terrance hayes american sonnets for my past and future assassin

In the lines from “Howl” that, I suspect, Hayes has in mind, you can see how blackness is used as a prop. “I’m not sure how to hold my face when I dance,” he writes: “In an expression of determination or euphoria?” poet Wanda Coleman, who died in 2013 and who coined the term “American sonnet.” Coleman adapted the sonnet to the jazz methods of, as she put it, “progression, improvisation, mimicry, etc.” Hayes’s style is warier than Coleman’s. The sonnet, an Italian contrivance adapted by the poets of the English Renaissance, was handed down to twentieth-century writers like Robert Lowell and Gwendolyn Brooks and self-consciously Americanized-its gait loosened, its politics sharpened.

The conflict between flight and confinement is built into the form he has chosen. These adversaries, dreamed up in Hayes’s poems, are also confined there: “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.” The “assassin” takes many shapes: a stinkbug, the gang that lynched Emmett Till, a bunch of white girls posing for selfies, Donald Trump, and, unsettlingly, Hayes’s own reflection.

Like a coin toss that keeps coming up heads, iterated titles suggest an occult lucky streak bound to break. For this latest collection, he made one big choice at the outset: all the sonnets share the same title, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” This repetition is superstitious, a tribute paid to the imagined assassin, as if the poems can buy back time in fourteen-line reprieves. In his five books, he has perfected a sort of poem where wild jams carom inside arbitrary formal boundaries. Hayes, who is forty-six, won the 2010 National Book Award and is a professor at N.Y.U.

He freelances inside a form he calls “part music box, part meat grinder,” fashioning a diary of survival during a period when black men are in constant danger. A former college basketball star, he treats poetry like a timed game, a theatre for dramatic last-minute outcomes. The day after the 2016 Presidential election, Terrance Hayes wrote the first of the seventy sonnets collected in his new book, “ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.” Time had been altered in some baleful and uncertain way the sonnet offered an alternative unit of measurement, at once ancient, its basic features unchanged for centuries, and urgent, its fourteen lines passing at a brutal clip.

Terrance hayes american sonnets for my past and future assassin