The Fearful Love of Terrance Hayes

By Staff Writer Simone Wallk ’21

“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.”

— Terrance Hayes

Published in July 2018, Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins adapts the Italian sonnet — a love poem — into a political form. Each of the seventy sonnets has the same title, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” though Hayes’ topics range from notions of spirituality to masculinity to Blackness. After every compact, terse poem, the reader flips the page and returns to Hayes’ tortured refrain: “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” Hayes’ focus meanders, and he himself states that there is no connection between these poems other than the fact that he wrote them in the wake of the 2016 election. Yet his repeated titles center his work on several clear themes: America, poetic form, violence, and temporality. Repeated like a mantra, the titles — mysterious, ambiguous, and multivalent — become buffers between Hayes’ vignettes of love and alienation.

The sonnet is typically a rigid, fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter, a declaration of love typified by Shakespeare and Petrarch. Hayes’ American sonnets are free-verse, but they maintain the line structure of a traditional sonnet. While not in iambic pentameter, Hayes plays with rhythm and punctuation, his verse clipping along at an intense pace. He was inspired by Wanda Coleman, an LA-based poet who coined “American sonnet” to critique the prescribed notions of American poetry and identity, writing free verse sonnets about American life. Hayes borrows Coleman’s term, framing political anger and despair with classical metaphors of affection. The love poem becomes a protest poem, at times one and the same. The act of re-purposing the sonnet is itself a political one, a claim that Hayes’ narrative belongs in the canon’s most rigid form.

Hayes asks his reader to interrogate the meaning of an American sonnet, and how, exactly, one writes a love poem to an assassin. In conversation with Lindsay Garbutt and Don Share of Poetry, he said, “The question in every poem is: What is an American sonnet and who is the assassin?” Hayes uses formal boundaries to explore subject matter typically excluded from the cannon and to put his work in dialogue with the poetic tradition. In Hayes’ own words, an American sonnet is “part prison,/ Part panic closet,” a confined, rigid space; only so many words can fit on one line. It is “part music box, part meat/ Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.” Superficially harmonic, the undergirding conceptual root of Hayes’ poetry is fear. The music of his sonnets, Hayes suggests, is produced through the crushing of the body, and the sonnet itself becomes a meat grinder, selecting for detail and music.

Hayes’ unified tone is driven by his “Past and Future Assassin,” which he reflected on with Garbutt and Share: “I think this dude is trying to kill me . . . and can I still love him? Can I write a sonnet for my assassin? That’s really what drives all of them.” Hayes’ assassin is manifest in his tone, which often expresses a sense of anxiety, fear, or disillusionment. The assassin shifts shapes repeatedly from Donald Trumpet (as Hayes calls the President), to white women taking selfies, cancer, and the very form of the sonnet itself. Hayes portrays American life as an effort to wrestle with a shape-shifting, occasionally beloved assassin.

Hayes speaks directly to this assassin, asking: “Can we really be friends if we don’t believe/ In the same things, Assassin?” His question implies that his assassins are constantly present, almost a part of Hayes, at times: “don’t we belong/ Together, Brother, Sweetness, Sweetness,/ Sweetness?” Hayes carries his assassin with him, in the stories of his family, in the deaths of Black Americans, in the everyday threats and phobias he details in an alphabetized index, beginning, “Aryans, Betty Crocker.” Significantly, Hayes often addresses his assassin as “you,” calling the reader into a world where fear of death and love are intertwined. In writing love poetry to the things and people that want to eliminate him, Hayes softens the meaning of “assassin” into a constant companion, an omnipresent unease.

Source: Poetry Foundation

The poems of American Sonnets are linked by both their titles and their political moment, as they were all written in the wake of President Trump’s election in 2016. Yet Hayes’ sonnets are also deeply rooted in history and genealogy, connected to his childhood, family, and spirituality. Born in South Carolina, Hayes has an unusual trajectory for a poet. His first passion was basketball, which he played at Coker College. He was encouraged to apply for a graduate program in creative writing by a professor, and after receiving an MFA from Carnegie Mellon, he now teaches at NYU, the University of Pittsburgh, and Princeton. He also edits poetry at New York Times Magazine.

While Hayes often frames his collection as a response the 2016 election of President Trump, the sonnets speak to a larger experience of fear, alienation, and struggle in Hayes’ interpretation of American history. At times, he directly addresses Trump as his assassin, asking “Are you not the color of this country’s current threat/ Advisory?” After listing orange objects — from clementines to quartered cantaloupe — Hayes declares, “I know your shade. You are the color of a sucker punch,” writing that Trump is “a contusion before it swells and darkens.” This ominous prescription for the Trump presidency embodies the classic turn of tone near the end of a sonnet, technically called a volta. With his vivid imagery of grimy orange fruits, here Hayes’ assassin seems overworn and orange, with his hue representing his politics.

Elsewhere, however, Hayes’ critique of “Don Trumpet” is targeted and ideological. He diagnoses the election as an itching for “a reign of gold. A leader whose metallic narcissism is a reflection of your own.” Americans are gold-thirsty lovers of Midas, longing for the awe provoked by wealth and money. And in this quest for power and the moral superiority that comes with it, we reflect the qualities of “Trumpet,” in Hayes’ opinion.

To characterize American Sonnets as post-Trump poetry, though, would be mistaken, as its subject matter originates in long-term trends of race relations in the United States. Take this sonnet, a meditation on blackness and survival:

Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous

Darkness. Probably all my encounters

Are existential jambalaya. Which is to say,

A nigga can survive. Something happened

In Sanford, something happened in Ferguson

And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened

In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore & happens

Almost everywhere in this country every day.

Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters.

You won’t admit it. The names alive are like the names

In graves. Probably twilight makes blackness

Darkness. And a gate. Probably the dark blue skin

Of a black man matches the dark blue skin

Of his son the way one twilight matches another.

Hayes writes of anonymity and survival, a world where his interactions as a Black man become “existential jambalaya,” a collection of questions about power, violence, and positionality. In listing American cities, he recalls incidents of police brutality and racial tension, and yet his argument is barely political, as he simply suggests that “something happened.” This allusion to gratuitous violence targeted at Black Americans is more somber than angry, a sign of resignation. In other poems, however, Hayes’ anger dominates, as a he pours “a pinch of serious poison” for his assassins: Dylann Roof, George Zimmerman, John Wilkes Booth, and many others, their names blurred together without a comma or a breath between. In “Probably twilight,” however, he writes allegorically and with a pointed but speculative tone.

Hayes’ use of “probably” and lack of assertions might be ironically qualified claims, as he makes broad statements — “Probably someone is prey in all of our encounters” — that seem rooted in his personal experience and observations of cyclical violence against Black skin. His final “Probably,” rephrasing the poem’s first line, implies a cycle of inter-generationality, where the skin of each black man is identical and anonymous, made dangerous by its very color — dark blue in the black twilight. Hayes’ poetic ambiguity, embodied by the use of “probably” and the fragment “and a gate,” is provocative, perhaps in an attempt to mediate between writing from experience and making political claims.

Hayes also conceptualizes race relations in the US through historical metaphor. He writes: “Like no/ culture before us, we relate the way the descendants/ of the raped relate to the descendants of their rapists.” Hayes implies deep psychological trauma, ghosts of history that haunt contemporary interactions, perpetuating racial power dynamics. Americans are unique in this, he says, further entrenched in our tortured history than other nations. This one line summarizes Hayes’ understanding of American society, one where power dynamics persist for generation upon generation, an eternal twilight where change is just beyond reach. Beyond simply stagnating, Americans seek a return to the past, too, he says, evidenced by the attitude that America must be made great again. Hayes’ analysis of the Trumpian universe is grounded in dissecting history, mourning a present shaped by the past.

“Language is always burdened by thought,” said Hayes in a Hot Metal Bridge (2013). “I’m just trying to get is so it can be like feeling,” he said. Hayes often fulfills this mission, writing fluidly and gracefully, but also logically, using love poetry to argue, protest, and critique. In American Sonnets, feeling and argument are often one, a demonstration of the moral, emotional root of politics. His descriptions of James Baldwin’s smile or his hypotheses on Jesus’ unappreciated sister as both argumentative and affective, but certainly not “burdened by thought.”

Other poems are song-like. In one of these, Hayes writes a metatextual analysis of “the song,” an allusion to the sonnet, which “must be cultural, confessional,” with “a clamor of voltas” that “turn on the compass of language like a tangle of wire endowed with feeling.” Hayes’ voltas do clamor, in sharp dissonance that has an intellectual effect on his words, rendering some poems polemical and others meditations on the effect of sound or rhythm. Hayes also analogizes the sonnet to “a record of witness & daydream./ Where the heart is torn or feathered & tarred,” a fourteen line box where feeling is documented and twisted into an archive of itself. This he does, and his tendency to bear witness is evident in the historical and political intertexts of his work.

Perhaps the great merit of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is that Hayes innovates formally through turns of phrase and syntax while creating a dialogue between sonnets. Images of birds, twilights, and prayers are scattered throughout his book. Hayes’ bird imagery connotes flight and imprisonment; birds are the free but fragile analogy for Sunday church hats, vessels of ink, and Black personhood. In “I lock you in an American sonnet,” he writes:

I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow

You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night

In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-

Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars

Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.

In this pun, “Jim Crow” becomes “gym & crow,” and Hayes forces his assassin to undergo feeling both of these states “while your better selves watch from the bleachers.” The setting — a high school gym — carries the weight of youthful naivete and the social microcosm of American politics that teenagers do not hesitate to bemoan. In this most American of settings, Hayes fantasizes that his assassin is trapped and observed, a reversal of fates. Hayes toys with detail, leaving the crow’s “beautiful catharsis” unexplained, but delving into the feelings of the gym floor. He ultimately returns to the challenge of writing love poems to his assassin — here, the sonnet itself: “It is not enough/ To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.”

When Terrance Hayes reads American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, he sounds like a preacher, speaking each word as if it has physical weight and needs space to land in the reader’s mind. His phrases land differently upon repetition; each “probably” becomes less speculative and more certain, each “I lock you” and “I see you” layered by re-definitions of the assassins they address. Hayes’ methodical tenor forces the listener to hold each phrase for a moment and to realize how full of imagery each sonnet is. At times Hayes’ soothing, slow pace is incongruous with the anger or fear addressed to his assassin, exposing the paradox of a sonnet to an assassin; in the delicate images of love poetry, political messaging is muddled with descriptive adoration.

Whether or not one agrees with Hayes’ reaction to the age of “Donald Trumpet,” his poetry is delicately, cleverly crafted, best read in aggregate to understand his self-referential world of repeated phrases and bird-filled twilight. Upon each re-reading of American Sonnets, I noticed news terms that Hayes repeats from poem to poem — “existential jambalaya,” “but there never was a black male hysteria,” — layered with accumulated meaning and ambiguity.

In writing American sonnets, Hayes asks: what does it mean to suffer, and to transcend that suffering through new poetic form? To love and to assassinate at once? In the act of exploring modern America’s self-reckoning, Hayes sees liberation in artistic work: “When the wound/ Is deep, the healing is heroic. Suffering and/ ascendance require the same work.”