Hip Logic (National Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Terrance Hayes (Author)

Book Description

Series: National Poetry Series | Publication Date: May 28, 2002

Terrance Hayes is a dazzlingly original poet, interested in adventurous explorations of subject and form. His new work, Hip Logic, is full of poetic tributes to the likes of Paul Robeson, Big Bird, Balthus, and Mr. T, as well as poems based on the anagram principle of words within a word. Throughout, Hayes's verse dances in a kind of homemade music box, with notes that range from tender to erudite, associative to narrative, humorous to political. Hip Logic does much to capture the nuances of contemporary male African American identity and confirms Hayes's reputation as one of the most compelling new voices in American poetry.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Forgive this letter covered in paint. There are no rags around me. I can't tell you where I am, but where I ain't." Selected by Cornelius Eady for the National Poetry Series, Terrance Hayes's Hip Logic is divided into five sections of fast-paced monologues and mania, leavened by "Autumn" ("its scent of cooling grease like the scent you inhaled once along the rim of a girl's collar") and portraits of greater and lesser heroes, from Homer and Audre Lorde to Shaft and Mr. T: "How to hulk through Chicago in a hedgerow afro, an ox-grunt kicking dust behind the teeth; those eighteen glammering gold chains around the throat of pity, that fat hollow medallionlike the sun on a leash "
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Terrance Hayes received an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. He was the recipient of a 1999 Whiting Writers Award, and his first collection of poetry, Muscular Music, was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2000. He is currently an assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Edition edition (May 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142001392
• ISBN-13: 978-0142001394
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #395,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1971. Lighthead, his most recent poetry collection, won the 2010 National Book Award. His third collection, Wind in a Box (Pengiuin 2006), was named one of the best 100 books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. His other books of poetry are Muscular Music (1999), which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Hip Logic (2002), which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, three Best American Poetry selections, a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ~, August 2, 2003

By 

Jennifer Merrifield (Frostburg, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hip Logic (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)

Hip Logic by Terrance Hayes does more than stroke the waters of the pool-his careful crafting allows the reader to become the boy in '"The Gulf Stream" / Four Studies: IV. Self Portrait / Vision,' pushed into the blue and sputtering for the oxygen of understanding. This subtle drowning in words and loves and hearts and minds and bodies leaves the reader poolside, but the bumps are not welts, now they are goose bumps, and the reader can feel "How, in the moments before birth, / The lines were washed from the map / That told the route you'd come?" and is still nodding `yes' to "Perhaps drowning feels that way." when the goose bumps reappear with:

I have wanted the kind of grace God gives
Only to the drowned;
The boundlessness

Of a man conjured
Out of gossip & time,
Out of theories of demise;

By interspersing the "A Gram of &s" chapters, this emotional language is melded to the rules of anagrams, and this logic infuses the works with a vulnerable stoicism. Much like the free-flowing current of a life is contained by the laws of riverbanks and gravity and dams and locks, so are we all born into the boxed banks of society where the conditioning currents of division are fjorded by seeing beyond our one-room boxes, by adhering to the logic of the heart.

Hayes uses various techniques to further transcend the printed page. One such technique is his use of onomatopoeia in works such as "a boomboomboom" in "Hip Logic" or "You want [beatbox beatbox beatbox] / Breathlessness" in "emcee." `"The Gulf Stream" / Four Studies' provides a second technique - here, each of the four studies rely upon a different technique to carry the poem. "I. Homer / Apparition" utilizes staggered spacing, "II. Fishmonger / Libation" is characterized by the repetition of "To the." "III. The Sea / Temptation" uses constant italicization and "IV. Self Portrait / Vision" relies upon the careful use of indentations to punctuate the language with a well-tuned aesthetic impact.

The forms of the poems, from broken villanelles and sestinas to poems created by weaving the rules of anagrams into the poetic framework of the piece, to "Sonnet," a poem where one line: "We sliced the watermelon into smiles" is repeated fourteen times to form the sonnet, facilitate this reborn awareness by jarring the reader's logic and offering a new, "Hip Logic" in its stead, as do the repeated imagery of water and paint, of blue, of oceans, of the fluidity of life and the persistent reality of oppression. All intertwine to push past the standard of poetic expression to propel the work, its words and rhythms, into a fresh sphere of personal expression through poetic rebirth and deepened understandings-through "The Law of Falling & Catching Up."

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mastery, March 18, 2003

By 

Frederick Joiner (Washington,DC, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hip Logic (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)

This is one of the best books of poetry that I have every read, period. Hayes' mastery of the the language and poetic standards allows him to break them and reconstruct them into something else that is truly his own. Hayes' work is a command to the brave new world of people who dare to call themselves "spoken word artist" or "poets", to master their craft, read and research this art form so as not to pollute it. Furthermore he shows that this can be accomplished while mainitaining the sensibilites pertaining to the particular aesthetic which one may identify themslevs with as an artist.

6 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Sentimental Avant, June 6, 2005

By 

Marjorie Ghast (Pittsburgh) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hip Logic (National Poetry Series) (Paperback)

With thesaurus in left hand and rhyming dictionary in right, TH's tin lyrics combine the mordant whelp of teenager's diary with 90 year old Dada techniques--collage, juxtaposition, idiomatic tagging--with none of the boulevardier charm. Most of the book is just dross, harmless and forgettable--what rankles is the author's highfallutin' attitude--he thinks we skipped that Experimental Poetry class.