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[ from What Narcissism Means to Me,
Gray Wolf Press, Minneapolis MN: © 2003 by Tony Hoagland ]
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America
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Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison
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Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,
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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
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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
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Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America
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And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,
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And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money
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That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,
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He gasped, “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—
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And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—
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Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,
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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,
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And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
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“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”
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But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be
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When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river
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Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters
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And yet it seems to by your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?
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Tony Hoagland (1953-2018)
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❀ ❀ ❀
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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?
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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?
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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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❀ ❀ ❀
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Poetry Day America
“. . . I am asleep in America too,
and I don’t know how to wake myself, either”
America, Tony Hoagland
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And then the famous poet stops by my table
to eavesdrop on our discussion of his poem, and Betty
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goes on and on about how we are each one of us
in our own little world, we don’t see
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the people drowning around us, we don’t want to,
and even she who is sensitive sometimes prays
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she won’t see another stray dog beside the road,
while Donna the quiet sister finally tells us
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the first two lines remind her
of the teenage brothers who catch the school bus
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out front of her house, how when she asked
why they wear those baggy jeans half-hanging
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off their hips the older one just shrugged, “It’s
the style,” but the younger boy piped
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“It looks cool!” Yeah cool, she told him,
well you’d better have a cute little tush because
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it’ll be real cool when those pants fall down. Then
she agrees with Betty, the poem’s about
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how we’re all put on earth to help each other.
I’m on the poet’s side, I want to be the one
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who helps the sisters open up, look deeper
into the lines, think metaphor, discover something
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true, and while the famous poet explains how a poem
can have many voices and that the conversation
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and conflict between them jars and shudders
us into new ways of knowing, I can’t quit nodding.
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After the workshop I’m halfway home before I quit wishing, no
before I even admit to myself I have been wishing
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I’d been the moderator at that other table
where they called the poem’s opening strophe
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Dante’s Inferno only shorter. Hell, I’d come armed
with my own strophes, Ginsberg’s America
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“like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they’re all different sexes,”
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and I’m remembering during Q&A the banter
between the famous poet and that golden table,
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the hot smart brightness of it still not large enough
to reach across the room for me,
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but here on the fourlane I’ve missed my exit
because now I feel like a real little shit
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for mentally dissing those sisters, me who would never
confess that before the reading I had to look up “strophe”
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in the dictionary, while right at this moment Donna is meeting
those boys as they get off the bus and Betty has stopped
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beside the road, her Ford Taurus, solid, best thing Henry’s put out
since the Model A, to pick up a stray dog.
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Bill Griffin
April 13, 2007
[Poetry Day America won the McDill Award given annually by the NC Poetry Society]
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❀ ❀ ❀
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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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❀
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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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