By using the American sonnet, a form that subverts the traditional sonnet to relate the Black experience, Hayes performs an act of resistance against Trump’s election. The poem’s specific context is America after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. “I Lock You …” is a poem about the meaning of being Black, American, and a poet in contemporary America. One of the most distinctive features of this collection is that each poem bears the same title: “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” For the sake of clarity during analysis, the poem’s first few words or lines can be considered a working title. The poem is part of a 70-sonnet collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin published in 2018. While the lines do not rhyme in the end, the poem contains many internal or half rhymes, which give it a musical quality.
The lines are enjambed, rather than end-stopped however, the enjambments are mostly smooth. Undivided by stanzas, the poem has 14 lines of fairly regular length. Above all, Hayes’s American sonnets envelop the contradiction of being Black and being American, an identity in which one part seeks the annihilation of the other.“American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin, is a lyric unrhymed sonnet by American poet Terrance Hayes. The speaker challenges readers and entreats them to consider the unanswerable question of how a human being can live in a cultural context that negates his existence culturally, spiritually, and physically.
In these poems, the trauma of Blackness in America unfolds as personal and public.
The resulting percussive echoes make the poem, part of a long conversation that runs through the entire series, in which the speaker returns to questions of personal identity and historical context.
Hayes adopts poet Wanda Coleman’s American sonnet model for his poetry, using 14 pentameter lines that reflect traditional English sonnet form, but replacing end rhymes with repetition, internal rhyme, and alliteration. In his volume American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Terrance Hayes pursues the central American problem of racial violence and inequity through 70 interlinked poems that share form, tone, and subject.
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