V E R S E and I M A G E

[ 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)

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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 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.

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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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