How to Be Drawn

The Penguin Poets

by Terrance Hayes

A dazzling new collection of poetry by Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead

In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes’s background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the
principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes’s award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.

Genres: Poetry, African American, Race, Nonfiction, 21st Century, Contemporary, American

112 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2015

About the author

Terrance Hayes is the author of six poetry collections, including American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, How to Be Drawn, and Lighthead, which won the National Book Award. He is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know how to talk about poetry but this is a powerful book. Lots of clever wordplay in many of the poems. When Hayes engages with popular culture he does it so well. Really enjoyed this.

[Arie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hello, sliding chairs. Hello, vicious whispering shadows.
I'm a reasonable man, but I want to be as inexplicable
as something hanging a dozen feet in the air.

I've been reading this in pieces, bite sized moments taken in mornings and twilights when no-one is around to interrupt the flow and spread of words on the page.

This is my first encounter with Terrence Hayes - first of many, I hope. His writing is fluid and twisting and clever, poems laid out in inventive ways that serve to tell their stories gorgeously (one, for example, is laid out as a crime report and it's perfect).

[Brown Girl Reading · Rating 4 out of 5]

What can I say? Just awesome! Love Hayes' approach to writing poetry. He brings everything and everybody into his poetry. He has a lot to say if you take the time to read, reread, understand and then reread. I swear you'll understand and find more things with each reading. This is his fifth collection of poetry but well worth the read.

[Z. · Rating 4 out of 5]

                                        People who say don't live in the past
Don't have a real sense of the past, would you agree with that?

The first three or four poems in this collection were love at first sight. Hayes is almost the stylistic opposite of the last poet I read, Claudia Rankine, whose unadorned, matter-of-fact delivery, while no less brilliant, serves an almost documentary purpose; Hayes, by contrast, dives gleefully into the abstract, the fantastical, and the musical, combining linguistic playfulness (Symptoms include a faint witchcraft, a boom- / bap, some claptrap in a parallel room) with a mishmash of name-referenced inspirations ranging from novelists and poets (Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Mayakovsky) to musicians (James Brown, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Leonard Cohen) to visual artists (Ellen Gallagher, Jenny Holzer, Mark Rothko). It's worth noting that Hayes himself is a painter as well as a poet, and several of the poems in this collection play with visual presentation (charts, police reports) in always-interesting, if occasionally slightly distracting, ways.

Hayes isn't what I'd call coy, but he rarely addresses his subject directly; he circles it, goes on tangents, creates unexpected associations, and trusts the reader to pick up on the things he's not quite saying. The title poem, "How to Be Drawn to Trouble," is maybe the best example of this approach in action, skillfully weaving fleeting details about the life and music of James Brown together with heartbreaking remembrances of Hayes' mother (a guard at the prison where Brown was once briefly incarcerated) and the day she and his father split. The poems aren't didactic, but I felt like I was learning when I read them, absorbing all the references and influences and hinted-at snippets of history and biography even as Hayes prodded the deeper feelings beneath them all. It's a mode of poetry I really connect to when executed well, satisfying emotionally, intellectually, and aesthetically all at once.

Disappointingly, though, my infatuation waned a little after the rock-solid start. (That's a very Hayesian theme, actually—the slow, sad fade of what seemed like love; he'd do it more justice than me.) Much as I wish I wasn't, I can be a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to poetry, and I have trouble sometimes engaging with the more postmodern and purely experimental strains so popular with professional poets today. (An egregious example from Hayes: Lil Elf. Cornucopian. Damn near ascetic dust net. Pilant curl-a-plenty. / Boomerang & Blung. The rustle in the sprawling that is noise listened to / carefully, but the kind of noise that is nothing.) The least effective poems here, for me, are the ones which feel like strings of images with no clear connective tissue. What should be any artist’s first objective—to communicate—is blurred to obscurity in a pyrotechnic haze. And maybe even our poet is aware of this tendency in himself: Beware: there is, he warns, such a thing as too much symbolism.

But taken in slowly and with an open mind, Hayes rewards far more than he punishes. He's a poet both candid and circuitous, valiant and vulnerable, cerebral and sincere. He takes real risks, and even when they don't quite pay off you can't help commending him for making the attempt at all.

A few favorites:
How to Be Drawn to Trouble
How to Draw an Invisible Man
Elegy with Zombies for Life
The Rose Has Teeth
We Should Make a Documentary About Spades

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this because it was longlisted for the National Book Award in poetry in 2015. Terrance Hayes is a South Carolinian by birth and his last volume won the NBA in 2010! That may have been the first year I read the poetry nominees.

Terrance is also a visual artist, and so there is some art going on in these poems - painting and painters, form, music; also some experimental forms based on genetic mapping (I think?) etc.

My absolute favorite is "The Rose Has Teeth" about a piano. You can see the poet reading it at Cafe Canem 2012.
"...But you got teeth, Piano.
You make me high...
You make me believe there is good in me...."

My second favorite is "Ars Poetica for the Ones Like Us"
"...It is evening that lets us,

For an instant, be possessed by someone else...."

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrance Hayes collection of poems, How to Be Drawn is a fascinating group of poems, filled with jazzy rhythms. There is a lot of pain but the overall impression is of an exuberance of life, of celebration.

Hayes uses many different kinds of forms here-tables, catalogs, a fascinating group of tribes and their customs, as well as your more typical poem. The collection is always interesting, both formally and emotionally.

[Holly (The GrimDragon) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In her bomb hair: Shells full of thunder; in her mouth: the fingers of some calamity, Somebody foolish enough to love her foolishly. Those who could hear No music weren't listening--and when I say it, it's like claiming She's an elegy. It rhymes, because of her, with effigy."

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I just finished the book I got while visiting bookstores with Cathleen last weekend. How to Be Drawn is a slim volume of poetry by contemporary African American poet Terrence Hayes. My favorite section was the 2nd (of 3) which contained several elegies to those dead or otherwise forgotten by society, either figures from Hayes's personal life or historical/artistic figures. My favorite was Black Confederate Ghost Stories His work also reminds me of that of Whitman with it's focus on the individuals that make up society. All and all this was a strong collection. I don't read much poetry, but I'm exceedingly glad I read this book.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Hey, I am learning what it means to ride condemned.
I may be breaking up. am doing 85 outside the kingdom

Of heaven, under the overpass and passed over,
The past is over and I'm over the past. My odometer

Is broken, can you help me? When you get this mess
Age, may be a half-ton crush, a half tone of mist

And mystery, may be trooper bait with the ambulance
Ambling somewhere, or a dial of holy stations, a band

Age of clamor and spooling, a dash and semaphore,
A pupil of motion on my way to be buried or planted or

Crammed or creamed, treading light and water or tread
And trepidation, maybe. Hey, I am backfiring along a road

Through the future with "I am alive" skidding across my tongue.
When you get this message, will you sigh, My lover is gone?"

// A. Machine



I did not end up gelling with this collection a lot, many poems left me cold or felt a bit stretched out even though they had brilliant sections here and there. Hayes explores the observer and the observed, the witness and the witnessed. How we are subjects and objects, fixed in a gaze as we gaze at others. More often than not, it is the African American subject who is made a victim of determining projects of racial taxonomy with no power, no voice, or autonomy.

There's a lot of fun to be had while reading this collection, I won't lie; the poems are often funny too. Hayes is adept at ingenious wordplay with a good measure of cultural references. You can see that he pays careful attention to how these poems sound by their inherent musicality. He is also playful with form: poems as crime reports, as instruction manuals, as Q/A. I loved "How to Draw an Invisible Man" and "Ars Poetica for the Ones Like Us".

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poetry here digs into, grazes, taps into, flows in and out of and grows from other art forms. Love that!
We have poems, so fascinating, born of: dissonant and colliding and melding color, crime reports, charts, maps and so much more.
Teeming with life.
So much packed in here. Wow!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A poem by Terrence Hayes that I love but not from this volume follows:

How to Draw a Perfect Circle

I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head,
Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow
But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral

From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle,
The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils
And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle

Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles
Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model.
In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject

Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected
By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake
Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,

A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman.
To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away.
I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves

As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth
In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her 
wedding,
The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel.

The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing,
In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows,
But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy.

When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face
And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling
To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone 
witness.

The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried
On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working
Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me.

At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped
Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel,
A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field

The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body
Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers,
The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O.

When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years
Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy.
I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate

Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat.
An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles
To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral.

The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings
The slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see
What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees:

A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat.
The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness,
All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other,

They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open,
They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim
And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeral

Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun
In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver
Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife.

The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed.
I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey
Pink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after Odysseus

Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could
Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased,
Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy

I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout
Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder
Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me.

Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes
In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs
With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops

Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas
Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything
Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject

A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye
Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops,
A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion

Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins
Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests,
When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed

It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell,
Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model
Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them

As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself
In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell
Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.

You must look without looking to make the perfect circle.
The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid
Until the drawing is complete.

[Sidik Fofana · Rating 5 out of 5]

SIX WORD REVIEWS: Poem about Spades says it all.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are several 5 star poems that just made sit and go Whoa!, and then there are some long ("playful") experiments that I either didn't get or didn't care about. The length of these experiments (especially that Vladimir thing) had me docking this one a star just for spite.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't read poetry and so I have no idea how to review it. What I can tell you is that it's been a long time since I couldn't put a book down because it moved me intellectually and viscerally. It's no surprise to me that Hayes is a trained visual artist; each poem is a visual work of art. That's what I can tell you. And here's a bit from one of my favorites, New York Poem:
...on sci-fi bridges and isles
of New York, on the rooftops in Chinatown
where Miles Davis is pumping in,
and someone is telling me about contranyms,
how "cleave" and "cleave" are the same word
looking in opposite directions, I now know
"bolt" is to lock and "bolt" is to run away.
That's how I think of New York. Someone
jonesing for Grace Jones at the party,
and someone jonesing for grace.

[Maud · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really wanted to like this more than I did.
I couldn't get into any of the rhythms. The subject matter was probably interesting but lost underneath too many words, which I didn't think was possible.
The Just never felt like I got anywhere with any but two of these poems - How to Draw an Invisible man and New Jersey Poem. Instructions for a Seance with Vladimirs was also good but seemed to drag on longer than necessary.
Perhaps partly his form, which is sometimes experimental and free verse-y and sometimes structured, just couldn't find one cohesive poem to really love.
Oh well.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm sure I didn't understand everything in this book, but I liked it.

[BookishStitcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have never really come across a poetry book that I didn't like. So when several poems into this and not liking any so far, I paused and tried to figure out why. Then I realized that I had only read poems by women (as far as I can remember). I persevered and finished this, but it was rare for me to enjoy any of the poems in this book. The book is divided up into 3 sections one I really didn't like, one that was okay, and one I thought pretty good. So that averages out to about a 3 star for me. The thing about reading a male poet is that I really didn't appreciate how he talked about women in a few of his poems. I guess this just wasn't for me.

[w.ii · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh mr hayes how wonderful you are! the grip terrance hayes has on language in this collection is so delightful. he holds both reigns with one hand, he’s playful, precise, and honest while smirking. he is showing off. this may be my favorite collection of his, if not tied with, “american sonnets…”

“what it look like”
“the deer”
“how to be drawn to trouble”
“new york poem”
“baberism”
“like mercy”
“a. machine”
“the rose has teeth”
“for crying out loud”
“portrait of etheridge knight in the style of a crime report”
“ars poetica for the ones like us”

[Phil Overeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning.

Hayes’ playfulness (through punning and free association, for example) and characteristic formal daring add a real richness to the truths he captures. Wonderful work, here.

[Caitlin Conlon]

A really interesting collection of poetry that consistently challenged my expectations. I was fascinated by Hayes’ diction, his formatting, & the way he approached poetic language. I’m looking forward to reading more from him in the future.

[Debs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hayes is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and one of the few I am consistently compelled to read aloud. His use of assonance is so satisfying; it’s impossible not to groove with some of these poems the way you would to your favorite song. I recommend him to people who say they don’t like poetry.

[Shakarean · Rating 5 out of 5]

everything about this collection is great

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though not without roughness in form and composition, Hayes writes beautifully and thoroughly here on body and identity. I enjoyed this title much more than the previous work I read by him in Hip Logic.

[jozie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Terrance Hayes has so many unique stylistic choices that make his poetry engaging and meaningful.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite possibly the best poem title ever is "Instructions for a Seance with Vladimirs."

[Gabby Grinaway · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrance Hayes, as always, is amazingly talented.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hayes has engaged so many things in his poetry, not least of which is the very idea of beauty. I found that the dominant theme of this book, although it is not the one usually referred to. Here's a short review I did a few years ago

https://annarborobserver.com/articles...

[Griffin Peralta · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most interesting aspect of this book is the formatting the author uses.
Some of the poems within are *graphs*. It's pretty lit.

[Shaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those times when I wish there was the ability to award an additional half-star; five (5) stars would of be too many and four (4) stars would be too few. Terrance Hayes' current collection of poetry reminds me of Claudia Rankine's award-winning book, "Citizen" which was and is so incredibly prescient.

In "How to be Drawn" Terence Hayes explores the pathos of the African-American experience in various forms of word play and structure not unlike that of my favorite word artist Jenny Holzer and radical Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky -- to whom both individuals Hayes pay express tribute.

But to label this book a collection centered solely on the black experience in America would be doing it a serious disservice for like the title in the first poem implies, "What It Look Like" is not necessarily what it means. Therein lies the rub; therein lies it's genius.

Read it and enjoy the way Hayes' word play rolls across the tongue and savor the flavor of his great work in your palate. See why it was short-listed in 2015 for the NBA in Poetry.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

At once contemporary and timeless, this collection asks the reader to embark on a musical study of history, family, and socioeconomic markers that are somehow both very personal and universal. As with all of Hayes' books, I left feeling better informed about how others walk around in this world. Such careful attention to language and detail. And the endings zing. I'm getting notes of Hicok and Bibbins here, but also some form play a la Rankine.

Some of my favorite moments:

I now know "bolt" is to lock and "bolt" is to run away.

I devoted myself to sumptuous moos and hallelujahs.

Ask me about hunger and I will hum something very unlikely.

This scenario is for the lonely child in me.

How much we love without loving, how little we sing while singing.

I'm a reasonable man, but I want to be as inexplicable
as something hanging a dozen feet in the air.

I can almost imagine the look of your scars,
Dear Lord, when I find you.

I wanted to be a lucid hammer.

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

When he's on, Terrance Hayes is one of the best poets writing today: check out Wind in a Box, Lighthead and Hip Logic. How to Be Drawn isn't Hayes at his best; it feels like a transitional volume, one in which he's experimenting with forms that are likely to show up in more fully developed ways on down the road. But I'm unlikely to come back to this collection often. There are some high points: "Like Mercy," "New Jersey Poem" and the wonderful tribute to James Brown in "How To Be Drawn to Trouble." If you haven't read Hayes, the path in's through Hip Logic.