Multiple Choice: Terrance Hayes’s Response-Poems and the African American Lyric ‘We’

Abstract

The sternest experiment by the African American poet Terrance Hayes (b. 1971) bears an unassuming yet subversive title: ‘Sonnet’. Rigidly traditional in its dimensions, ‘Sonnet’, from Hip Logic (2002), provokes, with its enigmatic subject matter, defiance of genre conventions, and refusal to turn: – and so on, for another eleven lines of immaculate iambic pentameter, stacked into a golden rectangle.1 How might we decipher this inflexibly repeating line, as it refuses to deliver the forward momentum and drastic voltas of changing heart and swerving thought that we expect to find in any lyric poem, especially a sonnet? From one angle, ‘Sonnet’ is a satire of received ideas and received forms, a protest poured into concrete-poem solidity, relying on loaded words but refusing to articulate their racist connotations: dehumanising stereotypes about African...