The Blue Terrance

“The Blue Terrance” by American poet Terrance Hayes is a lyrical, romantic poem written in 13 rhyming tercets or three-line stanzas. A love letter to the self, lovers, and blues music, the evocative poem is rich with metaphors and allusions. “The Blue Terrance” is taken from Hayes’s third collection of poems, Wind in a Box, published in 2006. The anthology examines masculinity, race, identity, and love through idioms drawn from pop culture, poetic tradition, and American history and culture. In “The Blue Terrance,” the poet plays on the associations of the word “blue” as well as the artform of blues music. Starting off as a personal poem, “The Blue Terrance” expands to include the reality of being a Black American. The poem owes much of its tension to a structured form juxtaposed with free-flowing images.

Poet Biography

Terrance Hayes has more than six collections of poetry, including the multiple-award-winning American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), How to Be Drawn (2015), and Wind in a Box (2006). Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a McArthur Grant among other prestigious honors, Hayes is considered one the most important voices in contemporary American poetry. His poetry is distinct in its rich use of metaphors and allusions, and frequent references to pop culture, music, art, and cinema. Hayes frequently experiments with poetic form as well, using traditional structured poetry to explore contemporary reality.

Born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971, Hayes was raised by his mother Ethel (Seabrook) Hayes, who was a prison guard, and his stepfather James Hayes. An artist and an athlete from an early age, Hayes won a basketball scholarship to Coker College, where a professor encouraged him to write poetry. At Coker, Hayes changed his major to English and went on to receive an MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, where he now teaches. His first book of poetry, Muscular Music, was published in 1999. Hayes’s rich poetic writing, and his nuanced exploration of themes such as Black identity, masculinity, racial injustice, and the meaning of love, won him critical acclaim, with his debut collection receiving the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Although Hayes’s poems explore political themes, his work is also deeply personal, delving into painful subjects such as his difficult relationship with his biological father, and his sister’s death.

Apart from being an artist and a writer, Hayes is also an educator. Apart from the University of Pittsburgh, he has taught at Carnegie Mellon University. A professor of English at New York University, Hayes has a daughter and a son with his ex-wife, the poet Yona Harvey.

Poem Text

Hayes, Terrance. “The Blue Terrance.” 2009. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The speaker—identified as Terrance Hayes by the poem’s title—implies that to escape his current state of blues or melancholy, he should return to his childhood, a period usually identified with innocence. However, when he does recall his childhood, he is transported to a time filled with small humiliations. All of his childhood is like a lost game of tic-tac-toe, with the crosses on the blackboard (representing failures to solve problems) canceling the naught of the math-teacher’s toe-ring, at which he stared hanging his head in shame. His Blackness singled him out further, with not even the “buck- / toothed” (Lines 5-6) or physically awkward girls showing any interest in him. In his youth, he felt trapped and lonely in a space as small as a matchbox, forced to either pleasure himself (since the girls have no interest in him) or dig himself a grave. Everything he touches—such as his own body—seems to grow heavy and take root, become static. At the same time, the “funk machine” (Line 7) of blues music provided him respite from his sadness.

He can recall the time before he considered himself in relationship with the larger world, with whiteness, and with women. It was before he heard the romantic blues song “Close the Door” (1978) by Teddy Pendergrass. In that early stage, the poet was a romantic, but did not yet associate an erotic image—like a blue garter belt around a bride’s thigh—with yearning and loss. Growing up and listening to blues music made him aware of the contradictions of life and the complexity of being Black in America. He needed to wipe the sweat off a good woman’s brow (possibly his mother), but only had a dirty rag to spare. Thus, he realized he would always fail the women in his life. Blues music understands and expresses these complexities, which is why it is timeless. People like the speaker, who get blues music, or to whom the blues call, are “in trouble” (Line 25) because they know a little too much about life. The speaker’s case is made worse by his intensity and sensitivity. He tends to lose himself in love, and he gets disproportionately happy and sad at small victories and losses.

The speaker feels he is destined to be “blue” or melancholy because of a combination of his contradictory temperament and circumstance. He loves to stare into the vast blueness of the sky, contemplating peace and infinity, yet he himself is restless and full of regrets. He loves to say “No” in love because it means setting boundaries and protecting himself, but he also recklessly submits to bad relationships and unhealthy situations. He liked the conflict love and sex sometimes bring. He is even a romantic about the end of love. He loves the melancholy that overcomes him when a lover leaves him. This is why he is “so doggone lonesome” (Line 38) and blue.