“I lock you in an American sonnet”: Terrance Hayes’s Public Lyric and American Antiauthoritarianism

Abstract: This article reads Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) at the intersection of antiauthoritarian discourses— rooted in the legacies of US chattel slavery and in mid-twentieth-century European history—and scholarly conversations about lyric poetry. I argue that Hayes’s unrhymed sonnets—written in response to the 2016 election of Donald Trump—constitute a public lyric. The sonnets are public because they explicitly denounce Trump and were advertised as such, yet Hayes willfully grounds his attempt to unseat a president in the conventions of lyric subjectivity. Throughout the collection, Hayes plays on two major themes of anti-authoritarian literature—the liberating potential of writing and of sex—yet he embeds these themes in poems that talk among themselves rather than narrate their way to freedom. Maximizing the public claims of his poems, Hayes makes the sonnet sequence a coup d’état; maximizing the sequence’s lyric power, Hayes reminds us time and again that he’s talking to himself as much as he’s talking to us.