Watch Your Language, Terrance Hayes
Watch Your Language, Terrance Hayes
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Watch Your Language
Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry

Author: Terrance Hayes

Narrator: Terrance Hayes

Unabridged: 5 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 07/18/2023

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

From the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead, Terrance Hayes, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews and illustrated prose addressing the last century of American poetry—to be published simultaneously with his latest poetry collection, So to Speak

Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry. Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers. "If you don't see suffering's potential as art, will it remain suffering?" he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes's astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet's routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.

* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF with visual poems.

About The Author

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other poetry collections are American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, How to Be Drawn, Wind in a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music, and he is also the author of To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. Hayes lives in New York City, where he is a professor of creative writing at New York University.

Reviews

Goodreads review by emma charlton on February 13, 2024

This is one of the most creative books I've ever read. Terrance Hayes wrote Watch Your Language as a response to prompt about reflecting on the last 100 years of poetry (1917-2017). He approaches this in sections which include one-of-a-kind book reviews, essays, letters to impactful poets (dead and......more

Goodreads review by Taylor on August 02, 2024

What an honor to learn from Hayes. My poetry TBR def grew thanks to this book.......more

Goodreads review by Kaila on November 20, 2024

Hayes is a genius. An excellent introduction to the study of creative criticism. Only gave it four stars because I am reading another work of his (To Float in the Space Between), and enjoy it even more.......more

Goodreads review by Eric on March 15, 2024

At first, I thought this might be a three star book, as at times Mr. Hayes style is so complicated and so full of references from a very specific circle of understanding that the reading became almost incomprehensible. Yet, the depth of resource contained in this book, the passion, and the poetic he......more

Goodreads review by amf on August 28, 2023

Hayes is a poet & thinker that makes every thought he writes about thought provoking. This small volume is full of amusing, serious, and thought provoking posts on poets he'd place in the American Poetry cannon. He starts with Whitman as a pushing off point (but not necessarily advocating for his pl......more

Quotes

Praise for Watch Your Language:

“A dazzling homage . . . [Watch Your Language is] a verbal and visual feast that defies genres . . . exhilerating . . . Time and time again, [Hayes] introduces a phrase or form that appears familiar, then radically reinvents it. The results are strange, sometimes surreal and always sublimely surprising . . . [He] continues to devise language well worth watching.” —The Washington Post

“One reads a book like Hayes’s to feel at home in a strange land, to feel one’s enthusiasm answered and challenged, to soothe one’s uncertainty, and to excite it, in order to get more into poetry . . . I get giddy imagining the view if this were the first panoramic glimpse teenagers got of the poetry landscape . . . I don’t think there’s ever been a book like this before. A young Black poet reading this book will see the poetic tradition—the past, as well as the present—as it really is, not one tradition at all, but many, carried forward by many kinds of people who are connected not just by scholars’ analyses, but by community . . . they will feel invited to poetry, and by no less a host than Terrance Hayes, one of the best and most important poets now writing.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Poetry

“A wildly entertaining and honest view into a poet and artist’s rangy mind.” —The Millions

“When one of America’s great poets assembles his poetic origin story in a collage-like collection of mini essays, illustrations, prose fragments, and assorted feuilletons of a life in poetry, it behooves us all to pay attention. In examining his own path to poetry, Terrance Hayes also manages to excavate a century of nearly forgotten African American poets, reminding us all of the very narrow poetic canon that predominates to this day in the academy. Essential reading.” —LitHub

“A freewheeling work of creative originality . . . Equal parts zine, poetic bibliography, and interior atlas to Hayes' literary inheritance, this imaginative undertaking will intrigue aficionados of the author's expanding oeuvre and anyone looking for artistic inspiration.” —Booklist

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