Subjects range from Confederate statues to Girl Scout cookies, from Dylann Roof to Derek Walcott, from inadequate fathers to tattooed lovers, from the n-word to orchids. Stumps us. The umpteenth falsehood stumps. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is Terrance Hayes’ best book, and that’s saying a lot. To love you. A form that is, I discovered, inexhaustible – we discussed hundreds of the rectangular delights as love letters, rooms, beds, plowed fields, tombstones. She once told Ernest Gaines she loved his novel, As I Lay Dying. It is not enough. Stumps our toe. Written in the wake of Trump's takeover of the presidency, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is a collection of seventy sonnets that address racialized terror and violence, the resurgence of white supremacy in American politics, the cultural memory of Black activism and protest, police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, and the question of how to maintain hope in the face of … I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart. and directly addresses Donald Trump in some poems and does not hesitate to mock him, calling him "Mister Trumpet". Our elbows & eyeballs, our Nos, Whoas, wows, woes. How very American is that? The collection often paints a picture of a country at war with itself, a country of moral ambiguity, taut with condemnations and celebrations, curses and blessings, rages and contemplations.
He builds the setting by slowly peppering the first half of the sonnet with references to a bird trapped within a high school gymnasium. Hayes has set the bar very high for himself, having won the National Book Award, NEA and Guggenheim grants, the Whiting Award, and the MacArthur Fellowship, to name just a few he’s earned with his six previous collections. But then, he completes the poem: I make you both gym & crow here. Every day. The lunk, the chump, the hunk of plunder. The poem “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin” by Terrance Hayes is focusing on the theme of racism. Mela Frye is a poet and high school English teacher who lives in Connecticut with her husband and sons. But somehow––and this impresses me tremendously––Hayes avoids any semblance of flippancy or self-aggrandizing acrobatics. In Hayes’ often politically charged sonnets there is, additionally, a swooniness, an eager wooing of the American consciousness: Something happens everywhere in this country. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is his seventh collection, and in these 70 identically titled poems, he honors the late Wanda Coleman in her imagining of an American sonnet. One of my most memorable courses in grad school was with the brilliant Mary Jo Salter, where we devoted the entire semester to the sonnet. He seems paradoxically both gravitas and lightness. And of Caligula’s copper-toned/ Jabber-jaw … Pomp & pumpkin pompadour); sometimes they are more damning (You are the color of a sucker punch,/ The mix of flag blood & surprise blurring the eyes, a flare/ Of confusion, a contusion before it swells & darkens). Each sonnet addresses contemporary issues of American society and its politics.
One which, like the sonnet form itself, feels inexhaustible in its delights. Many are invectives against the president, whom he often refers to as Mister Trumpet. She’s worked at the National Endowment for the Arts, taught at Johns Hopkins University, and bartended at Red Lobster.
As the gym, you feel the crow-, Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars. Hayes has said that he wrote the first of these sonnets the day following the 2016 election. Enter your email to get your weekly book download straight to your inbox! I recommend reading these sonnets in a one sitting. As the crow, You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night, In the shadows of the gym.
. Not only are you are keenly aware of the presence of a great mind, but themes, images, and lines repeat frequently––the book reads like a musical medley.
The poet Terrance Hayes is no exception. The title of the collection, "American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin" is also the title of each poem in the book.
Harmless enough.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is his seventh collection, and in these 70 identically titled poems, he honors the late Wanda Coleman in her imagining of an American sonnet. That is, a sonnet which breaks some classic rules of old-world decorum (Hayes’ are all unrhymed, uniambic-pentametered), but still maintains 14 lines of similar length, a volta (that change, that turn of direction, that surprise you’ve been waiting for), and an urgency in its forced compression and musicality.
In the 800 years since its invention in Italy, any poet worth his or her salt has contributed to the form’s celebrity and possibilities.
Sometimes his words are high-spirited (Are you not the color of this country’s current threat/ Advisory? After the 2016 U.S election, the author decided to write political poems. It is not enough to want you destroyed.
Voltas of acoustics, instinct and metaphor.
These sonnets are chock full of tongue-in-cheek witticisms and arresting puns. Someone is praying, someone is prey. . In one of my favorites, a curse to an unnamed subject, he brilliantly creates an image-pun from one of America’s great shames.
Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window). . And of pompoms at a school whose mascot/ Is the clementine?
In its belly, or a gate opening upon another gate. Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.
Sometimes his epithets gratify in their balancing of play and rage: The umpteenth thump on the rump of a badunkadunk.