The Shape of the Black Body in Experimental Poetics: A Study of Form, Identity and Historical Echoes in Lighthead

Abstract

This paper explores how Terrance Hayes’s Lighthead reimagines the Black body through experimental poetic forms. By employing innovative structures such as the Golden Shovel and pecha kucha, Hayes challenges conventional representations of racial identity, embodying a poetics of fragmentation, fluidity, and historical echo. The poems negotiate personal and collective memory, positioning the Black body as both subject and medium of formal disruption. Grounded in the theories of Fred Moten (fugitivity), Hortense Spillers (the flesh), and Christina Sharpe (wake work), this study examines how Hayes’s poetic techniques resist fixed identities and reframe Black embodiment as unstable, relational, and historically charged. The research argues that Lighthead enacts a poetics of resistance, where formal experimentation becomes a mode of reclaiming and reshaping Black identity within a broader historical and cultural matrix.