38. Terrance Hayes

 

“The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography.” -Terrance Hayes

                

                Terrance Hayes is, as he continuously reminds us, no biographer. In fact, by his own account, he is singularly unsuited to the task of sketching out a coherent life of another person. Among the biographizing skills he lacks: a sense of narrative, strong interviewing skills, the need to be exhaustive, and a preference for research over imagination. “I’m not a journalist,” he concludes towards the end of his non-biography of Etheridge Knight, To Float in the Space Between, “I’m a poet. I’m not good at asking questions; I’m good at making things up."           

                Etheridge Knight, too, was a poet, albeit one who received scant recognition during his lifetime and not much more after. Publishing his first book from prison in 1968, he came out with three more volumes before his death in 1991. Through it all, he remained an elusive figure, a man of varying personas who was tricky to pin down. By turns the bohemian, the prison poet, the bluesman, the Southerner, the soldier, the intellectual, the junkie, Knight was a man aware of his audience, always playing to the crowd, shifting identities as needed. Despite this appealing slipperiness, which would seem to invite the attentions of the potential scholar or biographer, though, critical commentary on Knight has been limited—a special issue of Callaloo devoted to him in 1996, a 2012 study by Michal S. Collins called Understanding Etheridge Knight, and not a whole lot else.

                At least until 2018. Hayes’s To Float in the Space Between, published that year, consists of a series of essays (along with pen-and-ink drawings) most of which originated as lectures and previously appeared elsewhere. Taking Knight’s elusive essence as an organizing principle, the essays aim to be “as speculative, motley, and adrift” as the poet himself. Knight looms large over the poetic career of Hayes, ever since the younger man read Knight’s poem “The Idea of Ancestry” as a college undergrad, and in the years since, Knight’s influence has found its way into Hayes’ work in various ways. According to Hayes, his direct inheritance from Knight includes shaping such aspects of his work as perspective, voice, and form, and, it would seem in reading To Float, that inheritance extends to larger issues of identity as well. As such, the question of influence serves as both a starting point for the book and one of its chief concerns. “Influence is never distant,” Hayes writes, “or influence is always distant. This text is about influence.”

                In fact, the question of influence is a complex one for Hayes (as it was for Etheridge) as a poet, a Black man, a son. Hayes’ questing takes him intellectually across a wide swath of terrain, considering such questions as literary community, the poetics of “liquid”, and what it means to come of age as a poet, but it also leads to a physical journey as well. He travels to Indianapolis to meet with Knight’s sister and others who knew him, to Syracuse to get an account of the poet from his former student, the memoirist Mary Karr, and, in the book’s affective highlight, to his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, to meet his own biological father for the first time.

                It’s in this section, towards the end of the book, that (non-)biography gives way definitively to a species of memoir, as Hayes trades a consideration of his poetic inheritance for an exploration of his familial one. And it’s something of a dark one, comprised of alcoholism (his father’s), possible rape (his mother’s at the hands of his father) and war death (his grandfather’s). As Hayes meets his biological dad and other new members of his family, he’s warmly welcomed but keeps himself at something of a distance, questioning them and trying to imagine his way into the lives of these blood relatives and their ancestors. This speculation ultimately centers on his biological grandfather, a career military man who was killed in Vietnam, and the questions of responsibility, family, and identity raised by his life and death.

                “Each time I’ve returned to my work on Knight,” Hayes writes at the beginning of the book, “only the impossibility of a biography has remained consistent.” Instead, Hayes offers up both what he hopes will be a starting point for future biographers more suited to the task than he is and ample heapings of his own autobiography. And, in fact, as Hayes notes, any prospective biographer will inevitably, if perhaps to a lesser degree than Hayes, be writing his own life as much as Etheridge’s. “The storyteller always tells his own story,” Hayes writes, whether that’s a journey to the writer’s hometown to meet his biological family or it describes whatever personal event might draw a prospective biographer to the tangled narrative of Knight. Any writer who chooses to tell the story of this forgotten, unpinnable poet will have their reasons. And as they always do, those reasons can’t help but seep into the text.