Claude McKay and Terrance Hayes

We’ve been talking a lot about the relationship between form and content lately, and Claude McKay’s poetry adds a rich and complex layer to the conversation. From a young age, McKay read British literature and learned to imitate traditional form in his own poetry. But his relationship with these received forms was a dynamic one. Cary Nelson writes about how McKay transformed the sonnet– a “centuries-long tradition”– in his introduction to McKay’s poetry: “McKay would take the romance and the consolations of the historical sonnet and replace them with a hand grenade of protest.”

The metaphor of “hand grenade” rings true for my reading of McKay. Powerful just doesn’t seem to cut it. The sonnet is a form that has pretty strong associations with a European (and mostly white) tradition, and part of McKay’s protest is by using and redefining a tradition that has largely excluded him. In “Mulatto,” the speaker embodies the complicated relationship with an inheritance that is neither black nor white, but both:

Because I am the white man’s son– his own,
Bearing his bastard birth-mark on my face,
I will dispute his title to his throne,
Forever fight him for my rightful place.

The speaker has to fight for his inheritance, which parallels to the project of McKay’s “protest sonnets.” The poem suggests violence because something needs to die in order for the speaker to achieve freedom, as witnessed in the final couplet: “Into my father’s heart to plunge the knife / To gain the utmost freedom that is life.” Sonnets often reflect a sort of thinking process, beginning with a problem and working it through to some sort of resolution in the final verses.

Terrance Hayes is a poet who also uses the traditional forms for his own purposes. In “Snow for Wallace Stevens,” however, Hayes is responding directly to a white poet who was contemporaries with McKay. Wallace Stevens was a modernist poet whose rhetorical invention is part of a literary inheritance Hayes identifies with. However, Hayes also recognizes the complicated relationship he has, as a black writer, with a poet whose work includes poems like, “Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” Like McKay, Hayes rejects the racism that fuels the attitudes of his literary antecedents. But Hayes also reveals admiration for and affinity with Stevens, when the speaker asks: “How, with pipes of winter / lining his cognition, does someone learn / to bring a sentence to his knees?” He follows this question through, ultimately reaching a different kind of resolution than McKay:

Who is not more than his limitations,
who is not the blood in a wine barrel
and the wine as well? I too, having lost faith
in language have placed my faith in language.
Thus, I have a capacity for love without
forgiveness. 

Hayes poem is a complex, complicated sort of tribute to Stevens. But his resolution can’t wholly be summarized as “love without forgiveness.” The poem ends with an insight that Stevens couldn't make: 

This song is for my foe,
the clean shaven, gray-suited, gray patron
of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness
blue as a body made of snow.

What is most brilliant to me about "Snow for Wallace Stevens" is how it questions the idea that the received poetic tradition is a purely white one. Stevens may have been blind to the “blueness” in his body made of snow, but Hayes isn’t, and his poem challenges any reader who is.