming with sneakers. A little internal rhyme. I know. It's an internal rhyme. I mean, I'm all for rhyme. We could leave it at that. But it does make me think of there's this phrase, shame is heenie uses,
01:05:42
Speaker
for what keeps his poems together sonically, imagistically, emotionally. He calls it the binding secret. And I do think there's a bit of the binding secret between squeaky Bible and sneakers. I love it on the road. I love it. Because sneakers are supposed to be squeaky. Yeah. Yeah. On a basketball court or something. Yeah. Yeah. Right. OK. So I'll read it. We've had the Dazz Promise and then these lines.
01:06:10
Speaker
The boys' sneakers were light on the road. We watched him run to us, looking wounded and thin. He'd been caught lying, or drinking his father's gin. He'd been defending his ma, trying to be a man.
01:06:26
Speaker
What stands out to me first in that section is, well, we're thrust back into the scene. Again, it's very kind of cinematic. We have this close-up on the sneakers as he's running towards the father and the son. And then all of a sudden, the logic of the poem where fathers stick with sons, where there's duos, and the word we refers to just me and my dad.
01:06:49
Speaker
him and me. Suddenly that widens out a little bit. We have three people standing in the middle of the road together. Lots of things in middle of the road in this poem. I mean, I think it is about kind of the in between spaces, crossing neighborhoods, bridging families. And what happens when he runs up to us looking wounded and thin? Well, in a very straight faced way, Hayes lists three, I think kind of
01:07:16
Speaker
irreconcilable or three alternatives for what could have happened. He doesn't say what happened that provoked the father hitting the son because he doesn't know or he isn't told. Maybe he'd been caught lying. Maybe he'd been drinking his father's gin, which makes him sound like one of the pool players in Seven at the Golden Shovel.
01:07:37
Speaker
but maybe it's something completely different. He'd been defending his ma, trying to be a man. Again, this is one of those moments where I think we have a kid kind of osmosing adult speech. Trying to be a man sounds like something like a very gruff, angry, offended man would say, you trying to be a man? Hayes is someone I think who writes
01:08:03
Speaker
particularly response poems, particularly a poem like this that looks at another poet and poem, to imagine alternate ways things could have gone, to imagine a multiplicity of forms of black life and black poetry.
01:08:18
Speaker
And one of the possibilities he weighs here is that, yes, this kid was just like the pool players from We Real Cool. He's drinking gin, he's lying, he's staying out late. But he also considers, it could also have been the complete opposite. He's a boy who's standing by the women in his life. He's a boy who- Trying to protect the family, not fleeing from it. Yeah, exactly.
01:08:43
Speaker
He might, I mean, he could be a hero. He could be, I guess, kind of like the anti-hero of Brooks' poem, we can't really know. In a different kind of poem that was written after the Brooks poem, you might have thought that this moment of speculation that what would have, the things that would have offered the alternatives
01:09:08
Speaker
would each have been, would each have had their analogues in the Brooks poem and that the poet would have been constrained or sort of tethered to those alternatives because of the formal trick he was playing. But what you've just shown us, Chris, is that that's one of the three options, but there are two others that are indicating a kind of
01:09:33
Speaker
I don't mean to be too cute about this, but a kind of lightheadedness. Yeah, I think so. That Hayes has a relationship to the Brooks poem, but is also not
01:09:49
Speaker
bound to it, not earth bound by it. Sure. I think the possibilities are dizzying, I think is one suggestion of a title like Light Head. I mean, one way we could go through the poem, and I don't think we should, but it's an exercise for home, for loyal listeners, is you can go through the N words and you can see how closely is Hayes adhering to what Brooks did, how much is he deviating.
01:10:17
Speaker
Well, I mean, he's using the word, but what you mean is like, is he using it in a different context or a different sense? Right. Is he drawing out different connotations? Is he changing part of speech? I find the boy looking wounded and thin is extremely poignant on its own as a visual image, but as a way to reuse thin the verb as in thinning gin and to kind of just put it onto a boy who's defenseless and coming up to you asking for some help or a model of how to behave. I find that really moving.
01:10:47
Speaker
I mean, that is a real departure then, right? Well, there's a real sense of contrast that I get
01:11:04
Speaker
that comes in the lines that follow that set of speculations about what might have provoked this violence that Hayes and his father witnessed when this other father struck his son. We stood in the road and my father talked about jazz, how sometimes a tune is born of outrage.
01:11:27
Speaker
Sorry, those lines are interesting, and I'm sure you'll have something to say about them. But when I said there was a real note of contrast, what I'd had in mind was the sentence I'm about to read. By June, the boy would be locked up state. That doesn't seem to give multiplicity of future. That both in its content and in its form seems to lock up this boy's future into a state of
01:11:57
Speaker
definition has this literally carceral kind of logic to it. So where does that certainty come from if what preceded it was ambiguity and uncertainty about what had led to this? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. And that line
01:12:25
Speaker
along with the earlier line of the act of violence is to me the chillingest line in the poem.
01:12:34
Speaker
We're very near the end of the poem and at the end, at the second to last couplet to introduce words like locked and then the very odd upstate in a poem which has had up until now really no consideration of what a state is, what they do to people, where we even are, which has up until now really never entertained the possibility that boys wouldn't stay at home with their fathers or be there either side the whole time. It's really striking.
01:13:04
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think this is kind of something that Hayes, how do I put this? Hayes is someone, as I've said, who thrives on being of two or three or 23 minds. When I wrote about him, I quote this interview passage I really do love where he says,
01:13:32
Speaker
I'm sorry for the pun, but I'm like not really a black and white person. I'm kind of a between area gray area person.
01:13:41
Speaker
I love that because it's a fantastic self-portrait and also I love the conversational kind of and not really unlike, which is just like the perfect verbal manifestation of that ambivalence. I think the line you've brought us to is a moment where ambivalence meets something that can't overcome.
01:14:04
Speaker
It hits up against the state, it hits up against laws, it hits up against a carceral system that forecloses possibilities instead of allowing them to open. That's great, Chris, and I didn't mean to step on your final words there. Oh, no.
01:14:21
Speaker
Is that perspective coming in a kind of free and direct discourse mode from the father? Is that something the father says to the son? Let me back up again. We stood in the road and my father talked about jazz, how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June, the boy would be locked up state.
01:14:42
Speaker
So there are a couple of alternatives now. As I say, that line doesn't admit of ambiguity. Now I'm going to introduce a few. By one way of reading, the father talks about jazz. The father says this thing about how sometimes a tune is born out of outrage. And the father says, though it's a new sentence, we can just go on reading in that mode. And the father says, that boy is going to be locked up by June.
01:15:04
Speaker
Or is the certainty born of the perspective that the mature poet has earned through historical experience? That is, he knows what happened to that boy. He doesn't know what had happened before that, but he knows that this kid from his neighborhood got sent away by that June. And so it's certain because it's historical.
01:15:32
Speaker
Yeah, my sense of the chronology is that it's the latter option you've kind of laid out. And I also get that sense by just how different these two sentences are and kind of the knowledge they're telling us about. I'm not a father. I've never had to do something like this. But this father, dad,
01:15:55
Speaker
And maybe this is the only time he's called my father in the poem. He's been given this kind of impossible moral assignment, which is he is standing in front of his son who has witnessed violence. He's standing in front of someone else's son who was the victim of violence. And he has to come up with something to say.
01:16:16
Speaker
And not just violence, but violence from a father. From a father, exactly, yeah. I've written poems and I know they're hard, but I've never had to do something I think that difficult. And even though I think it seems kind of like a hokey thing a dad would do is, well, I'll talk about jazz in this moment. Maybe I'll find some moral in that.
01:16:38
Speaker
I do think he's, I find it very poignant, this moment of a father who's kind of suddenly in the role of a poet or a speaker trying to articulate some moral that doesn't make family life just seem awful. And the moral in this case is that terrible things can happen, but I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but that beautiful songs can be born of pain.
01:17:07
Speaker
I think, and with maybe an emphasis on the word can, an emphasis on sometimes this happens, I can't guarantee it. It's funny, I mean, a tune is born of outrage is the sentence we're trying to wrap our heads around. And it may be just one of these unparaphrasable things because born is the perfect word, I think, for how
01:17:33
Speaker
violence how betrayal begets beauty possibly, or begets some sort of soul-making out of this. You know what I'm thinking of, Chris? I'm thinking of the Philip Larkin poem, you know, This Be the Verse, which
01:17:59
Speaker
This seems like the anti-version of that, you know, man hands on misery to man. Yeah, yeah. And this seems like, sorry, and I'm sort of laughing to myself because I think so far we've managed to maintain our no explicit language in podcast rating things. It was bound to happen. Yeah, yeah, I'm not gonna, maybe I shouldn't quote the whole poem, but look it up. Philip Larkin's This Be the Verse. It's another good poem to memorize. But it,
01:18:28
Speaker
It seems maybe like this is presenting a kind of alternative to that dismal model of parent-child relation. Yes. Parent-child's also maybe parent-neighbor's child. What are ways we can hand down things that aren't just genetic and deterministic and, I don't know, compounding misery over time?
01:18:58
Speaker
But he does it. The only F word he uses is father. He keeps a PG. Very good, Chris. Tell us now about the last two and a half lines of the poem, which I want you to read for us and remind us what they are and then talk about what's so wild, what's happening in them in terms of where voice is coming from and
01:19:26
Speaker
given all the context we have in this poem. So I would love to, you know, to hear you say a few words about those last lines. Yeah, it is. I mean, it's good that we've kind of broken up the poem in this way, because we're going to have another scene change for the very last lines. And it's going to be, I think, the third and last time that Dad is going to say something.
01:19:49
Speaker
It is a poem about speech acts and the ways we talk to each other and what that can do. And we're gonna get one last one right now. That night we got down on our knees in my room. If I should die before I wake, Dad said to me, it will be too soon. So that night, meaning the night of, I think,
01:20:18
Speaker
Is it the pool hall night or is it the night of violence night? I had presumed the latter. Yeah, I think it's the latter. Right, because that night is reorienting us by June, so yes. The night the father has had to talk about jazz in front of his son and their neighbor's son.
01:20:41
Speaker
It's now bedtime, and that is seemingly saying a common bedtime prayer, which I never recited growing up, but I've looked up. And maybe not everybody knows it, so say what it is. If I got it right. See, this is really the proof if I'm a good Massachusetts
01:21:03
Speaker
If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
01:21:22
Speaker
just beautifully grim. You know, you know how you want to go to bed. Night night. Yeah. So dad doesn't say that. He says the first line. Again, I've kind of compared him to a poet before and I don't think it's that whimsical. I think he is someone who's
01:21:42
Speaker
Taking traditions, taking received language, and revising them to make them more apt and true and beautiful. Instead of saying, if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. He says, if I should die before I wake, it will be too soon. Which does not rhyme. It does not fit the meter. If anything, it fits the meter of we real cool, where monosyllables just pile up and thud.
01:22:07
Speaker
But it's the truer statement for this dad. He's not someone who's going to leave grace and education and a true relationship between a father and son. He's not going to leave that to the afterlife. And all throughout this poem, which has been filled with
01:22:27
Speaker
ghosts and shadows and spookiness and violence. We've had this threat underlying all of it, the threat that maybe will make it seem like someone will die before they wake. And Dad is honestly saying, if that happens, that's not enough time. Not enough time to be a father with a son, not enough time to educate you. I mean, not enough time even just to play with sock puppets or play pool.
01:22:56
Speaker
I mean, I've talked about how a lot of the poem changed for me this weekend. It just seemed so heartbreaking this time around, now that I didn't have to write about it for an academic article, which are not exclusive things at all, but the emotional tug of the poem was just so evident to me this time. Well, that's palpable for me, and I'm really grateful that you've shared that with us.
01:23:28
Speaker
the spirit of what the father says at the end. Part of what's interesting to me is that that night we got down on our knees in my room. I'm trying to sort of accentuate what's a little bit surprising about the pronouns there. So it's our knees, but then it's my room.
01:23:44
Speaker
that we go immediately into spoken language that's indicated typographically with italics. If I should die before I wake, but we don't get the attribution of those words until that moment. So it's maybe unclear when you're first reading it whether that's a prayer the sun is reciting, whether they're saying it together. It sounds like a prayer, but it turns out that it's not even one at all.
01:24:12
Speaker
Dad said to me, not dad prayed with me or what, you know, it's just a thing he's saying, being sort of witty, perhaps, but maybe just saying something that he wants to say. It will be too soon. What I was going to say about it is that it revises dramatically what's shocking, maybe, about the ending of the Brooks poem.
01:24:38
Speaker
Yes, we die soon. Yeah. And, you know, I was reading that poem with students recently and there was this kind of instinctive desire I was noticing on their part to take the ending of the Brooks poem as indicating that the poem was like a cautionary tale about what will happen if you drop out of school. Yeah. Right. But and maybe that's the case. I don't know. But it seems like from the perspective of the we who speak that poem, there's
01:25:16
Speaker
it's better to burn out than fade away kind of line, but rendered in a different idiom. And this seems- Better in their own idiom. Yeah, yeah. In words, they can take pride in and get their attitude themselves. But this position seems to reverse that one. It's like, got no patience for it, really, ultimately, right? If I should die before I wake, it will be too soon. I want to live long. Yeah, yeah.
01:25:36
Speaker
There's something kind of heroic about we die soon, right?
01:25:42
Speaker
I mean, yes, I think if you were to play the game of going through it and seeing where Hay's coincides with Brooks and where he branches off, I mean, at the very end of the poem, he's going perpendicular. I mean, not to bring it always back to we, even though I have written a whole book on it, so why not. In We Real Cool, we is,
01:26:10
Speaker
one generation, it's argumentative, it's us versus them, it's about to disappear, we die soon. And the we we get when these two kneel down in this room is a very different kind. It's intergenerational, it's accepting, it's loving, it doesn't wanna go away. I do love, I mean, the way you described this very peculiar act of prayer,
01:26:39
Speaker
It does remind me of this distinction that Helen Venler makes in a book on address, where she talks about how prayers are usually vertical addresses. We're usually talking to someone above us, whether it's a god or a nightingale or an abstraction.
01:26:57
Speaker
But a poet like Whitman, who meets you face to face, is talking horizontally. He's talking to an equal and equivalent comrade. And one very clever thing about this ending is Hayes or Da takes the prayer that should be vertical and he addresses it to his son. It suddenly is something that instead of
01:27:23
Speaker
suggesting vast difference between who's down here and the God being talked to up here, it's binding two people together, literally, at face level on their knees. And they're on their knees, and so whatever, you know, height is diminished. Yeah. But not, you know, okay.
01:27:44
Speaker
It's a sweet moment. It's not a poem that I think takes a stand on religion very heavily. I think maybe one cool thing about the word squeaky Bible is you can read many things. And sin is, it seems to be a word it means very well. But by the end of the poem, it does seem like we have a kind of secular prayer, a prayer that can be recited from father to a son and back.
01:28:11
Speaker
It's one of many things in the poem that's about...
01:28:17
Speaker
communication about bridging difference, about crossing the street. And I just zoom out from the poem on a line by line level a little bit. I think that's one thing Hayes is trying to do with the literary past. One thing he's doing when he writes after Gwendolyn Brooks is he's, in a very odd way, he's collaborated with someone who's not alive. He's put her words in her order. He's respected their meanings. Sometimes he's added on to them, but he's not
01:28:48
Speaker
negated any of them. And in that same spirit, he's sharing it with his audience, as we heard, right? Yeah. He's not presenting his poem as a kind of rarefied object to them. No, yeah. I mean, it's kind of like the more conceptual we of the poem is the we that stands for both Hayes and Gwendolyn Brooks. Yeah.
01:29:14
Speaker
the we that's any poet who returns to Brooks' poetry and writes a golden shovel out of it. Well, Chris, we've gone so long and we could go much longer, I think. But I'm afraid we can't. There's so much we didn't talk about having that we sort of promised to talk about having to do with the
01:29:37
Speaker
influence of this poem, the poets who have written their own golden shovels, the, you know, giving that kind of context. We'll do that. I'll do that. And I'll do it with your help. So I mean, we really, Chris, in the newsletter that goes out with the episode. But since we've gone this long, why not go another two minutes and just let people hear the poem one more time in your voice? Chris, would you read the golden shovel for us?
01:30:07
Speaker
I'd love to. And again, thanks for having me on.
Exploring Language Through Poetry
01:30:11
Speaker
It does seem like a good poem for a podcast like this, because that is about, I don't know, people approaching language at the same time and making out of one small poetic text something wider and more capacious. So the golden shovel after Gwendolyn Brooks
01:30:33
Speaker
When I am so small, Daz Sock covers my arm. We cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold plated incantation as we drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness.
Themes of Jazz and Family in Poetry
01:30:55
Speaker
This is a school I do not know yet.
01:30:58
Speaker
But the cue sticks mean we are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk of smoke thinned to song. We won't be out late. Standing in the middle of the street last night, we watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight.
01:31:20
Speaker
Dad promised to leave me everything. The shovel we used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing, his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin. The boy's sneakers were light on the road. We watched him run to us looking wounded and thin. He'd been caught lying or drinking his father's gin. He'd been defending his ma, trying to be a man.
01:31:47
Speaker
We stood in the road and my father talked about Jazz, how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June, the boy would be locked up state. That night we got down on our knees in my room. If I should die before I wake, Dad said to me, it will be too soon.
Conclusion and Farewell
01:32:09
Speaker
Well, Chris Spade, thank you so much for being on the podcast and spending the last hour plus with me talking about this beautiful poem. I learned a lot from you and I really appreciate it. Well, thank you. Thank you all listeners for making it this far. Stay tuned. There will be more episodes coming soon. Be well, everyone.