re: terrance hayes’ “american sonnet for my past and future assassin”
Terrance Hayes was one of the first poets I read. It was for an African-American Lit class in college, we read Wind in a Box, and I remember reading and re-reading those poems, discovering that poetry is not just the old school, dense stuff, the stuff that might be talking to me, but probably only by accident. Poetry is also this poet, talking directly to me. It caught me by surprise—this closeness. It made it almost impossible to not hear him, even after the book was done.
I’ve loved Hayes’ work since then, and recently, when flipping through a copy of Ploughshares I found on my bookshelf—a 2018 edition edited by the director of my MFA program, Lan Samantha Chang!—I came across some of Hayes’ poems that I hadn’t read yet. These poems would later be a part of his book American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin. I hadn’t read that collection yet because something about formal poetry makes me feel itchy. Something about constraints in general, I guess. I told my friend recently that I didn’t like puzzles, and she laughed. We were doing a scavenger hunt, and she told me that it wasn’t a puzzle, but it kind of was? If you think of a puzzle as anything you’re meant to solve while simultaneously faced with some glaring uncertainty. Crossword puzzles make me want to scream. Riddles. Trivia. Escape rooms. Anything where the game is that I have to figure out something that somebody else already knows, but won’t just tell me the answer to. Writing a sonnet feels like that. Say what you want to say, but say it under these particular conditions—figure it out amidst your newfound uncertainty. I almost never can. Reading them, I guess, is different than writing them, but my favorite kind of poetry is the kind that tells you straight-up what’s on the poet’s mind. It’s told to you in a weird way, in a new way, but in a way that feels authentic to them. Like, okay, you had everything at your disposal, so what did you choose to keep?
I didn’t realize, until I read these poems in Ploughshares, that Hayes was writing American sonnets, which I learned in a poetry class I took recently means that they are not sonnets in the strictest sense, but rebellious sonnets, in a way, sonnets that break the rules !!! Why didn’t anyone tell me you could write a sonnet that broke the rules? It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle but putting the pieces in some other formation that the instructions hadn’t imagined, ending up with something stranger and more beautiful than it would’ve otherwise been. I love creativity—I love art—that isn’t so bound up in restraint, even though I can see how putting boundaries around what you’re making can bind up the energy, make it buzz.
Anyway, Hayes writes this sonnet that is both a sonnet and not, in the sense that he does not fully restrain himself. I mean, he kind of does, in the sense that there are 14 lines, but then he kind of doesn’t, in the sense that the lines are not in iambic pentameter (iambic pentameter!!! the ultimate puzzle!!!). In the book that eventually comes out, all of the poems have the same title: “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” Another rule broken. You want me to tell you what this is about? he seems to say. Read and find out for yourself. Tell me how this poem is distinguishable from the one that came before it and the one that came after. I’m not going to warn you—if you’re gonna come in, then come in.
This American sonnet includes the lines, “Black as tarnation, black as the consciousness / Of a black president’s wife.” I’m obsessed with the way repetition ends in such rich and dispersive variation here. Hayes, describing Maxine Waters, calls her “black as tarnation,” which one might initially perceive as negative, as, according to the Oxford Languages dictionary, “tarnation” is “used to express exasperation, frustration, or incredulity.” Negative, maybe, or just surprised then. Black in a way that’s incredible. But then, the speaker tries again, describing Waters as “black as the consciousness / Of a black president’s wife.” This consciousness is likely as exasperated, as frustrated, as incredulous, as Michelle Obama has been with America’s choices lately.
In this case, tarnation and this consciousness are synonyms, maybe, describing Waters as Black to the boiling point, Black as throwing your hands up in the air and then letting them fall back beside you so that you can keep going, whatever that may mean.
“Black as the gap,” Hayes writes later, “In Baldwin’s teeth.” I love the specificity of that one, I love how iconic a Black image it is, and how open. Hayes writes, “you are black as a Baldwin speech.” He moves between these moments of really complex, specific description, things that are so singularly and potently Black and then oscillates from those moments to things that are simpler, more general and yet hit just as hard. “I love your mouth,” he writes, and “I have wept listening/To Aretha Franklin sing Precious Lord.”
What I love about this poem and about Hayes’ work in general is that it’s so true. It is so true. He’s not performing Blackness, he is reminding you of the depths of it, as you know it in your own heart to be. He’s speaking to you, or he’s speaking to me at least, in a way that makes me feel incredibly perceived. Perceived, but not at risk. Perceived by someone else who knows how black the gap in Baldwin’s teeth is, how much it means to those who love him.
I love the two closing lines in this poem as well, the space where Hayes’ speaker shares what he loves: “I love your blackness leaves them in the dark.” He is whispering now, between you and me, he seems to say, everybody doesn’t have to get it.
“I love how even your sound bite leaves a mark.” To Waters again, this delicious double-entendre, an ode to her voice, all over the air—how can they possibly think, this poem seems to say, they could ever stamp us out?
