Terrance Hayes

This is such a gorgeous and profound collection.
It's hard to choose, but this might be my favorite:

From now on I will do my laundry early Sunday
Mornings when all the young tenants are hung-
Over or worn out, all the old people in church,
And the pets & parents parked at playgrounds
With their children beside the “Play At Your Own
Risk” sign. I tried to tell the woman who sends
Me songs, it’s departure that makes company hard
To master. I tried to tell her I’m a muser, a miser
With time. I show more love poems more than money & pussy.
From now on I will eat brunch alone. I now know
Eurydice is actually the poet, not Orpheus. Her muse
Has his back to her with his ear bent to his own heart.
As if what you learn making love to yourself matters
More than what you learn loving someone else.

Or this:
Goddamn, so this is what it means to have a leader
You despise, the racists said when the president
Was black and I’ll be damned if I ain’t saying it too.
Is this a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty,
Stupidity, an idiot’s threats & gangsta narcissisms threading
Every shabby sentence his trumpet constructs? You
Are not allowed to say shit about Mexicans when you
Ain't actually got any Mexican friends— I bet you’ve never
Been invited to a family dinner. You ain’t allowed to deride
Women when you’ve never wept in front of a woman
That wasn't your mother. America’s struggle with itself
Has always had black people at the heart of it. You can’t
Grasp your own hustle, your blackness, you can’t grasp
Your own pussy, your black pussy dies for touch. show less

Brilliant poetry. A fearless and well-crafted excursion into the possibilities of form, always grounded to the real world, the personal at the core of each poem's subject matter. These poems leap (as Robert Bly recommends they should) and also transform right before your eyes, the way some formal poetry can with an image or object that keeps coming back to stabilize the structure but means something different each time. It is like a well planned but utterly surprising light show.
As a show more writer, I found myself rereading poems over and over, asking how he accomplished this or that. I will go back to these poems many more times.
There is a large intelligence behind this work. The historical knowledge and the awareness of poetry's history are subtle but everywhere. And the poems that focus on social justice (mostly race, but class and other issues are there) are amazing--revelatory, powerful, heart-stopping. The poems about racism and its history are strong medicine, and manage to deliver their message with excellent craft, deep compassion, and long arms that embrace the reader as they shake your heart. show less

This is how all poetry should be: urgent, necessary, measured, and real.

Hayes' deft use of language is always surprising, and organic. Like a branch of an old tree that for 20 years grew parallel to the ground before suddenly deciding to strive upwards. So adept a writer is Hayes, that the success of this collection cannot be pinned to mastery of any number of particular skills or devices. He has mastered them all.

Just read it and feel it. It's an incredible experience.

With his new book American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes released a collection of sonnets, American sonnets, that hew to the fourteen-line requirement of tradition, but they are more jazz than baroque. So much of modern poetry is about throwing off those old, formalized limitations, but sometimes there is freedom in limitations. Think of going to the grocery store and seeing 100 different kinds of cereal and picking just one. Then think of going to the corner store show more where you choose from just three. Sometimes that limitation frees you and that seems to happen with Hayes because this is a stunning and generous collection of poetry with seventy–yes seventy–sonnets.

I am struggling with how to share my excitement about this collection of poems. I want to just quote and quote and could easily end up just pasting sonnets with the instructions to “Read This!” But let me speak to the music of his poetry. It’s not just that he sometimes references Miles Davis and John Coltrane, it’s the rhythm of this poem titled “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin:”

“The umpteenth thump on the rump of a badunkadunk
Stumps us. The lunk, the chump, the hunk of plunder.”

That is not the title poem or rather every poem is the title poem. All the poems are named “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin.” Hayes is aware that black men are endangered, threatened by racism, police, each other. Several poems open with the line, “But there never was a black male hysteria” addressing the very real fear. Another poem offers an alphabet of fears,

“Aryans, Betty Crocker, Bettye LaVette,
Blowfish, briar bushes, Bubbas, Buckras,
Archie Bunkers, bullhorns, bullwhips, bullets,
All cancers kill me, car crashes, cavemen, chakras,
Crackers, discord, dissonance, doves, Elvis,
Ghosts, the grim reaper herself, a heart attack
While making love, hangmen, Hillbillies exist,
Lillies, Martha Stewarts, Mayflower maniacs,
Money grubbers, Gwen Brooks’ “The Mother,”
(My mother’s bipolar as bacon), pancakes kill me,
Phonies, dead roaches, big roaches & smaller
Roaches, the sheepish, snakes, all seven seas,
Snow avalanches, swansongs, sciatica, Killer
Wasps, yee-haws, you, now & then, disease.”

I love the “Z” comes from sound and wonder why Bettye LaVette, though she is fierce.

Trump’s election may have inspired the poems and concern about white supremacy rising is woven into many poems, but Hayes only makes him front and center a few times, but when he does…

“Are you not the color of this country’s current threat
Advisory? And of pompoms at a school whose mascot
Is the clementine? Color of the quartered cantaloupe
Beside the tiers of easily bruised bananas cowering
In towers of yellow skin? And of Caligula’s copper-toned
Jabber-jaw jammed with grapes shaped like the eyeballs
Of blind people? Light as a featherweight monarch,
Viceroy, goldfish. Pomp & pumpkin pompadour,”

American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin is a grand collection of poetry that speaks to American society, the racism that endangers people of color and elected a white supremacist. I am fascinated by his choice to use the sonnet form. Fourteen lines give his poems urgency. I also love that he is a Dr. Who fan and has two poems for Whovians. He is a Time Lord.

American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin at Penguin Random House
Terrance Hayes author site

★★★★★
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/07/03/9780143133186/ show less