On the volta (lines 11-14), he then affirms: Love trumps power or blood to trump powerīeauty trumps power or blood to trump power In the following eight sonnet, the poet pour a pinch of serious poison and merciful panic into river for assassins like James Earl Ray, Dylann Roof, and others named in the poem.

Voltas of acoustics, instincts & metaphor. Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame. In sonnet 7, the poet alerts (lines 1/2//13/14): I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, So whatever I go in with, I have to come out with something new.” In trying to express all the complications of love and politics, “I have to change my mind, because it’s a sonnet, because of the volta,” he tells interviewer Rachel Long. He further expands on his poetic choice during his interview for The White Review Magazine in January 2019. In his 2018 interview for the Poets & Writers Magazine, Hayes tells interviewer Hanif Abdurraqib why he chose the sonnet: “How can I write a traditional love poem to someone or something I don’t deem worthy of my love? I just don’t know what other form would be able to hold this particular moment.” Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, the sonnets in this poetry collection are mostly political poems about life, love, and death of black men-haunted and hunted by violent racism. Hayes’ featured sonnet 13 is one of seventy freestyle sonnets, all bearing the same title and length of fourteen lines required for the poetic form.

The divorced father of two children resides in New York City. In 2017, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and now serves as an ex-officio member of the Academy’s Board of Directors. Hayes moved on to New York University to take up his current post of Professor of English. In Pittsburgh, he gained local fame as co-director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. After receiving his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he taught in Japan, Ohio, and Louisiana before returning to the University of Pittsburgh where he worked for several years. (Note: The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection.) Born in 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina, Hayes is a national award-winning poet and university professor. My Poetry Corner July 2020 features sonnet 13 from the poetry collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) by African American poet Terrance Hayes.

American sonnet for my past and future