Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry

"This collection of graphic reviews, illustrated prose, and visualized poetics addressing the last century of American poetry establishes the roots of Terrance Hayes's poetic influences and reconstructs modes of poetic engagement, demonstrating what makes a poem both move and be moving and illustrating how drawing itself can be a kind of critical, poetic discourse"--
This musing, mercurial collection of drawings and essays addresses the last century of American poetry, giving rise to the canonized, overlooked and forgotten African American poets and literally and figuratively mapping these acclaimed poets’ routes, roots and wanderings through a contemporary landscape. Original. Illustrations.
“Dazzling . . . a verbal and visual feast that defies genres.” —The Washington PostFrom the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead, Terrance Hayes, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews and illustrated prose addressing the last century of American poetry—to be published simultaneously with his latest poetry collection, So to SpeakCanonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry. Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers. "If you don't see suffering's potential as art, will it remain suffering?" he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes's astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet's routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.