Last week I attended a Bagley Wright Lecture on Poetry at the Library of Congress, given by Terrance Hayes. His lecture was on “Ideas of Influence” where he discussed Etheridge Knight and – you should really just listen to the lecture yourself because I’m getting ready to jack up this explanation – the idea of poets being “liquid.” Liquid, in the sense of being able to be influenced by many different groups – whether that be a local group of writers you meet with on a regular basis versus attending a workshop like Cave Canem, which potentially can bring people from all over the nation.
Hayes has a new collection of poetry coming out this year called How to be Drawn. The video below is him reading a poem from that collection (That’s an assumption on my part because of the title).
When I was 23 years old, I left Connecticut for Boston for what should have been an amazing experience. I had been recently hired to be a researcher for the Boston Globe’s award-winning investigative team, a dream come true for a young journalist. Over the next two years, however, depression slowly ruined me, although many people close to me never knew. I wrote about it for the Courant years later, when my mind was clear enough to make sense of it. Here’s an excerpt from that article:
The CamaraIfe Maktaba 