Wire, Knife, Shovel, Laurel

Wire

Terrance Hayes wrote American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) in the first 200 days of the first Trump presidency. He wanted its seventy blazing sonnets – ‘a record of witness & daydream’ – to speak, as he says in an interview, with the same ‘passion and intensity’ as the president, but about another set of values:

Hayes is a poet, critic, and Professor of English at New York University. His sonnets, a form he has worked with from the start, are capacious in their porosity and multifariousness, taking in ‘poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors, / Poetry whiners & whinos’. They swoop from God to Orpheus, Langston Hughes to Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí’s flowers with petals the ‘shade of a swollen moon’. They move between Hellos & Hell Nos, ‘mother wit and mother woe’, from ‘Do you?’ to ‘Nos, Whoahs, wows, woes.’

A sonnet built on an image from Moby-Dick ends: ‘I thought we might sing / Of the wire wound round the wound of feeling.’ Poetry can sing of wire and wound, can function like a wire around a wound. A spy might wear a wire, a covert listening device, secretly recording. This wire transmits evidence to a receiver, the reader. The poem-as-wire can riskily witness damage being done, and carry whatever injury might teach in the words of the wound. Flexible in its application, a wire can have a role in healing, holding the wound the way sutures do, or cutting away damaged tissue during diathermy or cauterisation.

Sonnet poetics, in particular, are wiry, wired and potentially fenced-in – ‘part prison’, as Hayes has said, but, to borrow a phrase from Paul Muldoon, ‘a prison with a recreation yard’. A sonnet paces a fourteen-line box, but that doesn’t mean it has to march. The wiring of its sonic and metrical patterns might be something the poet is held by, struggles against, or breaks. As a sonnet’s wiring twists, it can cut into its subject. The sonnet argues with itself. It might express its inherent tension, as Hayes’ sometimes do, by cutting from the legato of enjambed lines to the jittery syntax of ampersand-strung lists.

In the first part of the second Trump presidency, and in the lead-up to the appointment of an Australian Poet Laureate, reading his work has fuelled my thinking about power and poetry, and what a poet laureate might embody and do. Hayes’ sonnets now feel even more prophetic in their insistence on justice, on humanity, and on what poetry has to do with these things. They’re incantatory, spelling a response to the hollow and wounding language of insults, slogans, slurs; of edicts and prohibitions. They can do this because poetry travels across time and space. It is ‘telepathy and time travel’, Hayes writes in Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (2023). Poems can look backwards and forwards, mix witness with eerie prediction, tune to and fracture patterns, act as fulcrum and hinge. Hayes’ American Sonnets alludes to and riffs on a vast array of poets – Derek Walcott, Amiri Baraka, Sylvia Plath. They loop back to Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson, ‘Gwen’ (Gwendolyn) Brooks, and Yusef Komunyakaa. ‘I’m interested in Shakespeare’, Hayes says in an interview, ‘but especially when Shakespeare is in conversation with Scooby-Doo or The Walking Dead.’ They feel hot-wired, taking the sonnet for a spin, crossing lines and mixing influences, their insubordination oriented precisely by the need to rattle hierarchies that hold racism, sexism, elitism, and all manner of stale and stultifying attitudes and platitudes in place.

The sonnet, a mobile and responsive form, has always enjoyed these kinds of conversations. As Boris Dralyuk puts it: ‘In the sparsely attended centuries-long foot race of fixed poetic forms in English, the sonnet has clearly left its competitors in the dust.’ The sonnet has survived because of its continual reinvention. The hyperbolic blazonry often found in Petrarchan sonnets – that extravagant cataloguing of a beloved’s features where lips become cherries, eyes sky, hips pendulums, skin snow, marble and alabaster – was inverted by its English inheritors, with contra-blazons springing up to challenge its idealisation, its heteronormativity, its objectifications and absurdities. ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’, writes Shakespeare in Sonnet 130, naming and contesting the sonnet’s habit of ‘false compare’. A ‘moment’s monument’ as Gabriel Rossetti put it in a sonnet of his own, the form nevertheless leaps through time, as the lovesick speaker in Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ can attest: discovering a book of poems ‘Written by an Italian poet / From the thirteenth century’ (Dylan says he was referring to Plutarch, but probably meant Petrarch), he identifies with them – ‘every one of them words rang true’.

Once the sonnet became all the rage in England, poets played with its Petrarchan themes of unrequited and idealised love, the paventose speme or trembling hope Petrarch’s poems to his unreachable, or possibly invented, Laura evoked. But longing for Laura morphed quickly into longing for laurels. The sonnet became a competitive craze. Elizabethan courtiers used the form to gain favour with a vain queen and spar with one another for patronage and fame. A dangerous game, as Edmund Spenser knew, disguising epithalamic sonnets to his wife (conveniently, also named Elizabeth) as allusions to the queen. Centuries later, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets would sacralise the terrain of longing and despair, Laura replaced by an abandoning God.

This characteristic tension between hope and despair intensifies when Hayes draws the sonnet into the streets of Sanford, Ferguson, Brooklyn, and Charleston, ‘Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore’, where ‘something happened… & happens / Almost everywhere in this country every day’. These names establish a geography of racial violence, each place name transformed into the marker of brutality. That Hayes’ sonnets include both crime scenes and glimpsed dreams shows the breakage and re-making foundational in his use of the form. This time it highlights, without naming, what the anodyne phrasing ‘something happened’ can, in some contexts, try to veil or minimise. At other times, Hayes repeats ‘the names alive are like the names / In graves’, alluding to people whose deaths might otherwise be passed over. The names he uses throughout American Sonnets are also those of his literary lineage, which he also holds against silence and erasure. This second aspect of naming is a riposte to the symbolic violence (alongside the more overt forms of violence Hayes addresses) of exclusive canons, plagiarism, lack of acknowledgement, and apathy about literary indebtedness.  

This activist work suits sonnets. They are restive. They are about change and debate. At the heart of a sonnet is its volta, a turn or shift. Hayes’ sonnets, agile and bounding, are full of voltas, volts, and vaults. Imaginatively and sonically, they are leap-making machines of exhilarating energy and deep knowledge of poetry, music, history, and language. Voltas are leaps and crossings, the way metaphor and translation are. (Etymologically, metaphor comes from the Greek word metapherein, to transfer; translation from the Latin translation, to carry across.) Metaphor, Hayes says in an interview, ‘is a gesture of empathy’, and if poetry is ‘made of metaphor’, as Edward Hirsch writes, while drawing together other poets’ words into a chorus in How to Read a Poem: and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), this is part of the connective tissue Hayes works with, words ‘always reaching to connect to something else’.

This vault-volt method continues in Watch Your Language where Hayes, a college scholarship-winning basketball player as well as a poet, writer, and visual artist, celebrates his ‘all-stars’ – each with a sketched collectible card and paragraphs of paean as an invitation to readers to explore these writers and to find their own beloved books and poets: ‘a creative shelter, a psychic data bank, a resource for living’. Hayes is unfazed by those who cast shade on enthusiasm. He makes it uncool to be frosty about others’ work and not to acknowledge the debts poets have to other poets. To Komunyakaa he says: ‘no body of work is more deeply in my blood than yours’. And, inspired by a letter James Baldwin wrote to a nephew saying ‘You come from a long line of great poets’, Hayes writes: ‘You are the kind of great poet he means, Yusef. You cross the bridge carrying the song.’ Generosity’s bridge-crossing is another hallmark of Hayes’ work. The number of allusions in Hayes’ work is thrilling. Names of musicians – Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Prince – dance with names of poets. Some are the names of those slipping from history’s gaze, but ‘the names alive are like the names / In graves’.

Homage, like reading, is a kind of vaulting – a way to leap out of ourselves, to cross into the mind of someone else; a way to consider where self and other might meet. Writers and readers are made of and by what we read. Affinity and avatar pulse through words on the page. Watch Your Language questions our forms of homage, the title itself wrapping prohibition around vigilance. Hayes recalls that Wanda Coleman, who coined the term ‘American sonnet’ to critique America, Eurocentrism, and the sonnet form, brought a bureaucratic document as an example of form to a poetry group. Here, his formal elements include exam papers, journal entries, letters. He invents a Renegade Poetic Fortune Telling Machine with Tarot Cards for poets: Tarot of Music – ‘The Coltrane in You’. For (Portuguese diva) Cesária Évora, a ‘Tarot of Mystery with Seascape with Vessel’. Tarots of Muses, Heroes, and Mentors.

Each of the nine parts of Watch Your Language begins with a question. Hayes’ orientation as a writer is the ‘artist who doesn’t know and is pursuing an answer’. Questions run through his poems, too. Of those who take power in America, he asks in a sonnet:

But he does not exempt himself, or some avatar of self, from questioning, and that intimacy, vulnerability, and sometimes-tenderness are part of the poems’ appeal: 

The audiobook of Watch Your Language is narrated by Hayes. Between its sections a gong sounds, inviting listeners to look at the book’s illustrations. Drawing, he writes, ‘is close to the act of writing […] is also a way to watch your language.’ I make it my reading-and-walking companion and get breathless trying to keep up with the lively cloud of ghosts who walk with us. And the lively living. Taking my phone from my pocket, I stop to make quick notes about what to revisit. I study Hayes’ drawings when I get home. I make lists of musicians and poets to explore further. I pull out some of my dustier vinyl and listen to albums I haven’t heard for a while. Some of this work I know well, but with every step, what I know expands. This is one model of freedom Hayes offers – the freedom of generous exploration. Maybe all this is a microcosm of the best experiences we can have as a reader.

Knife

John Forbes once called Australian poetry a knife fight in a phone booth and now the phrase, probably Forbes’ most-quoted line, is reliably highlighted in any discussion of the subject. It’s wired into the story. Something vicious takes place in a small space, like the hissing first scene of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lesbos’: ‘Viciousness in the kitchen!’ Something could kill you. Something ludicrous could kill you. A knife fight: claustrophobia, the body all elbows, the blade coming from an unexpected angle, hard to say who hurt whom and how, who held the blade and whose blood was drawn. Limbs packed so tight the fight could be mistaken for love. ‘It is not enough / To love you,’ writes Hayes: ‘It is not enough to want you destroyed.’ 

The phone booth: packed like a stanza. (Can a phone booth fit a laureate-sized poet?) A sonnet is a glass room, a space from which to speak. Standing, you can volta, say one thing then pivot to another. I’ll be home for dinner, but I missed the bus. I love you, but I’m running out of coins. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, and yet I think my love as rare as any she belied by false compare.

At least you could stay out of phone booths back when Forbes said this. There are still phone booths, but we hardly notice them. Most of us carry a phone. Does each of us exist in an invisible phonebooth? Is there an invisible knife fight playing out there? Do we hold our invisible nemeses close, bracing against the blade they bear, or baring our own? Each of us has our sharp edges and a sometimes-self as vicious an enemy as Hayes’ assassin in the mirror, ‘a mystery’, a shadow. Is there no escape?

What if we stopped admiring the blades that keep people in place? What conditions someone to think something’s better if it comes with a whack or a smack, a put-down or kick? Why is a critical hatchet job often more revered than the thrillingly meticulous and attuned skulduggery of attentive critical work? Why does acclaim require killing it, smashing it, crushing it? Why do so many writers ask for brutal feedback? Why would you teach like a brute, when no one learns from a brute? I’ve witnessed incidents in the history of phone-booth attacks. You could say, sticks and stones. You could say, unlawful actions and legal actions. Things that have damaged peoples’ lives. Plagiarism, jostling for position, theft, acquisitiveness.  

Shovel

But what if we dropped the knife to pick up a shovel?

The Golden Shovel is a form invented by Hayes. He was teaching his son to memorise Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem ‘We Real Cool’, and when he next sat down to write, a poem emerged with her lines spliced through it. He paid attention. It repaid him with a poem, a form, and a means to honour and connect poet to poet.

Brooks wrote ‘We Real Cool’ in 1959. It was published in her third poetry collection The Bean Eaters (1960). On a walk in her Chicago neighbourhood, she passed a pool hall full of boys who should have been in school. She was a fifty-two-year-old poet who had published her first poem ‘Eventide’ at thirteen, and in 1950 became the first African-American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen (1949), the follow-up to her debut collection A Street in Bronzeville (1945). She was up against two books by William Carlos Williams, his Selected Poems and the first part of Paterson, as well as the Complete Poems by seventy-five-year-old Robert Frost. Frost had already won the prize four times. Muriel Rukeyser also had two books eligible for the award. The judging committee commended all these books, but awarded the prize to Brooks.

Seeing the boys who should have been at school, Brooks imagined how they felt. The poem uses the first-person plural to listen to their collective voice. It is a lean and tender work of noticing and attention that begins:

Made up of four two-line stanzas, each blade-thin line ends with the word ‘we’, except the last. After a pattern of monosyllabic rhyme running through the poem’s centre, the last line is simply: ‘We die soon.’ ‘We’ is then gone.

Before their names become ‘names in the graves’, Brooks witnesses their lives. Her lines name various states of being or acting from ‘We / Lurk late’ to ‘We / Sing sin’. Jubilant, rebellious, the poem has often been taught in the United States, except when it was banned in the 1970s by schools in Mississippi, Nebraska, and West Virginia for its second-last statement, ‘We / Jazz June’, in case the word ‘jazz’ had sexual connotations. Brooks has said:

But she adds:

You can listen to her reading the poem. The ‘we’ at each line’s end is spoken softly: We real cool We          left school We          lurk late We… ‘We’ is a word Brooks uses for porousness, a word to reach and listen to the thoughts of boys normally only looked or glanced at. Brooks has said it is ‘as though the protagonists in the poem are questioning the validity of their existence’. Her poem’s listening to them insists on this validity.  

A two-part homage to ‘We Real Cool’, Hayes’ poem ‘The Golden Shovel’ invents a form many poets now use. The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (2017), edited by Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith, and introduced by Hayes, includes hundreds of versions of the form by poets including former US Poets Laureate Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo, as well as Ishion Hutchinson, Sharon Olds, Kwame Dawes, and Hirsch. In each part of Hayes’ golden shovel, a line or run of lines from the original is tenderly unstrung so that each of its words occupies the end of each line in the new poem, built from the skeleton of the first. The original poem has the last word, just as Brooks’ poem lets the boys’ statement of agency ‘we’ (however provisional) have the last word. Just as Hayes’ ‘I’ uses the words of the originating poet’s poem to create a sense of a provisional ‘we’.

In the second part of the poem, the boundaries are blurred further as Brooks’ words are often folded into other words, becoming the last syllable of the last word or the first syllable of a word that turns on the line:

The golden shovel is a means of honouring someone else’s work, finding in one poem the seeds of another, the way a laurel tree can be propagated from seed.

Laurel

The leaves and berries of the laurel tree were used by the Romans for a range of medicinal purposes. Laurels can help your nerves, your halitosis or indigestion, ward off bad luck and help with divination, as long as you avoid ingesting the poisonous variety. The Greeks associated it with myth and magic. There are Nobel laureates and laurel-wreathed sporting heroes. Julius Caesar is famously depicted wearing one. Nero liked to wear one when dressing as a poet, an affectation contemporaries and near-contemporaries like Suetonius recorded.

The Laurus nobilis, the Bay Laurel or Bay Tree, grows pretty well, but needs to be fed and watered, and a bit of pruning is a good idea. Take a knife from a phone booth, sharpen its blade, and it might help something grow.

For several years, from the time the idea of a Poet Laureate was mooted, this thought has led me to another metaphor, something less adversarial and triumphalist, something grounded and horizontal. Borrowing the metaphor Deleuze and Guattari develop in A Thousand Plateaus, I’ve been led to think about poetry community as less arborescent – one far-reaching tree – than rhizomatic: something underground, complicated in its connections; something mobile and multifarious.

Over the years, the poets in my masterclass and I have tried out these ideas, which I’ve drawn from Hayes and, among others, American poet and essayist Ross Gay. A Professor of English at Indiana University, Gay is also a community gardener, who draws on gardening to consider power. He says in an interview:

Gay’s work has an insouciance as he urges joy, gratitude, and delight – words he includes in the titles of several of his books. He writes about ‘terrifying tenderness’. His titles pre-empt the charges of unwarranted optimism likely to be levelled against him as he trades the knife’s blade for the shovel’s: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) and the repurposing of ‘inciting’ in Inciting Joy: Essays (2022). In an On Being interview, even the meticulously gracious Krista Tippett expresses disquiet about the idea of joy, suggesting that some might consider things like joy and delight ‘somehow a luxury or a privilege’. Gay’s immediate response is, ‘That’s just fucking dumb.’ After being warned about public radio-appropriate phrasing, he goes on to talk about holding in the imagination ‘what is to be adored and preserved and exalted’, how we’re ‘not as good’ at ‘advocating for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary’ as we are at ‘fighting’. As he argues in another interview, harder than fighting is ‘studying and attending to and sharing what you love [which] is one of the ways of responding to what is brutal and what is awful.’

This is a riposte to violence Gay knows all too well. In another of his books Bringing the Shovel Down (2011), the eerie, coiled wire of a poem ‘Bringing the Shovel Down’ – written around the same time Hayes invented the golden shovel form – unwinds in a single sentence that appears in the collection twice, the second time under the title ‘Again’ and with an alternative ending. The collection’s themes of government and power are distilled in the poem’s sentence-long story of an unnamed boy and a bedraggled, frightened dog. Having been taught to see the dog as a ‘rabid wolf’ in the self-justifying way violence often situates its victims, the boy brings the shovel down in a brutal act he has come to imagine almost as an act of tenderness.

The alternative is to ‘[deepen] your relationship with your sense of nurture’, as Gay puts it in a dialogue with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, also a poet-gardener. Provisional as a handful of thrown seeds, and informed by the tensions in Gay’s work, the community garden model is one I’ve described and drawn on when poets I teach or mentor ask about being part of a literary community. The more I’ve tended the idea, the more it’s sprung up – like a poem, rewarding attention – offering an alternative to ideas such as that a poem can be ‘rejected’, a histrionic term for a common experience on the way to publication. A poem’s existence, like a weed’s or magnolia’s, does not depend on the taxonomies or lenses of those who regard it. It has been made, or is on the way to being made, and it exists. What if a wide range of plants could be encouraged to flourish? I may not eat tomatoes, but the companion planting of my basil alongside your tomato vines attracts pollinators.

Community gardens and veggie co-ops tend to collect around ideas of sharing responsibility and sustainability, thinking about how what I do supports the whole patch. This might be as quiet as borrowing another poet’s book from the library. And there’s a place for the blade alongside the shovel, as in the delicate pinching out that pares away what’s moribund to allow new growth.

Gating and Sowing

I’ve been involved in organic vegetable co-ops inspired by such ideas, notably one named The Lesser of Two Weevils. I’ve benefited and learned from them, but I recognise the challenges. In Two Weevils, we thought about what to do about those who didn’t put anything in, but wanted something out of the co-op. A gate, perhaps? In the writing world, I’d like to see a new metaphor replace the tedious gatekeeper, braced and aggressive as a bouncer, or a phone-booth villain. But gatekeepers in Australian poetry are nearly all poets, working with minimal funding to get poems to readers. This includes the majority of poetry publishers, prize judges, editors of journals and journal issues. The skeleton of poetry publishing, like the skeleton of a golden shovel is poet-made. Along the way, these poet-publishers, editors and curators accrue expertise, an irreplaceable asset. This is the work of gatemakers, not keepers, poetry’s quiet and often invisible advocates.

In these roles poets already do what a Poet Laureate would be charged with doing. Why is there more discussion about who should wear the laurel wreath than what this poet might do while wearing it? Perhaps they could address the neglect and fear of poetry, implicit in its absence, relative to prose, from bookshops and library shelves and festival programs. Perhaps bring the names of poets they read and cherish into more conversations. Perhaps think of ways to nurture thoughtful reviewing. Perhaps support its teaching.

While there are some brilliant poet-teachers and teachers who love poetry, poetry often tends to be killed by neglect and the passing on of teachers’ fear of it to students. It’s the pot plant left on the windowsill for the whole school term. A week before the holidays an exhausted teacher tests its soil to find it parched. Or sudden overwatering: someone invents a Poetry Day – come to school as a poet! Carrying permission slips, fifteen Taylor Swifts, one John Keats, and a dozen Shakespeares arrive at school. Kendrick is warned to leave the beef at the door. A few kids who didn’t mention it until breakfast come to school in their uniforms. One has a pencil behind her ear, another wears a beret. Someone carries a tobacco-stuffed pipe which someone else lights in the toilets.

The shabby treatment of poetry and classroom pot plants is a symptom of the overwhelming demands placed on teachers and the shabby treatment of teachers themselves, but it’s an area to attend to, if we want to share something beyond what frozen peas and chips become when no other plants are grown. Teachers who fear poetry and go on to fuck up poetry for kids were fucked up in their time, to riff on Philip Larkin. A shovel and some seeds could help break this cycle, and nurture teachers and teaching.

If we move away from a single-crown model, which replicates existing thinking about booths and blades, what else might a horizontal and communal model allow us to sow?

A laureateship needs to be sustainable both for the poet and the patch they tend. It’s untenable to go around cutting down branches to make things to put on our heads. Trees shouldn’t suffer because a person with a crown needs to catch planes. We need to think urgently about flying as a way of connecting. Gathering is something we can do in other ways.

And none of this can be extracted from the frame of Indigenous-settler relations. Brutal, ongoing post-contact history is the laureateship’s unavoidable setting. In ‘Kumanjayi’, award-winning Kooma poet Cheryl Leavy describes: ‘this whole bloodied continent, your felling floor’. In the face of this, practices of Indigenous guardianship of land have been sustained for many generations – and are the reason why the felling floor can still be tended as a patch. As Hayes’ poems show, listening and refusing to look elsewhere are starting points. So is questioning the glorification of the blade, the trappings of larrikinism, cognitive imperialism, and considering what each of us with our particular ancestry might bring to a collective practice of care. 

Who can and can’t undertake the role of poet laureate depends on a range of elements. Numerous roles in poetry disadvantage those whose lives involve caring for others, those whose energy mostly goes towards paying the bills, or those living with disability. To allow these opportunities always to go instead to those whose circumstances allow for more travel and freedom starts to look a lot like a poetry role unsuited to many, if not most, poets. Most poets need solitude and attention to write, and many are introverts, making a social, globe-trotting, extravert poet unlikely to represent poets and poetries well (even if such a poet were to exist). Then there’s the question of the burden of the role, especially the first time around, on a poet, likely already to be bearing scars from the phone booth.

Could the role be shared, as was suggested in a question after Sarah Holland-Batt delivered a keynote on the position? A collective, representing varied expertise and poetries, allocating tasks and working as a group to sustain one another in advocacy for poetry. For the sake of argument, convenience, and sustainability, there might be one from each state, though that idea should not elide the fact that these arbitrarily shaped polities lie (in both senses of the word) over Aboriginal Country. Each member of the Laureate Collective would take on certain roles, according to expertise and capacity, and the very combination of energies would allow a more generous, rhizomatic dynamic.

Medley

Hayes uses the idea of a medley to describe the virtuosic Watch Your Language. The etymology of ‘medley’ goes to the French words for ‘hand-to-hand combat, war and battle.’ But that’s obsolete. Now it connotes connecting and drawing together, creative splicing. As Watch Your Language binds visual and literary responses to reading and writing American poetry, and is structured around questions, not answers, it shows a way of reading, writing, whatever that is generous and generative, provisional and invitational. A medley is not a random anthology. It’s all in the mixing, which is the syntax, method, and spirit of Hayes’ work in poetry, prose, and drawing. It’s the adding of one thing to another, the way someone used to make a mix tape for a friend, or the way a skilled DJ’s work is subtle and intuitive in its bridges and vaulting. For a poet, it’s the leaping between tracks or registers, the adventurous shifting of a word on its axis, the improvisational jazziness of a poem, the return of a line. It’s the homage and joy of its celebration of other poets’ and ancestors’ work that binds and charges a poem.

What if we got out of the phone booth and used the ethos of Hayes’ work as ‘reference or guide in creating [our] own poetic journey’? In the winding agility and empathy of Hayes’ work is a model for something more sustaining and sustainable, in the way Tracy K Smith imagines a poem as ‘a voice offering to build the world, by means of some crucial fragment, anew’. That something-more is insubordinate and unabashed in its working with attention and tenderness rather than brutality and aggression. It requires a blade’s precision, a wire’s capacity to hold and listen, a shovel’s tending. It reorients generosity and breaks up the ever-fight. All leaves fall, become mulch.