terrance hayes american sonnets for my past and future assassin

His words call to be read aloud, to be tasted. He loves to stuff a line full of sound (“the lunk, the chump, the hunk of plunder”), to write for the ear as well as the eye. Hayes loves language he loves the round vowel and crisp consonant. There’s a saying attributed to Flannery O’Connor, that to be a painter, you must first love the smell of paint. One narrator addresses the president: “Trumpet I can’t speak for you but men like me/Who have never made love to a man will always be/Somewhere in the folds of our longing ashamed of it.” One sonnet addresses “Seven of the ten things I love in the face/of James Baldwin.” But his inquiry also deepens and turns more daring. There are paeans to the beauty of Jimi Hendrix and Prince. It is the story/of a son whose father is a ghost”). Hayes revisits lifelong obsessions: the cage of masculinity, the gulf between fathers and sons (“Christianity is a religion built around a father/Who does not rescue his son. His poems have been influenced by riddles, anagrams and Japanese slide shows called pechakucha.Ĭredit. Hayes received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2014, and won a National Book Award in 2010 for his collection “Lighthead.” He is sensitive to the uses and abuses of political art, and his career has been a hunt for forms that might protect him from easy certainties. “Something happens everywhere in this country,” Hayes writes. These 70 poems were written after the election of 2016, in the shadow of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and a nationwide surge in hate crimes. “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”Īny real accounting of the art emerging from our own current terrors would be premature, but “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin,” the new book by Terrance Hayes, has a claim to be among the first fully-fledged works to reckon with the presidency of Donald Trump - and one of the most surprising. “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,” Lime says. There is a notion - best expressed by Harry Lime, the genial psychopath played by Orson Welles in “The Third Man” - that bad times make for good art.

Terrance hayes american sonnets for my past and future assassin