Assistant Editor Chelsea Whitton: Thelonious Monk famously said that “a genius is the one most like himself.” Some seventy years before that, on what may forgivably be conceived of as another planet altogether, Schopenhauer wrote in his essay “On Genius” that “[t]he gift of genius is nothing but [ . . . ] the ability to [ . . . ] discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world.” For me, and probably for you, the first quote resonates in a way that the second one never can again. As readers and writers of literature—as humans, really—we are mostly beyond the idea of the “pure knowing subject.” We are none of us pure, and whatever we know is our side of the story. We can tell our own truths, with great beauty and agency, and in doing this we can influence the way other see things, see us.
As usual, I’ve been (fashionably?) late to the party, reading MacArthur Genius award–winning Terrance Hayes’s latest, To Float in the Space Between (Wave, 2018), nearly a year after its release. I was still pouring over the final essays when it was announced last month that it had won the Pegasus award for literary criticism from the Poetry Foundation. It would be acceptable for a poet like Hayes to avoid the subject of influence altogether, invoking a kind of I am that which I am and leaving it there—or to rattle off a list of famous names, each of which functions as shorthand for some essential quality or project engaged in his work. This book on influence, which Hayes emphasizes is neither an autobiography nor a biography of its central subject, Etheridge Knight, instead engages Knight’s life, writings, and legacy on the basis of what these might reveal about Hayes’s own journey and about the nature of influence itself.
Hayes, who wants nothing to do with a stable lineage, reminds us that “influence is, at its etymological root, fluid: from the medieval Latin influentia (‘inflow’), from Old French influence (‘a flow of water’).” He adds that in these ancient usages, the context was implicitly, if not explicitly, supernatural, related to “unseen power” exerted over the human will. Liquid and unseen, seemingly sourceless and magical—the secret behind the choices we make when we are at our most creative. Influence isn’t sourceless, though, only diffuse and tiered and multivalent—schools and movements, yes, but also “writing groups and workshops” and, deeper down, our closest and most influential personal relationships. Making a case for what he terms “liquid poetics,” Hayes suggests that great art comes from the ability to stay loose, to change tacks, to shape shift in response to these shifting, mysterious factors. Hayes’s sustained emphasis on personal poetics as both liquid and descendant creates a way for his readers (colleagues, family, fans) to find themselves within the fluctuating matrix he proposes.
So much of what we talk about, lately, when we talk about a major poet’s body of work, is about identity, affiliation, the political and personal interests and investments that poet’s work reveals to us. And this is a good thing, because divorcing writers’ politics and interest from the words they choose, the narratives they play with, and the influences they cite, has become a dead project of the New Critics. We understand poetics to be deeply situated in autobiography and identification, and see poems as windows into the consciousness of other human beings. No modest witness, Terrance Hayes has always asserted his own contingency. He doesn’t effect a neutral stance, he is in the history that feeds and shapes his point of view. Writing from inside the storm, as it were.
I first encountered Terrance Hayes in the Legitimate Dangers anthology, published by Sarabande Books in 2006, when I was a newly decided creative-writing major at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. It’s my suspicion that this massive anthology, which still feels fairly comprehensive in its coverage of all the fresh young voices of that ascendant generation of American poets, has influenced my own generation in ways that have yet to be fully engaged with or explored. I wonder, for instance, who else lugged it around their undergraduate campus, buying up the featured authors’ collections, hauling it out when they needed inspiration or exciting access to a dynamic conversation that seemed to be happening in the present, but so many miles away, in New York and in Texas and in Iowa, and elsewhere. The proximity and recognizability of so many of these voices felt like looking through the window into a crowded bar where everyone cool in poetry was gathered. I needed to get inside, and this is perhaps the most romantic (or the least, depending on your perspective) motivator for my decision to “become a poet.”
Around this same time, I remember hearing, secondhand, about what Harold Bloom termed “the anxiety of influence.” The discussion started, most times, with my teachers, who would urge us not to become overwhelmed by the sheer weight of humanity’s collective achievement in letters; to not let this prevent us from venturing forth to tell our own stories. They meant well, I am sure, but the way they said these kinds of things made me feel sort of chastened. What I heard was: It is very difficult to participate in this conversation, to say something new—you’ll have to be a genius of some kind—but you should still try.
So the Monk quote feels good to the touch. It is the kind of thing my parents might find inscribed on a coffee mug and send me as a go-gettum gesture when I’m bogged down with comparison anxiety. It feels attainable, Monk’s brand of genius, and also pleasingly distant and challenging. Some day I will be most like myself, I might think, smiling at it, like Etheridge Knight, like Terrance Hayes, and all those poets I discovered in Legitimate Dangers, so many years ago. And then I hope I’d shake my head to clear the cobwebs out, and recognize three things: 1) the concept of genius, as it has long been understood, is at best troublesome and at worst patriarchal and ableist; 2) I am currently most like myself; I am as much myself right now as I will ever be; and 3) whatever good I do at writing has been inspired by, in conversation with, or outright borrowed from the work I’ve read, the things I’ve seen, the people I have known. In this light, the genius of “being most like oneself” isn’t tricky at all, because the self isn’t stable; it learns and adapts; it expresses itself through connection.
