Terrance Hayes. Hip Logic.

Terrance Hayes. Hip Logic. New York: Penguin, 2002. 103 pp. $10.40 paper.

Terrance Hayes's poetry moves in many directions simultaneously: confessional exploration of identity; various degrees of dissociated formal innovation and cultural criticism; the ironic tightrope along the blurry, increasingly troublesome and untrustworthy line between US consumer culture and African American vernacular traditions. In his powerful first book of poems Muscular Music (Chicago: Tia Chucha, 1997), Hayes's constantly shifting angle of entry navigated the multi-dimensional home turf of popular African-American aesthetics, the ubiquitous inner-city, to amazing results. In the wink-eyed declaration of identity ("What I am") that announced a new voice in Muscular Music, the persona takes history as a sign of difference and reminds that African Americans (as a group) aren't immigrants to this continent: "My ancestors didn't emigrate" (15). Hayes follows with a longing call to a stable and comfortable homeland and culture. The call, at ironic odds as it is with the collection's restless, self-cauterizing voice, plainly wishes for the option of nostalgia: "Why would anyone leave their native land?" (15). Moot point, really. Any immigrant can give you a laundry list of propulsive reasons for leaving and another for why he or she sends money back to the "old country." But the voice intones the sources of power in Hayes's work: his technique of capturing his personae's naive longings and juxtaposing them with his intellectual's awareness of turbulence eroding the usually wholesome, stable possibilities toward which his characters strive.

As anyone worth his John Hope Franklin tattoos already knows, black people aren't immigrants to North America. But under unique kinds of pressures, many certainly became migrants, some even literal fugitives, within it and forth and back to it and from it as soon and as fast and often as they could. I don't know (though the New Jersey State Patrol probably does) what the median speed of black interstate highway travel is, but I'd bet it's faster than the US mean. As critics from Robert Stepto to Craig Werner and to Farah Griffin have shown, black patterns of movement become veins in the kinetic life of the art. Since the publication of the first collection of poems by an African American (brought about by a trip to England), these patterns have taken shape in relation to the contemporary terrains of experience in every era. Various, regionally specific, eras and incarnations of freedom and slavery followed by reconstruction, the so-called nadir, great migrations, Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, expatriate life after both world wars, the Freedom Movement, Black Power, various kinds of feminisms, and the unprecedented level of commercial visibility of black culture have all etched themselves and erased each other, forcing artists to improvise new kinetic patterns into paint, song, and script. Terrance Hayes's Hip Logic writes its own ever-fluctuating patterns into the palimpsest. Among the many, one form of the Hip Logic explores the ambiguous imperatives stemming from "The law [that] says.... No standing still" (12). Of the many, I'm interested in what can be gained from his poems' ironic, ambivalent relationship to consumer and popular cultures and, most interestingly, his personae's unremitting quest for human connection and vital warmth. As with Muscular Music, in Hip Logic, the poems that move in the most intriguing ways cobble together kin to hold to the bonds of another American mythic quantity, the family.

In his 1962 essay "The Creative Process" (The Price of the Ticket, New York: St. Martin's, 1985), James Baldwin writes that the "entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, literally, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive" (670). Lies. When necessary, necessary lies. When brutal, brutal lies. Modern and postmodern societies perpetrate these lies with what's called "culture." Right about the time Baldwin wrote that sentence, black publications like Ebony Magazine began to take out advertisements in mainstream US newspapers. Noting the trend in Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), Stewart Ewen cites ads that pictured bright-eyed, white-toothed Mary Dalton- or Doris Day-type visages of "American happiness," a.k.a. whiteness, underneath captions like "IS THIS ANY WAY TO SELL TOOTHPASTE TO A NEGRO?" (89). These ads signal a profound shift in the twin aims of American popular culture: create homogeneous American consumer-citizens, and sell them stuff. From the 1960s onward, selling America has been, increasingly, the job of culturally specific, multicultural tactics. For most black people raised before the 1960s, the distinction between white fantasies of American happiness and cleanliness, on the one hand, and real human life, on the other, was (at least at one level) clear. For subsequent generations, less so. The result is one dimension of the contemporary kinetic field of the tradition: an unprecedented level of ambivalence about black vernacular cultures that for most of the twentieth century provided so much useful material for artists. At the end of Muscular Music's "What I Am," Hayes's persona ironically declares his American inheritance:

   Fred Sanford's on
   in a few & I got the dandruff-free head
   and shoulders of white people & a cheeseburger
   belly & a thriller CD & Nike high tops
   & slavery's dead & the TV's my daddy--."

Necessarily gripped by confusion in "Noir Orpheus," the persona's anger, devotion, and curiosity grope in futility for reliable, external images in the consumer's cave as "shadows hug[] in the alley":

   Fuck the college boys clutching in the hallway.
   Fuck this oddly placed napkin dispenser.
   You are pure as the water bottle in the comer,
   You are mysterious as the crosswords on the floor. (53)

"The crosswords," where deals are made with the mysterious geography of language. Hip Logic picks up the already half-disbelieved quest for a native land, and a language that sings true in a culture where a persona might look at a Donny Hathaway album and remember: "How my father's baritone / Covered me like a shirt' (73). Again, the naive persona imagines the overlapping security of culture and father. The intellectual sees profiles cut from the sound of breath in a cold night and perched on a windowsill in a fancy midtown hotel.

In a mythic native land that one couldn't imagine leaving maybe people are a close-knit family, joined at the, what, hip? Sister Sledge, father and son, singer and song, Chang & Eng? The first section of Hip Logic, "At the First Clear Word" explores the possibilities of a cultural family. Poems touch on would-be members: anonymous rappers qua pied pipers, Mr. T, the obligatory Shaft parable, and Big Bird. "Butter" echoes the battle of the sexes in Morrison's Paradise, but decides (at least half-ironically) instead that "men could never be so brutal" and places hope in a sensuous cease-fire.

The poems that reach for connections at once more anonymous, more fully imagined, and less caustically and culturally ironic seem infinitely more satisfying. In poems like "Ars Poetica #789," "Hip Logic," "The Things-No-One-Knows Blues," and the crushingly tender and buoyantly surprising "Gospel of the Two Sisters," something human has made it through under the radar screen of multicultural US marketing. In "The Things-No-One-Knows Blues," the persona's "favorite sweater" stands in as a metaphoric formula (and endless quest) for identity: "green, 50% rayon, 5% cotton, (rest unknown)" (9). As in, no rest for the rayon-clad weary. The best poems in Hip Logic go after the unknown ingredients of a human design and wonder how to connect them to others of similarly mysterious content. Despite the preoccupation with word-puzzles, where the intellectual mysteries in Muscular Music were imaged in the "crosswords on the floor," the most powerful unknowns in Hip Logic fit tighter to the chest.

As a whole, Hip Logic is more intellectually adventurous as well. In Muscular Music, the persona swears off one avenue of movement and chimes "Fuck the college boys." In Hip Logic, we find a muted confession broken into a sentence: "I suffer various degrees / of wistfulness" (9). Studied or not, Hayes's prosody playfully improvises over his personae's dire emotional needs. "Ars Poetica" chants the needs of a son into a silent space of masculine would-be connection, "My daddies have voices." Part school-yard braggadocio, part underhanded confession, and partly the voice of suffered wistfulness, it seems as if the persona must have fifty daddies: "My daddy sits beside me"; "One of my daddies was a carpenter"; "Each of my daddies asks, 'Are you writing'"; "But my daddies are tired"; and "My daddies fall asleep in all the rooms." The TV daddy from Muscular Music becomes "my daddy" becomes two, then four, and so on. Same with sisters. In "Gospel of the Two Sisters," Hayes improvises monikers for the sisters in ways that multiply their presence. Single adjectives, "tall," "chatty," "small," "silent," give way to compound ones, "pecan" and "penny-colored" (23). Compound adjectives to sentence-length praise names: "the sister with the banana-colored Bruce Lee-press on nails"; "the sister that could sprint eighty miles"; "the sister that could sleep underwater"; and "the sister with the bullet in her hip" (24). In Muscular Music, a persona realizes the needful lack of connection, too late: "You should have held that woman. A brief embrace, / That would have been tenderness. / You should have held your father" (60). The realization of human connectedness follows courtesy of Larry Levis, "there is no other" (60). In "Gospel of the Two Sisters," the singers supply the song of connection and answer back in a spirit not quite found in the body of Muscular Music.

   How often do you hear the tenderness you need to hear? I mean
   exactly when you need to hear it? Is it ever before that little
   yolk of hurt wraps itself in layers hard enough to break teeth?
   (24)

In this aesthetic, (unlike the post-soul, mock-up-for-sale late night in which "brother, you've got to get your own ...") the song comes from a family that, in Hayes's language, seems to expand and cohere in the organic rhythm of cell division.

In the section "Conjure," the persona shuffles through an almost exclusively male artistic world looking for a sense of accompaniment. At this point in the book, "desire," becomes a self-conscious theme in ways that made me, a few times, wonder if the book didn't begin to "suffer degrees" too. That is, if academic discussions of "desire" and its discontents hadn't crept up onto the page in a way that displaced some of the hard-won, truly new and worth-while wood of Muscular Music. But, we're damn sure not going back to "Fuck the college boys" either. Nevertheless, among the personae of artistic accomplishment are figures notorious for their freelance desires: Diego Rivera, Balthus, Neruda, Picasso, accompany Robeson, Hayden, William H. Johnson and others with more muted, even closeted sexual proclivities. In the opening poem, the figure listens to Marvin Gaye "humping" "Sexual Healing" through earphones and follows a woman through a Japanese museum. In "Sleeping Woman," the persona identifies with Picasso's "Hopeful stroke" but, seems to fear that "fingers have no logic in their need, and desire is a curse" (54). Attempting to answer the creative call, the persona confides: "I have tied fate / to everything." Trouble is, like every trouble man knows, and "Friday Poem" suggests, "passion sometimes climbs a ladder / over the fence of good sense" (39). The persona in "Sleeping Woman" wonders about the pseudo-purity found in "the water bottle" of Muscular Music that has come home to roost in his own heart: "I am only as hopeless; closing these fingers around your wrist as it sleeps upon my chest" (55). In "Still Music," the persona "tied to everything" in a world where "Women's bodies shine / in the buttons on my coat. Women lean//From the train straps above me," wonders "What do you call desire in a married man?" One hears Marvin curse, and an answer in the background: trouble, man! Still real music concludes the section with a brilliant image of ambivalence. The "50% rayon" asks the muscular / vernacular question, "why would anyone leave [home]" (15). The "5% cotton" asks why ask why? And the "(rest unknown)" counts its losses and says: got two good minds telling me to leave here, only one telling me to stay.... Hayes completes the image:

   But, Wife, tonight I don't want to sleep.
   I want to rise into your lungs,
      Linger like a music in your throat,
   Vanish like water under heat.

The longing for a community not torn by the dissonances imaged above concludes the book in the section, "The Law of Falling & Catching Up." Woven from the past recollected, as told to, half-remembered out of dreams, and finally, simply fabricated out of the rhythms of memory themselves, the personae's reports show that the strife between the components of the would-be family isn't anything new. In one dream, in the poem "Fire," the mother instructs the boy: "This is the meaning of the past, Boy" (75). But, the boy's left to discern the sub-conscious geography of the tale for himself: "There were maps and scriptures / carved into my palms, whole towns / I entered sleeping" (75). Through all the swirling levels of image and information, it seems the grief of women in Hip Logic is the one constant, even sustaining, element. Possibly, echoing an important feature of the slave economy of South Carolina, Hayes concludes "Fire" with the sub-conscious bounty of a woman's/mother's suffering: "But I was not hungry, / I remember. My mother turned her tears to rice / & as long as she wept, there was food" (75). In "Gun / Woman / Son," the baby-blanket that links the generations of men in the family is marked with "freckles of blood" from a mother/grandmother who, after being shot in the head, "pries the slug / from her brain ... & drops the bullet in the ashtray beside her pipe" (76). In "Blues Procession," Hayes echoes Robert Hayden's classic portrait a father's stoical love and anger in "Those Winter Sundays." Switching from the father to the mother's reserve, and converting Hayden's famous "What did I know ..." into a statement, the figure admits "I did not know the detours of grief. / I did not know the detours from grief" (80). From the inheritance of popular culture in Muscular Music and early in Hip Logic, the personae now realize that much (maybe most) of the American inheritance is a layered silence, surrounded by static, and underlain by grief. Something the culture, mainlining popular versions of itself, has yet to fathom during the odd halftime break in the distractions.

Amid the steady presence and sporadic voices of women in the section, the men come and go. In "Heartthrob," the persona and his mother wait at roadside for help "when the car overheated" (77). Even, maybe especially, when arriving in the guise of the classic American hero, the men bring chaos and violence, and then they leave. The persona recalls that, as a little boy : "in my heart / I knew a hero would appear.... We'd be saved by one of those head- / strong heroes who rode into her heart / every Saturday evening with heat / rising from the mouth of his pistol" (77). After blasting evil "back to Hell," the persona imagines the hero will "vanish just as the other men had done" (78). In the Hughes-esque "Mother to Son," the mother's script begins by testifying to the temporary nature of male presence: "He was whole evenings / sometimes" (79).

Later in the section, dreams of vagrant desire begin to worry the persona, now grown, about whether one's ever really connected: "with your whole sell / though the other selves remain / lost loitering in love" (88). In the final poem of the collection, "The Same City," the persona searches for a telling of the story that can shore up the fragments of three generations born on the outside of that mythic stockade, the American family. Like the repetitive improvisations of memory captured in C. K. Williams's "Blades" (With Ignorance, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), the persona and his father exchange the capacity for tenderness and manliness in the memory of a stalled car with an infant inside. At once, the persona feels the pull of the macho-competition, "I'd get out now, / prove I can stand with him / in the cold." Instead, at the father's behest, the persona stays inside, in the maternal space, "with the infant ... [and feeds her] an orange softened first in my mouth" (89). Both men are outside the imaginary path of the mythic American man with a secure, and detached (if violently dissociated), mobility and a stable (though, more than likely the target of volumes of well-placed feminist critique) destination: "on his way / to his family, his radio deafening / the sound of water & breathing / along all the roads bound to his" (89).

In version two of the story in "The Same City," the car won't budge and both father and the persona occupy the improvised maternal space, the car. Here, the father cares for the baby who is biologically linked to neither man: he "took the orange from my hand, / took the baby in his arms" (90). Of the expectations of the mythic American world where a man's "young child / bears his face [and] whose wife waits as he drives home through rain & darkness," the persona quotes Miles Davis: "So What" (90). Finally, we learn that the father met the persona's mother in 1974, too late to be his biological father. As memory swirls in the submerged tides of need, the persona yearns to claim not only the man, but, the broken-down, roadside moment of tenderness itself, as his ontological anchor in the spaces between the chaos within and empty mythologies of detached stability without. Hip Logic concludes with an image of a willed legacy in the search for a lineage that contains seeds of the life the persona desperately wants to grow: "In 1974, this man met my mother / ... If you ever tell my story, / say that's the year I was born" (90). I'm sure there are other books contained in Hip Logic. But, read in this way, and in connection to Hayes's first book, Muscular Music, Hayes sets his personae in Hip Logic on a compelling search for reliable echoes to the needs and intensities of contemporary experience. At the level of culture, art, and family, the established stories fail to provide the stable moorings that would enable the personae to join their self-interested, responsible "will" to the full-truth of their questing, desiring lives and selves. In "The Creative Process," Baldwin writes that "A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven" (670). Clearly, Hip Logic leads the reader toward lyrical truths that are difficult to know, harder still to bear.

Hip Logic doesn't seem to know how to feel about the missing components "(rest unknown)" of the sweater/self. Understandably so. But, that the origins and destinies of our lives are securely woven into the tragic is simply an inescapable (if apparently deeply un-American) realization. Once more, as Baldwin suggests, this realization (the blues insight) is the beginning (not the end) of what can be made of modern freedom because without it, "a person ... [not only] is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths ... [but, indeed] frequently mistakes the one for the other" (672). According to Baldwin, "This is also true of nations" (Price 672). At this point, (July 7, 2003), it's hard to imagine a society (and therefore a citizenry) ever more tragically, indeed negligently, mistaken about its strengths and weaknesses. In Hip Logic, in musical fits and lyrical starts, Terrance Hayes's poems realize the tragic formulae within and around us. At its best the book dramatizes the troubling split between the part of us that wants a home we'd never leave, a true, safe and stable world, and the part that knows it's not going to be that easy.

Reviewed by

Ed Pavlic

University of Georgia