Terrance Hayes | American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin | Penguin, £9.99
I’ve been trying to write a review of Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin all summer. I read the book cover to cover in one sitting when it came out in June. Since then, I’ve dipped in and out of it at random and each time something about American Sonnets seems to change. I should clarify: each time it changes, it gets better.
After reading Hayes’ two previous books, How To Be Drawn and the National Book Award winning Lighthead, I eagerly anticipated his next collection. I read somewhere that Hayes was writing a sonnet a day for the duration of Trump’s presidency. I was reading more than enough about Trump in the news to want to read more about him in poetry. But because it was Terrance Hayes writing, I was interested.
I’m not normally one for political poetry. The two words seem a little oxymoronic when put together— what can poetry do to affect policy? But Hayes isn’t writing ‘political poetry’, he’s writing poetry inflected by politics. From a white woman saying the n-word when singing along to “black / Modern American music” to the fetishisation of the black male body, Hayes uses the sonnet form to explore micro-aggressions in Trump’s America. This isn’t a broadly political collection, but a deeply personal one. In American Sonnets, Hayes “mean[s] to leave / A record of [his] raptures” in all senses of the word— from seizure to joy, from getting carried away to being taken away.
One reason I am continually drawn back to the book is to understand its title. Every sonnet in the seventy sonnet collection is titled ‘American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin’. When Hayes reads from the book, he reads the title before every poem. The repetition is testament to the sustained focus of the collection; each poem asks the same questions: what is an American Sonnet? Who is the assassin? And why on earth are they trying to kill Terrance Hayes?
While the questions remain the same, the answers differ. The repetition allows the title to take on new associations, to continually change meaning. Hayes likens the repeated title to the way that all the Mondays in a year bear the same name but are completely different. To me, the repetition of the title throughout the sonnet cycle is numbing in the way a headline repeated on a 24-hour news cycle is numbing.
While there is no doubt about the modern relevance of American Sonnets, the first sonnet of the collection ends with an exchange between classical characters:
Orpheus was alone when he invented writing.
His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent
His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it.
He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant
I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.
These differing interpretations of the image serve as examples of how readers will go on to read the rest of Hayes’ collection. He creates images but their meaning isn’t concrete— in many cases, like the “eye with an X struck through it”, they can be interpreted in completely different ways. The image of the X particularly stood out to me, and came to mind whilst reading other poems from the collection. To me, it represents a kind of chiasmus; Orpheus sees one thing and Eurydice its opposite. Throughout American Sonnets, Hayes creates similar oppositions:
After blackness was invented
People began seeing ghosts.
The chiastic structures read almost like mathematical equations, and their simplicity shows Hayes at his best:
It’s not the bad people who are brave
I fear, it’s the good people who are afraid.
Any poet writing sonnets must confront the sonnetists that come before them. It’s a self-referential form; to write a sonnet is to become part of lineage. Hayes certainly refers to other sonnetists throughout the collection with implicit and explicit echoes of Dickinson and Rilke, Berryman and Lowell. But these are American sonnets, a term that refers to Wanda Coleman.
Wanda Coleman bookends Hayes’ collection — a quote from one of her own American Sonnets serves as the epigraph and she is mentioned in the Acknowledgements — but her influence can be seen consistently throughout the 70 sonnets. Coleman recognised the exclusionary tradition of the sonnet; it was a form historically dedicated to (white) male perspectives of love. She reimagined, repurposed and therefore, reclaimed the form with what “she called […] jazz sonnets ‘with certain properties—progression, improvisation, mimicry, etc.’” The jazz influence on Coleman’s sonnets is instantly recognisable; the words are scattered all over the page and Coleman disturbs the rules that define the sonnet, she doesn’t sing, she scats. Hayes however, seems to draw less on jazz than blues.
Hayes’ sonnets range from bittersweet comic takes on modern life, to pure unabridged anger. Like the best blues lyricists, Hayes has the ability to cut deep with one line:
Like no
Culture before us, we relate the way the descendants
Of the raped relate to the descendants of their rapists.
I read and reread certain lines as much for their sound as their constantly evolving meanings:
As if a bird
Could grow without breaking its shell.
As if the clatter of a thousand black
Birds whipping in a storm could be held
In a shell.
This image, like many others in the collection, creates an opposition between constraint and freedom. It’s an opposition that makes the sonnet the perfect form for Hayes’ project. The words themselves are trapped within the formal constraints of the sonnet (however loose) but Hayes’ images refuse to be contained, they live beyond the page, resurfacing in different sonnets and staying on in the readers’ mind. This sense of confinement is key to Hayes’ definition of the American sonnet:
I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat
Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.
Reading this reminded me of Edna St Vincent Millay’s “I will put chaos into fourteen lines”. The sonnet is an ideal form for containing rage and chaos. Where representations of anger in free verse poetry can feel a little slack, fall a little flat, the evident anger and need for freedom in Hayes’ “prison[s]” creates a conflict that is electric and, at times, shocking.
Part of the joy of reading sonnets is to see which rules the poet follows and which they ignore. In one poem, Hayes hints at a kind of guiding principal for the sonnets:
The song must be cultural, confessional, clear
But not obvious
…
The song must turn on the compass
Of language like a tangle of wire endowed
With feeling
Hayes writes with a vocabulary of “cultural” references, from Ginuwine to Trump. His style, like Lowell’s, is “confessional”— more personal, I would say, than any of his previous work. The words themselves are always “clear”, sometimes colloquial, but put together, the sentences are rarely “obvious”. The second half of his ‘explanation’ I think is more revealing than the first. It shows Hayes having fun with language, shows that these sonnets are guided by instinct and “feeling”, that they shift on “voltas of acoustics”.
I think it is important then, to consider how Hayes wrote the sonnets. Usually he extensively edits, but with this experiment, he hardly edited the poems at all. He wrote about 200 and whittled them down to 70. But after that, he barely touched them. This change in Hayes’ writing process is perhaps why these sonnets seem to be a lot more personal— Hayes hasn’t allowed himself to edit himself out of them. It also gives the sonnets an almost sketch-like quality. They can be seen as studies, written in the way that a painter sketches the same subject again and again, in different ways, to better understand it.
Hayes, a painter himself, seems to be trying to perfectly capture what an American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin is. Through repetition, there is a sense that Hayes is trying to get the sonnet right, to repeat and repeat, until, at the end of the book, there is a definitive American sonnet. This, of course, does not happen. This is not a linear collection of improvements leading to the perfect poem, but 70 variations on a theme. Personally I’ve always thought that artists’ sketches are more interesting than their paintings, for what they reveal about the artist and their thought processes and Hayes’ experiments with the form have led to his most revealing work yet.
I have always thought of sonnets as individual, perfectly-formed structures. A perfect sonnet is untouchable in a way, a house of cards kept miraculously in tact. To reject the rules of the form has become a kind of cliché, but Hayes’ reimagining of the sonnet is justified. He has fun with the form, he relishes in the sound of words:
The umpteenth boast
Stumps our toe. The umpteenth falsehood stumps
Our elbows & eyeballs, our Nos, Whoahs, wows, woes.
Perhaps the reason why it’s taken me so long to feel like I understand the book is because reading the sonnets in different orders seems to change their relations to each other. Repeated images become more apparent, phrases return in different forms, with different meanings. American Sonnets is like one of those albums that make sense played backwards and forwards; it reads just as good on shuffle as it does in order.
The collection is split up into five parts, each consisting of 14 sonnets. Because of this, the sonnet index, made up of the first lines of each poem, reads like five additional sonnets. These meta-sonnets almost make sense, the first lines juxtaposed next to each other create a patchwork of the collection as a whole, playing out like a remix on a B-side. For example:
The song must be cultural, confessional clear
A remix of “Pony” by Ginuwine plays
The umpteenth thump on the rump of a badunkadunk
Or:
This word can be the difference between knowing
Why someone would crowd into a church is beyond me
From now on I will do my laundry early Sunday
Otherwise home is the mess laid bare
Scrambled together, the index sonnets show Hayes’ range, both in style and content. Finishing the book, I went back to read at random. Like Orpheus and Eurydice in the first sonnet, I read each image, each poem in a new and sometimes contradictory way, and now, months later, I’m still reading.
by Gurnaik Johal