Hayes said the election of Donald Trump in 2016 launched him into action - he vowed to write a poem every day of Trump’s presidency. He doesn’t teach his own poetry, and he said his mom introduces him as a professor - not a poet.īut it’s the writing process that seems to consume him, never more so perhaps than when he started the work that would become American Sonnets.
He also teaches creative writing at New York University, but he told his Exeter audience when asked how being a teacher has influenced his poetry that he tries not to cross the streams.
He is on the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. The author of six poetry collections - Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999), Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015) and American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) - he has won the National Book Award a Whiting Award an NAACP Image Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. Hayes fits comfortably among those ranks, and not only because his resume is so rich - though it unquestionably is. The likes of Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, Seamus Heaney and Donald Hall have served as Lamont Poets. Past visitors have included poets laureate and presidential inauguration poets. Two poets are invited to campus each year to give readings of their poetry and - in pre-pandemic times - to attend English classes. The Lamont Poet Series was established in 1982.
Reading from the collection and from other works, then fielding questions, Hayes beguiled an Assembly Hall audience that included Exeter students currently studying American Sonnets. He shared with the Exeter community his motivations, his inspirations and his creative process Wednesday night as the Lamont Poet for winter term. Which makes all-pro poet Terrence Hayes’ choice to deploy the convention in his 2018 collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin curious at first glance. “How do I love thee?” asked Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a sonnet. The sonnet is the valentine of poems, a love letter of verse born in Italy and shared with a kiss for most of eight centuries.
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