American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

Hayes is undoubtedly a skilled poet, arguably one of the US' best current living poets. Many of these poems flow with a naturalness and energetic wordplay that should be envied. His voice comes through as both artful and purposeful, and the rhythm in these poems speak of an intuition about language and its power that many poets will just never possess.

But where these poems fail me is how they often feel that they are retained in the same overly careful mental space, which gives the collection the feeling that there is an unused potency in these poems that is being kept caged and inert. Every time I read the title "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin" it had this sense of being reset, of going back to a starting place, with show more a kind of anticipation of what would come next, which grew over the repetitions of that increasingly familiar refrain. I found that a bit exciting with its potential, but overall, as a collection, a feeling of slight inhibition come over me as I progressed through those "resets," as if Hayes was trying too hard to not have one poem be more engaging or stand out more than the one prior or following it. Hayes' powerful voice over the course of these poems became more like a museum guide who needs to maintain a steady pace through the museum, not letting the group linger too long at any one exhibit, and I'm not sure Hayes' gift for luscious wordplay and intense emotional response that invite the reader to engage his poetry more deeply is best served by that carefulness. show less

Hayes cracks bone in this new collection connecting mythic past in immediately present concerns. It's a collection that doesn't shy away from interrogations of the experiences and the rage of marginalized people.

I don't often read form poetry anymore unless I've revisiting old favorites from Browning or Shelley or whoever else, so I wouldn't normally pick up a collection of sonnets, but I've so enjoyed Hayes' work in the past, I decided to give this one a try.

There are a lot of moments and phrases to love in these poems, but I admit that the form distracted me, and it too often felt like the content was being shaped more due to the form than complete thoughts in and of themselves. In some ways, it occasionally read more as experiment than full polished collection, much as I hate to say that.

I'd recommend Hayes' poetry without hesitation, but this just isn't the collection that I'd hand someone first. Normally with his collections, there are show more four or five poems that I can't help but reread immediately and plan on returning to later, and that just didn't happen here. show less

A deeply moving and disturbing collection of poems from the perspective of post-2016 election. These poems examine race, America, manhood and the political climate after Trump’s inauguration.

I'm not gonna pretend that I *got* all the references. I'm not well-versed in poetry and find the genre very abstract. This was a collection that challenged me in a way that encouraged me to slow down and reflect. This was bleak at times but poignant and a wonderful collection with plenty of reread value.

From this year’s NBA longlist for poetry comes another great collection from Terrance Hayes. This collection is a series of sonnets looking at a culture that continues to allow racially-motivated killing of black Americans to occur. There is both an anger and a sadness evident in these poems, along with a defiance against accepting the status quo.