terrance hayes american sonnets for my past and future assassin

(“self/ Importance is the only word God knows.”) The comfortable words of both scripture and self-help manual mingle but fail the sore wounds in the body politic: binaries fold into a surreally poetic question with no question mark: “Is blindness the color one sees under water.” God, briefly, seems pleasantly radicalised (“Is forbidden the only word God doesn’t know”), and then debunked.

Humorous, profound and biting aphorisms are almost flirtatious line-crossing interlopers: “Black people in America are rarely compulsive/ Hi-fivers”, or “to truly be heroic/ You have to think once a day of killing yourself”. Is the poet sending word to “my future” or to “my future self”? Do we connect the first two words of line two as “self perpetuation”? Is “the war against Time” also a war against “Time/ Travel”, and perhaps a war against nostalgia? Is “blindness” or “time/ Travel (…) essentially the aim of any religion”? But to read this poem simply as an attack on religion would seem a rash judgement of a virtuoso performance that delights in pulling the hassock from under the reader’s knees.īut here are a few out of many possible – and obvious – questions. There seems to be more oppositional clarity in the poet’s concept of God. Hayes’s long conversation with cherished Black writers and mentors turns some of these sonnets against their dedicatory “assassin” into praise poems. White aggressors are excoriated with fierce, alliterative wrath, but not every poem is single-mindedly wrathful: even the aggressor is permitted shades of guilt and “blindness”. The political and emotional angle throughout Hayes’ collection is as subtly and variously registered as the face of the assassin. If any reader is, like me, tempted to look for a credo, the poem keeps warning us to hold on.

It’s is a constant unfurling of voltas – “turns” or double-takes – conjured by raising the power of syntax over punctuation. The “volta” is a key component in his own renovation of sonnet form, and this week’s poem takes the technique to soul-blowing extremes. “When asked for a definition she called poems jazz sonnets ‘with certain properties-progression, improvisation, mimicry, etc,” he adds (Coleman’s American Sonnet 35 can be heard here) and concludes: “I decided to have fun - to blow my soul.” In the collection, Hayes acknowledges the poet Wanda Coleman (1946-2013) with “tremendous gratitude” for the term American Sonnet, and quotes an interview in which she interestingly describes how she would set the form as a writing assignment.

Terrance hayes american sonnets for my past and future assassin