Customer Reviews

Hip Logic (National Poetry Series)

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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."

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.

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.