• About

Three Worlds One Vision

~ Guyana – Brazil – USA

Three Worlds One Vision

Monthly Archives: July 2020

Darkness Descends

26 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Poetry by Rosaliene Bacchus, United States

≈ 40 Comments

Tags

Discord in America, The undoing of America

Photo by Su0130NAN u00d6NDER on Pexels.com

Darkness descends upon the land

The evil deployed far & wide

return home to devour our flesh

Our enemies revel in our undoing

vengeful gods spewing discord in the wind

The brave are silenced & threatened with evil

teargassed & spirited away in the night

Who will save us from the hateful heart?

Who will save us from the faithful

holding onto false promises?

Who will save us from collaborators

bought with wealth & power?

Candles flickering in the darkness

guide our faltering steps

“American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin” by African American Poet Terrance Hayes

19 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Poetry, United States

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

African American poet, America’s violent racism, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) by Terrance Hayes

My Poetry Corner July 2020 features sonnet 13 from the poetry collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) by African American poet Terrance Hayes. (Note: The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection.) Born in 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina, Hayes is a national award-winning poet and university professor. After receiving his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he taught in Japan, Ohio, and Louisiana before returning to the University of Pittsburgh where he worked for several years. In Pittsburgh, he gained local fame as co-director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

Hayes moved on to New York University to take up his current post of Professor of English. In 2017, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and now serves as an ex-officio member of the Academy’s Board of Directors. The divorced father of two children resides in New York City.

Hayes’ featured sonnet 13 is one of seventy freestyle sonnets, all bearing the same title and length of fourteen lines required for the poetic form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, the sonnets in this poetry collection are mostly political poems about life, love, and death of black men—haunted and hunted by violent racism.

In his 2018 interview for the Poets & Writers Magazine, Hayes tells interviewer Hanif Abdurraqib why he chose the sonnet: “How can I write a traditional love poem to someone or something I don’t deem worthy of my love? I just don’t know what other form would be able to hold this particular moment.”

He further expands on his poetic choice during his interview for The White Review Magazine in January 2019. In trying to express all the complications of love and politics, “I have to change my mind, because it’s a sonnet, because of the volta,” he tells interviewer Rachel Long. “Otherwise, it’s just a box. Something has to give. So whatever I go in with, I have to come out with something new.”

In sonnet 7, the poet alerts (lines 1/2//13/14):

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,
Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.
[…]
Voltas of acoustics, instincts & metaphor. It is not enough
To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed.

In the following eight sonnet, the poet pour[s] a pinch of serious poison and merciful panic into [the] river for assassins like James Earl Ray, Dylann Roof, and others named in the poem. On the volta (lines 11-14), he then affirms:

Love trumps power or blood to trump power
Beauty trumps power or blood to trump power
The names alive are like the names in the graves

In the featured thirteenth sonnet on my Poetry Corner July 2020, Hayes describes all the ways in which the black male is silenced and erased by violent racism.

The earth of my nigga eyes are assassinated.
The deep well of my nigga throat is assassinated.
The tender bells of my nigga testicles are gone.
You assassinate the sound of our bullshit & blissfulness.

Hayes commentary on Trump’s rise to the presidency in sonnet 26 (lines 1-4) resounds loudly today:

America, you just wanted change is all, a return
To the kind of awe experienced after beholding a reign
Of gold. A leader whose metallic narcissism is a reflection
Of your own…

He asks in sonnet 30 (lines 4-6):

Is this a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty,
Stupidity, an idiot’s threats & gangsta narcissisms threading
Every shabby sentence his trumpet constructs?

“…I ain’t mad at you, / Assassin,” Hayes writes in sonnet 53 (lines 12-14). “It’s not the bad people who are brave / I fear, it’s the good people who are afraid.” (Emphasis mine)

To read the complete featured thirteenth sonnet, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” and learn more about the work of the poet Terrance Hayes, go to my Poetry Corner July 2020.

Thought on America’s Independence Day: “A country coming apart at the seams”

05 Sunday Jul 2020

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in United States

≈ 67 Comments

Tags

America in decline, How the American Century Ends, Tom Engelhardt

On America’s 244th year of independence, I offer these “rants” from Tom Engelhardt, an American editor, publisher, and author who belongs to the same generation as our 45th president.

That my generation, whether in the form of Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell, would be responsible for turning imperial America into an autocratic-leaning, collapsing semi-democracy, and a first-class world annihilator, I would have found hard to imagine. [In the early 1970s], if you had told me that, half a century into the future, the world’s fate would rest on a presidential election between a genuine madman and something close to a dead man (that, for all we know, may not prove to be an election at all), I would have dismissed you out of hand. And yet that, it seems, is the pandemic legacy of my generation for which we should all be ashamed, even as we watch the young, driven by the insanity and inanity of it all, turning out in our diseased streets to protest a country coming apart at the seams.

Excerpt from “The Age of Disappointment? Or How the American Century Ends” by Tom Engelhardt, published in TomDispatch.com on June 18, 2020.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch.com and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

A Happy Fourth of July to all my American blogging friends! For the sake of our country and planet, may saner minds prevail.

Subscribe

  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Archives

  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011

Categories

  • About Me
  • Anthropogenic Climate Disruption
  • Brazil
  • Economy and Finance
  • Education
  • Family Life
  • Festivals
  • Fiction
  • Guyana
  • Health Issues
  • Human Behavior
  • Immigrants
  • Leisure & Entertainment
  • Nature and the Environment
  • People
  • Philosophy
  • Poetry
  • Poetry by Rosaliene Bacchus
  • Poets & Writers
  • Recommended Reading
  • Relationships
  • Religion
  • Reviews – The Twisted Circle: A Novel by Rosaliene Bacchus
  • Reviews – Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel by Rosaliene Bacchus
  • Save Our Children
  • Social Injustice
  • Technology
  • The Twisted Circle: A Novel by Rosaliene Bacchus
  • The Writer's Life
  • Uncategorized
  • Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel by Rosaliene Bacchus
  • United States
  • Urban Violence
  • Website Updates
  • Women Issues
  • Working Life

Blogroll

  • Angela Consolo Mankiewicz
  • Caribbean Book Blog
  • Dan McNay
  • Dr. Gerald Stein
  • Foreign Policy Association
  • Guyanese Online
  • Writer's Digest
  • WritersMarket: Where & How to Sell What You Write

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 2,852 other subscribers

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Three Worlds One Vision
    • Join 2,852 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Three Worlds One Vision
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...