Bird from Bone: An Analysis of Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnet Katie Livingston College

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes suggests that the experience of black Americans is a constant self-love and self-destruction, a separation of “the song of the bird from the bone.” Through the expert use of speaker/auditor relationship, metaphor, and structure the poem paints a picture of the complicated and often contradictory relationships that black American’s are caught up in with themselves and with the culture they live in.

The title of the poem, American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin immediately sets up a reader expectation that this poem’s speaker and auditor will be at odds. The reader naturally assumes that the “My” in the title must reference the speaker while the “Past and Future Assassin” is another entity entirely, presumably one who wants to hurt the speaker. This expectation is at once confused in the opening line, “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,/ part panic closet” (Hayes line1-2). Suddenly, the one doing the harming is the speaker, while the auditor is the one being harmed. This forces the reader to reconsider the dynamic at play in the speaker/auditor relationship. The speaker is clearly addressing a black American, as evidenced by the metaphors...