HOAGLAND, Tony

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Nationality: American. Born: Anthony Dey Hoagland, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, 19 November 1953. Education: Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1971–73; University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1974–77, B.G.S. 1977; University of Arizona, Tucson, 1979–83, M.F.A. 1983. Family: Married Betty Sasaki in 1995. Career: Instructor, Arizona Western College, Yuma, 1986, College of the Holy Names, Oakland, California, 1989–90, St. Mary's College, Moraga, California, 1990–91, and University of Maine, Farmington, 1992. Writer-in-residence, Kalamazoo College, Michigan, Summer 1991. Since 1993 faculty member, writing program, Warren Wilson College, Asheville, North Carolina, and instructor, Colby College, Waterville, Maine. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1987, 1994; Pushcart prize in poetry, 1991, 1993; Brittingham prize, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992; John C. Zacharis prize, Emerson College, 1994. Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown fellow, 1986. Member: Academy of American Poets. Address: 47 Redington Street, Waterville, Maine 04901, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

A Change in Plans (chapbook). Sierra Vista, Arizona, San Pedro Press, 1985.

Talking to Stay Warm (chapbook). Minneapolis, Minnesota, Coffee Cup Press, 1986.

History of Desire (chapbook). Tucson, Arizona, Moon Pony Press, 1990.

Sweet Ruin. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.

Donkey Gospel: Poems. Saint Paul, Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 1998.

Recording: Lunch Poems, Tony Hoagland, 10/7/99, University of California, Berkeley, 1999.

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Critical Study: "Poetry Chronicle: An Extravagant Three: New Poetry by Mitchell, Hoagland, and Gallagher" by Peter Harris, in Virginia Quarterly Review (Charlottesville, Virginia), 69 (4), Fall 1993.

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The total quantity of Tony Hoagland's poetry is relatively small. Three slim chapbooks were incorporated in large part into the full-length book Sweet Ruin, selected by Donald Justice as the 1992 winner of the Brittingham prize. In addition, he has published other poems in various magazines. But the body of Hoagland's work is fine honed, and it has won considerable admiration not only from Justice but also from critics like Carl Dennis and Carolyn Kizer. Hoagland's poems characteristically open with dramatic flair: "When I think of what I know about America, /I think of kissing my best friend's wife /in the parking lot of the zoo one afternoon …" or "That was the summer my best friend /called me a faggot on the telephone, /hung up, and vanished from the earth …" These openings suggest the narrative mode in which Hoagland likes to work, and the need to find out what happens draws the reader into the poem. Hoagland develops his narratives in longish poems, almost always more than a page and sometimes as long as three pages, that normally resolve themselves in a wry, epigrammatic twist that implicitly acknowledges the insolubility of the initial premise; after you kiss your best friend's wife or after your best friend calls you a faggot, there is no going back.

The geography of Hoagland's poetry is white, middle-class, suburban, post-1960s. Hoagland explores this region with a pervasive irony, a bravura wit, and sometimes a probing self-awareness. Many of the poems seem to be autobiographical, edging toward the confessional. Hoagland, or his invented persona, tells us not only about his best friends but also about how his father deliberately ruined (thus the title of the book) his own marriage and was then struck down by a heart attack; about how, at age seventeen, the young poet watched his mother shrivel away with cancer; about his grandmother Bernice, who believed that "people with good manners /naturally had yachts, knew how to waltz /and dribbled French into their sentences /like salad dressing"; about "that architect, my brother," who "lost his voice, and then his wife /because he was too proud to say, 'Please, don't go"'"; about the rock concerts that filled his ears and those of his friends with scar tissue; and about many, many girlfriends. Sometimes the "I" becomes a "you" to imply that these experiences are typical of a generation and a particular social group. Thus, in one poem we read of "the night your girlfriend /first disappeared beneath the sheets /to take you in her red, wet mouth /with an amethystine sweetness /and a surprising expertise, /then came up for a kiss /as her reward …"

In the most resonant of Hoagland's poems the thin and somewhat brittle social surface opens up to reveal unexpected depths. Sometimes the depths are religious, for God, it seems, is keeping an eye on us. In one marvelously delicate poem the poet shares a late-night cigarette with God, and in this moment "things"—the clutter of American middle-class life, not only the cars and the microwaves but all the responsibilities and human entanglements too—fall away, and we find ourselves in the presence of a great and blessed emptiness:

   One does so much
     building up, so much feverish
       acquiring,
   but really, it is all aimed

     at a condition of exhausted
       simplicity, isn't it?
   We don't love things.

The poet realizes that, at least in our sleep, we can escape the tyranny of things. All about him (and God) are "bodies /falling from the precipice /of sleep," who for a few hours do not

         remember how to suffer
   or how to run from it.
      They are like the stars,
         or potted plants, or salty oceanic waves.

It seems that even in American suburbia getting and having can sometimes fade away to allow a few moments of simple being, although the reference to potted plants seems to twist the poem back toward irony.

In a few of his later poems Hoagland chooses to probe beneath the surface of American middle-class life in quest not of spiritual depths but of the social and economic underpinnings of this way of life. In "From This Height," for example, we are invited to observe a seduction scene that takes place beside a hot tub in an eighth-floor condominium. The speaker, caught up in the elegance of his surroundings, suddenly finds himself looking through this veneer as he recognizes that

            we are on top of a pyramid
   of all the facts
   that make this possible:
   the furnace that heats the water,
   the truck that hauled the fuel,
   the artery of highway
   blasted through the mountains …

At the bottom, the speaker realizes, down there "inside history's body /the slaves are still singing in the dark." The speaker cannot think of anything to do with this knowledge except to kiss the girl and eat another mouthful of the "high calorie paté … /which, considering the price, /would be a sin /not to enjoy." But while the speaker of the poem seeks to deflect his new awareness with cynical wit, the poem seems to ask another kind of response from us—to move beyond cynicism and to act on this new and bitter knowledge.

—Burton Hatlen