American Sonnet
Quick answer: The American sonnet keeps the sonnet's 14 lines and pressure while dropping fixed rhyme and meter. Learn its history from Wanda Coleman to Terrance Hayes.
An American sonnet is a sonnet that has stopped asking permission. It keeps the essentials, fourteen lines, compression, a turning argument, and discards the rest: no required rhyme scheme, no iambic pentameter, no octave and sestet etiquette. The name signals attitude as much as nationality, a form remade in a country suspicious of inherited rules.
The term is most strongly associated with Wanda Coleman, the Los Angeles poet who published her improvisational American Sonnets in the 1990s, jazz driven fourteen liners that swerved and shouted. Terrance Hayes picked up her torch explicitly in American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, seventy poems all bearing that title, written in the first two hundred days after the 2016 election and published in 2018.
A lineage of rule breakers
Loosened sonnets have a long history: Gerard Manley Hopkins stretched the frame in the nineteenth century, and modernists wrote unrhymed fourteen liners freely. Gerald Stern published a book called American Sonnets in 2002, essays of feeling in shaggy lines. But Coleman gave the form its name's current charge, and Hayes, who called Coleman the mother of the form, made it famous, dedicating his volume in her memory and describing the sonnet as a cage he was locking himself inside with his country. Diane Seuss's frank sonnets, another loose limbed sequence, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022, confirming the mode's dominance.
What stays and what goes
There is no rulebook, and that is partly the point, but in practice American sonnets share a recognisable contract with the reader.
Scholars argue over whether an unrhymed, unmetered fourteen line poem is a sonnet at all. Practitioners answer that the sonnet is a way of thinking, a small room where an argument turns, and that fourteen lines of concentrated pressure earn the name regardless of rhyme.
Writing one
Give yourself the box first: draft knowing you have fourteen lines, no more. Choose a subject with public and private voltage, love tangled with politics, family tangled with history, since the form's tradition thrives on that mix. Write fast toward a turn around line eight or nine, then let the final lines argue with the opening. Keep some sonnet memory in the texture, a half rhyme here, a pentameter line there, so the ghost of the form flickers. The best American sonnets feel like classical sonnets remembered under pressure, not like free verse trimmed to fit.
Strengths and the standing risk
The form suits urgency: political fury, grief on deadline, love poems with teeth. Hayes wrote seventy in two hundred days precisely because the container let him move quickly without collapsing. For contest writers, fourteen free lines with a strong volta is a reliable frame, and judges scoring structure notice a turn that lands even without rhyme. The standing risk is flabbiness, fourteen lines chosen because fourteen sounded sonnet like, with no compression and no turn. If nothing pivots, you have a stanza, not a sonnet. Build the volta first and the name becomes honest.
What poets can take from this
- Commit to exactly fourteen lines before drafting.
- Engineer a genuine volta around the eighth or ninth line.
- Let ghosts of pentameter and rhyme flicker without ruling.
- Pair a private subject with a public one and let them argue.
- Read Coleman, Hayes and Diane Seuss to hear three registers.
- Cut until every line carries pressure; compression is the sonnet's soul.
Try it yourself
Write an American sonnet addressed to something abstract that governs your life, an algorithm, a border, a diagnosis, and let the volta arrive as an unexpected act of tenderness toward it.
Questions
What makes a sonnet an American sonnet?
It keeps the sonnet's fourteen lines, compression and turning argument while abandoning required rhyme schemes and strict iambic pentameter. The label signals a free, often improvisational handling of the tradition.
Who invented the American sonnet?
No single inventor, but Wanda Coleman's American Sonnets from the 1990s gave the form its name and spirit, and Terrance Hayes's 2018 collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, written in tribute to her, made it widely known.
Does an American sonnet need a volta?
In practice, yes. With rhyme and meter gone, the turn of thought is what still makes the poem a sonnet rather than fourteen lines of free verse. Most practitioners keep the volta and often sharpen it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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