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To Float in the Space Between

A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air." —NPR

In these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation "as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself." Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poet's search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America.

The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography. Fathers who go missing and fathers who are distant will become the bones of the stories.
There will be a fable about a giant who grew too tall to be kissed by his father. My father must have kissed me when I was boy. I can't really say. . . . By the time I was eleven or even ten years old I was as tall as him. I was six inches taller than him by the time I was fifteen. My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache.

Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; and three other award-winning poetry collections. He is the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine and also teaches at the University y of Pittsburgh. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin will also be forthcoming in 2018.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 18, 2018
      National Book Award-winning poet Hayes (American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin) plunges into creative nonfiction with this book about another poet, Etheridge Knight, cautioning readers that “this is not a biography.” Throughout, Hayes challenges genre constraints, bringing together personal reflections, drawings, and poems by Knight and himself, and constructing a work that is part speculative biography, part autobiography, and part critical essay. He offers some insight into Knight’s life, explaining that he was a Korean War veteran who got hooked on narcotics and served time in prison for armed robbery. Prison was where he found poetry and eventually became part of the Black Arts Movement. Hayes shares his own life stories, too, which include going to college on a basketball scholarship, making his own discovery of poetry there, and dramatically meeting his birth father as an adult. In the text’s most effective moments, Hayes links his life’s details to Knight’s, such as by noting that neither of them set out to become poets. Such reflections stitch together the book’s various components around the question: “How does someone become a poet?” In this wonderfully lyrical text, Hayes suggests it isn’t in the details of an individual’s life, but through a hard-to-trace yet vital network of influences.

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  • English

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