POESIEGESPRÄCH: TERRANCE HAYES – Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully

In the organizer's words:

Studio space

Terrance Hayes (born 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina) is one of the biggest names in contemporary American poetry. He has published seven collections of poetry, including "Lighthead" (Penguin Books 2010), winner of the National Book Award for poetry, and "American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin" (Penguin Books 2018), a sonnet collection begun after Donald Trump's election as US president, in which Hayes, influenced by Wanda Coleman, breaks open the sonnet container full of twists and turns and playful ambiguities: "I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame." In his latest volume "So To Speak" (Penguin Books 2023), Hayes also updates rigid poetic forms such as sonnets, ghaselen and sestinas, and in instructional poems such as "DIY Sestine: What Does This Piece Remind You Of?" he precedes his own text with a tabular template for writing descriptions of images in sestine form. Hayes also makes the resistance to the given formal constraints and norms productive in terms of content. He often collages the voices and experiences of Black artists and African-American history and combines poetic potential with an exploration of the self: "If you see suffering's potential as art, is it art or suffering? / If you see life's potential as art, is it artful or artificial living?"

Terrance Hayes in conversation with Shane Anderson

The event will be interpreted into English and German. With the kind support of ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen

Project management: Matthias Kniep | Nadine Tenbieg

With Terrance Hayes

Supported by:

The poesiefestival berlin is a project of the Haus für Poesie in cooperation with silent green Kulturquartier and the Akademie der Künste and is funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.