Terrance Hayes – “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin”

- shines a light on the racial violence in America

- “Is a diary of survival during a period when black men are in constant danger.” – New Yorker
- Politics & Prose
- The news overwhelms him since his poetry comes from its disruptive element to metaphors.
- When in history in leaders can you think that they are against their own people?

American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin

- 70 “American” Sonnets; written two/three days after Donald Trump became president
- A poem each day as a response.
- Sonnet – the turn  “love poem”  12 lines  first 8
- American Sonnet: filled with turns
- “It can’t end where it started.”
- Love poems  dimension of love for forces that don’t see the world as you do.
- “Live and think in poetry.”
- “To write in poems to people.”
- After blackness was invented, people began seeing ghost.
- He writes everyday
- Question deep into the books about politics and demons.
- “Can art really save us?”
- Even a bad poet can save us.
- Poetry as a response to the world.
- “Write every day, even writing your own name counts as so.”
- Even the bar is that low, it becomes a productive element.
- “Just because I wrote a sonnet doesn’t mean it’s a good sonnet, but that’s called writing every
day. And that’s what I’m grateful for. I try not to linger on the adjectives. That’s my response.”
- 10 – 15 minutes a day to write and you’ll get somewhere.
- Duration is an advice.
- It can’t be that complicated, bar must be on the ground.
- Revision is something else, turn something to something else entirely.
- “It doesn’t matter if you write every day, what matters is you go back to what you write and see
it, do you try to make it better.”
- To write so much – no revision.
- Trial and Error process.
- Having to revise so much feels like it hasn’t been gotten right.
- Any music he’s listening to can be made into a reference.

Intention about Structure:

- “A Poets response is a poem.”

- Sonnet  American Sonnet
- “Breakdancing with your other self but with a different clothing.”
- Structure and form encourage creativity.

How did he get into poetry?

 - “Creativity as a response to the universe.”
- Language is the supreme, all you can do is talk.
- If you can bring shape of language, you can get anywhere.
- Truth > Fact
- Are we really going to critique Picasso’s art metaphorically?
- Picasso’s style of painting = metaphorical writing
 Terrance poems have always seemed super charged by a signature mix of invention and
immediacy. Mythmaking and memory contended; playful, riffing, and exploding personas
arguments of sublime. His lyricism takes a maximal approach in contrast to, or even bolstered by
the rigor of its music. Poetry is as philosophically and spiritually messy as our spirits can allow for.
But from that is where it offers us a sense of sureness. A kind of claim toward a space it creates
in the moment it creates it.
 “An advantage of poetry is you can come in and out of metaphor so you can be confessional when
you aren’t.”
 Space between Personal and Public
o Transparency is what Hayes want to achieve. If you can get the rhythm, language, and
sensibility right, you can say what you can say. Write it beautifully.
- Poetry was not likely his career.
- Writing and art is the difference of playing an instrument that they cannot play.
- Risk writing about controversies/issues.
- “Can a writer really go to another writer and say, ‘Don’t write that’?”
- You can write whatever you want to write.
- “You can write it better.”
- Imagine things in order to transform them.
- “Identity is fine, but personality is much more interesting.”
- Poems trying to get a personality, not just identity.
- Attacks racial discriminate on through poems.

Issue of Race & History:

- “Black Confederate Ghost Story”

- Truth Checking > Fact Checking
- Poetry can be political.
- A poetry can never be one thing like a metaphor is never one thing.
- “Engaged citizen of the world.”
- Political  Belief System  Poetry becomes Political
- Hysterical country  satire or too tragic
- “Elegies with Zombies for Life”
- “The trouble with living like thinking is feeling is it’s not really living”  political statement 
politics are rooted in really thinking  morality
- “Life is not about what you learn, really, but what you remember.”
- The different between poems, poets, and poetry.
- People < Persons
- Poetry < Poems
- Shapes are good but they are not as permanent, like translation.
How to be Drawn

- Into politics  race, etc.

- Conscious, transparent, honest, and empathetic.
- Not writing poems to advocate, but rather as a poet.
- Long sentences will reveal what you really see/feel about the world.
- Sudden shifts of theme and image.
- “What comes first or where my pleasure is.”

Review:

- He’s angry in the poem.

- Structure he needs in those 14 lines and use them as inspiration for his creativity to make a
response every day.
- “American sonnet form”  “Volta” means turn.
- Traditional Italian sonnet turns usually in the last 4 to 6 lines, but in the American sonnet, mostly
free verse, there are multiple turns with the 14 lines.
- Shape his language  speaks in metaphor.
- Written in free verse but still in 14 lines; colloquial style

First Part

- In the hands of someone that knows and understands the form and it can work within that format.
- “Langston Hughes and Phillis Wheatley”
- Wheatley  first female African American female poet to be published.
- Brought to New England as a slave in the early years of the American discovery.
- At that time, most of American poetry was derived from British poetry.
- “Colonized period”
- Hughes  different era and tone: “Renaissance”  post-civil war/post-colonial
- Tone: Hayes has in common with Hughes that from Wheatley
- Orpheus was alone and misunderstood when he wrote
- “Writing itself does not rescue.”
- If not writing, then what? Why write?
- Put these poems for a reason
- To be heard is what will be to rescue this persona
- “Putting these words out there in an effort to be heard by the culture that colonized them.”
 White Culture

- How white people think that black people are alike

- Hayes is part of the dialogue, the effort to make these atrocities, murders in these cities that he
referred to, we need to listen.
- The turn of the book is in the sonnets themselves.
- We are familiar with the form, a love poem, though there are sonnets out of a love theme.
- Colonized, post-colonial, and where we are now, Hayes entered a space that if not created by, but
certainly expanded a great deal by great poets like Maya Angelou; their writing from a place of
love, an agape love, love for the country, etc.
- He’s chronically using these issues, injustices where he is speaking to us in a place of love.