It’s about race, gender, masculinity – all of which hover around the political impetus for the script. Even in the political sense, it’s not just about Trump. I slide that under the table because it’s true, I don’t just want them to be reduced. That fall was my first fall in New York, so the Orpheus stuff in the poems or the lovers stuff that comes up sometimes is purely thinking about the sonnet form accounting for love and heartache. There’s a third rung in that I had also just ended a marriage.

What I’ve been doing is trying to put that on the table as a writerly response to where the sonnets come from, next to the political or social response – which is Trump. By default she writes what is maybe not a political, but a very tense, kind of poem. She wanted to be a writer and it never quite worked out - she published a lot but never got to where I am. What I have been doing lately is talking about Wanda Coleman, had been writing these ‘American sonnets’ over many years. How do you feel about having it received in such a way? A lot of the reception of your sonnets has been in the self-exclaimed context of art that is of the Trump era. How do you go from Obama to Trump? Volta, volta, volta!’ In this book’s examination of America and its many assassins, Hayes’s modus operandi is to be unrelenting in his ‘posing of poets’ questions to history’ we discuss some of them here. One thing that appealed to me was the notion of the volta, the sudden turn. Later that same week, I was also lucky enough to see him in conversation with Sarah Churchwell as part of the Southbank Literature Festival, where he elaborated on his choice of form: ‘Sonnets have love in them, which makes them a great form in which to talk about someone trying to kill you. We chatted in the corridor of his hotel, while he ate a croissant. I was able to meet Hayes when he was promoting his book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, a keenly insistent sequence penned in the news-scream fever-dream which followed the 2016 American election.

In 2014 he was awarded a McArthur Fellowship and in 2018 he was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. It was there that he started writing poems. He grew up in South Carolina, before attending Coker College on a basketball scholarship.

His mother, who works as a prison guard, had him when she was 16.

By Stephanie Sy-Quia Terrance Hayes likes to describe his background as ‘very American’.

American sonnet for my past and future