Formal Restlessness | Restless Formlessness: In Conversation with Terrance Hayes
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Terrance Hayes is an American poet and educator. He is the author of seven books of poetry, including American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, which was the winner of the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a finalist for both the National Book Awards and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Terrance won the National Book Award in 2010 with his fourth collection, Lighthead. He has also published a collection of visual and lyric essays, entitled Watch Your Language, and a book of criticism about the life and work of Etheridge Knight. Among his other honours are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship. Terrance was appointed the fifth Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow. The Visiting International Poetry Fellowship is part of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Queen’s University Belfast’s joint ten-year Seamus Heaney Legacy project, supported by Atlantic Philanthropies. Terrance sat down to speak with poet, Finola Cahill, during his time at the Seamus Heaney Centre in March 2026.
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Do you think poetry can exist in isolation? Is anything—
What is isolation?
Is anything truly individually authored?
No, I don’t think that. I mean, if we’re just talking poetry, the word would be hybridity. Hybridity is kind of trending, but poets have always brought other impacts into it. I mean, this is what modernism is. This is all that T. S. Eliot was ever doing. Poetry is always in conversation with other things. What is the village poet? The griot? Some people think of the poet as this very spiritual and very wise person. Some people think it’s very academic. There is a heady part of poetry, and I’m always trying to aspire to the other part – the non-tangible, spiritual or even surreal. Maybe that’s what the more lyric and experimental zones are. I’m always pushing in those areas because I’m more inclined to tell a story, like everybody else. I encourage everybody to do memoirs. I think every person on the planet should have a memoir. I will never do a memoir, but I think others should do it.
So you can’t take your own advice, is what you’re telling me?
I feel like, as a poet, memoir has just folded into what I do. There are certain things about my life that people will know if they read the poems or the prose. But I find prose exclusively a little boring. I let other people do it.
I do think the poet can do pretty much anything in terms of the literary world. Lydia Davis would say this is true for the fiction writer. I’m trying to convince people that they can do anything I can do. If you can write your name, you can draw. Handwriting is drawing, you just have to have confidence. The confidence of signing your name, and the confidence of drawing an apple that doesn’t look like an apple. It’s not going to be the same line, but it will be your line.
You have an interesting relationship to negation in imagery. For instance, in ‘Fish Head for Katrina’: ‘The mouth is where the dead / Who are not dead do not dream’. Is that impulse in conversation with your visual art? A borrowed awareness of the importance of negative space?
You know, the first thing that came to my mind was negative capability when you said negation. So I was thinking about Keats. The idea of holding knowledge in the unknown, being comfortable with what you’re not knowing inside of a poem. I would say that before I would think of it as a visual relationship. It’s a new question for me. I wonder if that’s true. It’s not a thing that I thought about because it was only in the Etheridge Knight book that I started feeling I could have my artistic self sitting next to my writerly self. I’ve kept them fairly separate, the language and the visual. Music, too. I can’t play the piano, but I’ve been playing it for about twenty-five years. I play about an hour a day.
Are there unreleased Terrance Hayes songs?
Well, I used to record them. This is the paradox. I feel like I play best when nobody’s listening. The self-consciousness of it goes back to reading poems and having people look at me. I feel that’s wrong, staring at a person reading poems. If someone’s sitting there, I’m thinking about them listening, which automatically throws off the organic freedom I’m looking for. I took a lesson once in 2006, but I’ve never had lessons. The piano shows up in the poems. As an instrument and as an entity. In my thirties and forties, I kept things in categories – I had Ps – parent, poet, painter, piano player, professor. All separate boxes. And then I turned fifty, I was like, they need to be woven in together. Why am I keeping them separate?
You centre topics that other people often skirt – masculinity, taboos, familial dynamics. Is there anything you’re afraid to write about?
When I wrote those sonnets, every reading I gave, I was dripping sweat. When you come up to me afterwards, I’m going to say to you ‘I wrote it so I won’t have to talk about it.’ It’s a letter. You’ll get it, but I’m not going to be sitting in front of you while you’re reading the letter. Maybe I don’t care to hear what you think about it. When I’m writing it, it’s me and my shadow.
There’s a poem in my first book called ‘Woman Walking on the Road’, which is about a fight I had with my college girlfriend. I don’t think I ever sent it out. It’s a good poem. I had to do this thing for domestic abuse at the UN. I have a poem about Miles Davis called ‘When the Neighbors Fight’. I thought I could read that because it’s very clear about Davis and his abuse. But, having been in the situation which is the subject of ‘Walking on the Road’, I felt I had to ask myself questions. If you’re talking about the confessional mode, it’s a very honest poem. If you asked me about my top ten most challenging or important poems, it would be on there. I read it when the book was out, but last January I hadn’t read it in probably fifteen years. Dripping sweat, dripping sweat. A room full of women, all with histories of abuse. I was worried about triggers. I sent it to them in advance. I was like, I think I want to do this because no one does it. Everybody that’s talking about it, to a room of women, will never think about their own culpability. But I couldn’t write that poem right now, which is why it’s an important poem to me. Emotional questions are not always easy ones. Ultimately, you’re still relying on craft and integrity. I know what I was trying to get at. And if I did it right, the people who are open to it will know. It went over fine. To put myself back in that predicament, however uncomfortable it was, felt like what that poem was for. It was what I wrote it for.
How do you read a poem? What questions do you ask of it as a reader and as a writer?
I think of poetry primarily as art. So for me, it would be easing into the work almost like you ease into music. The engagement is not instantaneous. Insecurity comes from that first experience of not knowing what’s happening. I don’t know what’s happening either, I’m just listening to music, even now, you know. What do you think when you’re walking through a museum of abstract expressionism or listening to jazz? When I’m reading T. S. Eliot or the opening to Finnegan’s Wake, I’m not trying to process it like math. It’s trying to hear it like music. That is to say, my primary pedagogical response is: poems are not read, they’re reread. Borges, I think, said something like that too. And poems are not written, they’re rewritten. So I have read a million poems and I have reread maybe half of that. Most of them – it’s like a cliché, it’s like a movie you’ve seen before.
Do you think some of the intimacy of the individual poem is lost in putting together a collection?
It depends on how you think about your subject. If you think every poem is about one thing, like I wrote a poem about a rose, so I will never write a rose again. But the weeks come around, you know? You wrote about Monday once, write about it again. The practice of poetry is ongoing. It’s not trying to solve one thing. That is how collections work – they’re not made up of individual, one-off poems. And the bookmaking process – like, here’s your narrative poem about the rose, here’s your lyric poem about the rose and here’s your experimental poem about the rose. Roses smell good, they’re red, they have thorns, there’s your narrative. The lyric part, maybe you’re singing rose, I just love the ‘o’ sound in rose. Okay, that’s good. But the other zone of experiment and invention is the most personal. It’s one’s own question about where you’re risking, inventing inside of your work. That’s how I think about building books. I want to have a subject that I can keep playing with and walking around. Very rarely do I feel like I write a purely revelatory poem. Is that true? Maybe they just take longer to do. My general habit is to want to be writing. So I push against that idea that it has to be this sort of event, the one poem that solves the world. Because I never approach poems that way. I think of the collection as a series of attempts as opposed to a series of successes. So that you can keep going. I mean, who wants to stop writing poems?
But I think that’s a good question about what the individual poem can do. Me and Nick [Laird] were talking about this. At the end, you only have a handful. Five or six poems. That’s all Frost had, a couple of poems that people really can say, there you go. What are you doing the rest of the time?
When introducing you, Nick Laird called your work ‘formally restless’. The content of your poems often skews towards the surreal, associative, dreamlike. You’ve said you use form to get free. Do you think you might also use form as a counterweight against surreality? A containment?
I mean, the thing I love about poetry is it’s almost too big for any one thing to be true. You’re really just trying to get all of yourself down. So as a person who likes music, I’m always talking about music. I know a little bit of art, so that comes up. I like Gwendolyn Brooks, and so that golden shovel comes out of asking my son to memorise ‘We Real Cool’. The restlessness, to me, is reactions. It’s just trying to be aware and not get too stuck. Like, ‘you can do another book of sonnets, he’s back in the office.’ And I’m like, ‘uh, I already did it. Y’all can read the old sonnets.’ The restlessness is like ‘I ain’t that dude anymore’. That’s why you want to put everything in that first book that you can, even the wild stuff, because you may not be able to do it again. It’s hard for people to hear that, that there’s a thing they can do now that they might lose. They think ‘I’ll just get better at everything.’ That just isn’t true. That idea of capturing your real-time self, even if it isn’t perfect, and then pushing past that or learning the next thing after that, is what I’m interested in. I’m not ever interested in some kind of fixed product. You go into a room, they’ll be like, you’re a confessional poet, you’re a black poet, you’re a southern poet, you’re a formal poet. People are trying to figure out what you are. I’m just trying to be my full self. So I really don’t even think of it as conscientious restlessness, so much as strategies that allow me to keep writing. Strategies that make it exciting for me. Fun.
Do you have a favourite from your books? Or is it like your kids – you have to say you love them all equally?
Usually it’s the last one – which is also what a parent would say. The last thing needs the most care. The older ones – books – they’re fine. But my relationship comes back to how long I have had to sit with them. I have this poem, I haven’t looked at it in maybe five years. I started it in 2006. It’s about meeting my half-brothers. It’s 224 pages. And it just didn’t work. There’s a sonnet that’s a page out of those 224, and in How to Be Drawn, there’s a poem called ‘As Traffic’, which was something I could peel off. Whether the rest of it ever becomes anything? It’s just hanging on this one experience and framed around a lot of assumptions. I think I have to find these dudes again. One of them went to jail. I found him and then when he got out of jail, he vanished. This other brother I never saw again. But if I die, somebody’d go: oh look, a whole manuscript from Terrance Hayes. But that thing isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing. What would they think if they saw it? Would they think it was … If this half-brother saw ‘As Traffic’, what would he think? Actually, in Lighthead there’s a poem, ‘Arbor for Butch’, which is a PechaKucha. It’s about the time I met their father, my dad. I only met him twice. It’s about being in a hotel and about the circumstances of my birth – which I wrote about so I don’t have to talk about it – which was rape. He raped my mother. How it happened, I’m getting it from both of them, and the poem is processing all of that. So I read it at the 92nd street Y not long after the book came out. The last time I looked at that poem online (it’s on YouTube) I saw in the comments – not that I go looking at people’s comments – the older of the two brothers said: ‘Butch was a great dad.’ When I saw that, I did whatever you can do in the comments: ‘hey man, you know I’m still here.’ But maybe they thought, ‘I don’t want to deal with you’. Maybe that’s why I haven’t heard from them again. So I have 224 pages of these two half-brothers and I think I have to have a better, rounder relationship with them. I don’t know how to find them. But if I could find them, I think I would finish it, and if I don’t find them, I can maybe find another page or two out of it. This comes back to my current relationship to poetry, which is about the prayer and the letter – that gesture of talking to someone that maybe isn’t there. That will get it on the other side.
It’s a strange consequence of modern life, isn’t it? That somebody can catch you on YouTube speaking, whereas before, if they wanted to see you, they had to come see you.
I’ve never wanted to be super available to people after I’ve done the work. No real social media in a way that makes me have to engage fans. You can barely find my email if you look for it. I never did the Twitter thing. I would be obsessive over it because of the 140 characters, I’d be writing a haiku for every comment. I wasn’t built for it because of my relationship to language; I’d be taking all day just to get that haiku right. I got a letter once from a guy who was like: ‘My dad was passing away and I took your book and I read him your poems and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ And then he was like, ‘here’s some of the poems I wrote too. What do you think?’ I was like, ‘I’m not going to respond. Just pretend I’m dead.’ I’m going to be dead so let’s just say right now: the author’s dead and no matter what you think, you can think it and you can say it and you can post it and write about it. I have no control over that. So, reviews, opinions, I try not to track any of that.
I like to be home. I like to work on my stuff. Even readings – I’m like, yeah, I can do it, but I prefer to just send the poems out and never have to deal with anybody. You know what I mean? My poet self only wants to write poems. Writing is lonely all the time. Sometimes you can get a little bit of fortification in groups, but never think that it’s not a lonely practice. There’s no organisation that’s going to take away that quality of loneliness. I’m deliberately using ‘lonely’ to put a little darkness on it, but let’s say solitude or whatever. Being on your own is always foundational to writing. Thinking about solitude … Look, my parents have been to maybe two readings. My brother has never come, and my brother’s in the military. I don’t actually know what he does. His wife doesn’t know what he does. But he’s never come to New York. He’s never come to a reading. Totally fine with me. When I use the word lonely, my relationship to that word is not problematic. Solitary, lonely, hermit. A person who likes to be by himself most of the time, that would be me.
In Watch Your Language you talk about interviewing your friend and colleague Yusef Komunyakaa. You asked him what he remembered being obsessed with at fifteen years old—
At fifteen, I decided I was going to be a high school English teacher. I was like, there’s English, there’s basketball, there’s track, there’s chorus, there’s art. If I’m an English teacher, I can have access to it. I thought that until my college professor – I’m authorised to say this, he’s passed away now – he was a bit of an alcoholic and let me teach. He let me teach Toni Morrison’s Beloved because he was hungover, and I was like, I think I could do this. I think that the workshop and academic space is for challenges; it’s a laboratory. People think it’s for validation – for sanctioning what you do. I don’t think that. Since maybe 2014 I’ve only given As and it’s never been a problem. I’ve never regretted it. I do think of myself as a person who’s mostly a fan of literature and lucky enough to teach it. Where else am I going to get to talk to you about the last novel I read, if not in the classroom space.
Do you feel American in a different way when you’re outside of America?
I would add a modifier to that. I could add two. The first one would be black. So, black American. Outside of America, everybody knows what our history is and feels sympathy. Somebody asked me about Belfast: ‘what does it feel like when you walk around?’ One place I walked in, they took too long to serve me, and I just left. You know, I didn’t push. I could feel that energy. But generally, no. The premise of that question, that kind of sympathy, I’m not sure white Americans get as much of it. I feel people don’t think of me as being responsible for the fucked up stuff in America when they meet me. The other thing is just being tall, you know? I don’t feel under threat in my body, or the kind of insecurity Americans feel outside of the country. I’ve never felt that. When you get around, you realise only landscapes change, but people don’t. The houses may look a little bit different, the sky may look a little different, but people themselves are essentially the same. And the only reason I can’t go all the way with that comment is because I can’t speak any other languages.
In what way do you feel most commonly misunderstood?
Do I even think about that? What does that mean to be misunderstood? If I’m having a conversation with a person, I talk fast, it’s associative, it’s all over the place. But in the writing process and the art-making process, I’m taking my time to get it right because I’m so ineffective in 3D. So, how people understand me, I don’t know. I mean, there are ideas about form. People think I’m one thing when I think I’m not one thing. That’s probably going to be true on and off the page. Any room I walk into, nobody’s going to guess I’m a poet. Maybe that’s it in the 3D world. My body keeps people from knowing what I am. I think about Prince and I think about Martin Scorsese – the short person thing – maybe I would have taken over the world if I was short. Because I think my height made me relaxed, just kind of laid back in a certain way, and I can feel that intensity in people who don’t have it. It’s just totally luck. So I don’t fetishise it. I guess that it helped me get free. And so I’m just trying to help other people figure out what would get them free, even if it’s not, you know, being tall.
But in the artistic world, I don’t think too much about being misunderstood. I think that is the work. If you don’t understand something, it might be the poem that’s screwed up. But the ambition would be to get it right and to give it to you and then you would see. That’s the work – to get some portion of yourself down that feels right, you know? Again, the notion of restless formlessness.
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This interview was originally printed by the Apiary Magazine, Belfast, October 2026. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Finola Cahill is a writer from Co. Mayo, Ireland. Her work appears in Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, Banshee, and elsewhere. She won the 2025 Cúirt New Writing Prize.
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