17 pages • 34 minutes read
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Terrance Hayes begins and ends American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin with quotations from the poet Wanda Coleman, who initially coined the term “American sonnet.” Coleman recast the traditional European form initially developed by Petrarch and Shakespeare, making it more relevant and adaptable to late-20th century American writers. Her 14-line poems favored internal over end rhyme and returned to the idea of a sonnet as a “little song,” a piece with a sense of musicality and rhythm. Hayes’s American sonnets use refrains, alliterative patterns, internal rhyme as they evoke the sense of improvisation Coleman brought to her American sonnets.
Hayes explores and expands the idea of formal poetry in his other works. He invented the “golden shovel” form as part of a tribute to poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Using Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool” as its source, Hayes’s poem “The Golden Shovel” takes its title from Brooks’s epigraph and ends each line with successive words from “We Real Cool” until that entire poem repeats twice within Hayes’s.
For Hayes, form builds connection with, pays tribute to, and continues the lineage of other poets. It can demonstrate individual virtuosity or language’s power and resilience. Hayes uses form as a tool of community, creating a kind of participatory ritual.
At the end of US President Barack Obama's term in 2005, the Republican Party, attuned to a cultural climate of white anxiety, chose vehement demagogue Donald Trump as their candidate. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, the first female major-party candidate for President of the United States, whose platform was a continued arc toward progressive, egalitarian government. During Trump’s election campaign and presidency, many Americans saw increasing aggression and disenfranchisement; white supremacist narratives increased as they did in backlashes to civil rights movements in the early and middle 20th century.
Terrance Hayes began writing this sequence of American sonnets the day after Donald Trump took office, and its genesis cannot be extricated from political context. Though Hayes addresses the President in one of the sonnets as “Mr. Trumpet,” he does not refer to Trump as an individual, but as representative of an American attitude of xenophobia and populist anti-intellectualism that finds its origins in the Scopes trial, President Andrew Jackson's genocidal policies, and countless other movements based in fear.
The poem’s title reminds the reader that Hayes lives in the knowledge that American ideology produces assassins of Black people and that this nation does not protect its Black citizens from those assassins with credible regularity. In fact, often the state apparatus nominally charged with providing that protection enacts the assassination. Hayes’s speaker wonders in “Probably twilight…” what it takes to “survive” (Line 4) and who constitutes “prey” (Line 9); in his exploration of the danger of owning “blackness” (Line 1 and 10), he wonders how his poetry could bring light into this “darkness” (Lines 2, 11) of ignorance and apathy. These sonnets all return to the question of who the assassin is—seemingly almost anyone in a country divided by political, cultural, and racial hatred—and whether the poet can bestow the love of art onto such a person.
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