V E R S E and I M A G E

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes

Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,

He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds

Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,

It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped, “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were

Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to by your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

Tony Hoagland (1953-2018)

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Why have I gotten myself into this? Dutiful half hour early at the Forsyth County Public Library, pick up my packet, find my table and sit down to await unnamed arrivals for the poetry reading and discussion. I know no one here. The other table facilitators chat with their neighbors, comfortable and congenial. They definitely look like they know what they’re doing, what they’ll say when the small group interactions begin. They look smart. What am I doing here?

Now my table has filled up and we’re all listening to the librarian introduce Tony Hoagland, but when he stands up and smiles he is not professorial or imposing. He is a guy reading a poem. Afterwards the people at my table have nothing to say and my throat is too dry to croak out one of the prompts on the sheet I’ve been given, but then a woman and then her sister start telling stories somehow connected to Tony’s poem. He himself sits down to listen. I’m sweating. A good facilitator fades into the background and let’s his students shine, right?

Tony nods, speaks to those two women, moves to the next table. Later I’m driving home and the whole scene keeps spooling through my head. I miss my turnoff. Next week The Sun arrives in the mailbox. There’s a poem by Tony Hoagland. No, no, I just made that part up, but safe to say there have been poems by Tony Hoagland lurking in my mind ever since that afternoon in the library. Lurking, and every once in a while stepping into the light.

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America, Tony Hoagland

And then the famous poet stops by my table

to eavesdrop on our discussion of his poem, and Betty

goes on and on about how we are each one of us

in our own little world, we don’t see

the people drowning around us, we don’t want to,

and even she who is sensitive sometimes prays

she won’t see another stray dog beside the road,

while Donna the quiet sister finally tells us

the first two lines remind her

of the teenage brothers who catch the school bus

out front of her house, how when she asked

why they wear those baggy jeans half-hanging

off their hips the older one just shrugged, “It’s

the style,” but the younger boy piped

“It looks cool!”  Yeah cool, she told him,

well you’d better have a cute little tush because

it’ll be real cool when those pants fall down. Then

she agrees with Betty, the poem’s about

how we’re all put on earth to help each other.

I’m on the poet’s side, I want to be the one

who helps the sisters open up, look deeper

into the lines, think metaphor, discover something

true, and while the famous poet explains how a poem

can have many voices and that the conversation

and conflict between them jars and shudders

us into new ways of knowing, I can’t quit nodding.

After the workshop I’m halfway home before I quit wishing, no

before I even admit to myself I have been wishing

I’d been the moderator at that other table

where they called the poem’s opening strophe

Dante’s Inferno only shorter. Hell, I’d come armed

with my own strophes, Ginsberg’s America

“like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his

automobiles more so they’re all different sexes,”

and I’m remembering during Q&A the banter

between the famous poet and that golden table,

the hot smart brightness of it still not large enough

to reach across the room for me,

but here on the fourlane I’ve missed my exit

because now I feel like a real little shit

for mentally dissing those sisters, me who would never

confess that before the reading I had to look up “strophe”

in the dictionary, while right at this moment Donna is meeting

those boys as they get off the bus and Betty has stopped

beside the road, her Ford Taurus, solid, best thing Henry’s put out

since the Model A, to pick up a stray dog.

April 13, 2007

[Poetry Day America won the McDill Award given annually by the NC Poetry Society]

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My first introduction to Tony Hoagland was in the pages of The Sun magazine, published in Chapel Hill, NC, then later at the workshop I’ve described above, sponsored by the Winston-Salem / Forsyth County Library. Tony was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As the child of an army doctor, he moved often during childhood. According to the novelist Don Lee, Hoagland “attended and dropped out of several colleges, picked apples and cherries in the Northwest, lived in communes, followed the Grateful Dead and became a Buddhist.” He earned an MFA from University of Arizona and in addition to his many awards, fellowships, and positions as educator, he re-established his NC roots by serving on the faculty of the low-residency Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Tony Hoagland died in 2018 at age 64 of pancreatic cancer.

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[The quotation by Don Lee is from  Ploughshares Authors & Articles > Tony Hoagland, Zacharis Award > by Don Lee Archived October 13, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.]

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Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:

. . . . . every Friday I present one or more poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;

. . . . . some Saturdays I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.

If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.

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Thanks again for joining the conversation.

[ from What Narcissism Means to Me,

Gray Wolf Press, Minneapolis MN: © 2003 by Tony Hoagland ]

It was the winter we ate a lot of oatmeal to stay warm.

We lived on 17th and G Streets; Kath called it the G spot.

At night in the bathtub I read The Collected Letters of Virginia Woolf,

trying to keep the pages of the 20th-century prose from getting wet,

reading the guest lists for her dinner parties

as she knocked out book after book between her shattering depressions.

Sometimes I would meet Richard at the Chinese place for dinner,

and one two three hours would vanish like our food.

We would stand outside The Great Wall, adjusting our scarves

in a pastoral moment of urban separation,

watching the cabs whiz by in the dusk.

The Vietnam War monument was just five blocks away;

on Saturday you would always see a vet or two,

in their windbreakers and baseball caps—

heads down, crying in the shrubs—

the little POW buttons and various insignia attached to their clothing

like they were advertising something.

We ourselves were fighting the Time Wars:

we could feel it speeding up, rapidly escaping,

like the hiss from a leaky balloon.

We were trying to plug it, to slow it down, to decelerate,

but none of us was having much success—

One day in February Kath brought in some roses and said,

“Here, the sun came 93 million miles

to make these flowers that I killed for you,”

and I said, “Kathleen, my talents are not capacious enough

to properly exaggerate your virtues,”

and we both burst out laughing

and time stopped right over our heads like a little red car.

On June 14th, Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal,

“Windy day. I am the hare, far ahead of my critics, the hounds.”

Something endearing about the mixture of weather report and vanity.

Something lonely about this image of success.

We ourselves aren’t thinking about the future anymore.

What we want is to calm time down, to get time in a good mood,

to make time feel wanted.

We just want to give time many homemade gifts,

covered with fingerprints and kisses.

Tony Hoagland (1953-2018)

❀ . 
 . 

My first introduction to Tony Hoagland was in the pages of The Sun magazine, published in Chapel Hill, NC, then later at a workshop sponsored by the Winston-Salem / Forsyth County Library. Tony was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As the child of an army doctor, he moved often during childhood. According to the novelist Don Lee, Hoagland “attended and dropped out of several colleges, picked apples and cherries in the Northwest, lived in communes, followed the Grateful Dead and became a Buddhist.” He earned an MFA from University of Arizona and in addition to his many awards, fellowships, and positions as educator, he re-established his NC roots by serving on the faculty of the low-residency Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Tony Hoagland died in 2018 at age 64 of pancreatic cancer.

❀

[The quotation by Don Lee is from  Ploughshares Authors & Articles > Tony Hoagland, Zacharis Award > by Don Lee Archived October 13, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.]
 .

❀    ❀    ❀    ❀    ❀

Thank you for visiting Verse and Image:

. . . . . every Friday I present one or more poems I’ve read this week that particularly speak to me;

. . . . . some Saturdays I present one or two poems submitted by YOU, my readers.

If you would like to offer a poem for consideration, either by a favorite author or your own work, please view these GUIDELINES for Saturday Readers Share:

If you would like to receive an email each time a post appears, please SUBSCRIBE to Verse and Image using the button on the Home Page.

If you have a hard time finding the SUBSCRIBE button on this WordPress site, you can send me your email address and I will add you to the subscriber list. Send your request to

COMMENTS@GRIFFINPOETRY.COM

Thanks again for joining the conversation.