Tony Hoagland: Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty

I was reading an interview from the Poetry Society of America with Tony Hoagland in which he explains how important political issues have become for him as he has matured. He ends the interview with the following observation:

Unfortunately, a whole generation of contemporary young American poets has largely made an unconscious retreat into aesthetic self preoccupation.—we seem to be in a period of Aestheticism—art made for art's sake. The best and brightest migrate towards the most erudite and specialized and least politicized "projects."

  

Amen, Tony Hoagland.  Finally, someone has articulately confirmed what for me has been pretty obvious. This is the age of aesthetic pre-occupation—how else to explain the dearth of poems about the war(s), the soul smothering commercialism that hounds us all from the cradle to the grave, and government corruption eroding what we thought were are unalienable civil liberties?  (By the way, NSA, I forgot my email password.  Send it to me?) 

So I am inclined to like Tony Hoagland right off the bat, and when his book made it my desk, I made a point of reading it.  I distinctly remember enjoying his earlier collection Donkey Gospel so I was prepared to praise. In truth there is much to praise in Hoagland’s poetry. At the same time, there are poems like this one which I am compelled to offer in its entirety:

Visitation

Now when I visit Ellen's body in my memory,

it is like visiting a cemetery. I look

at the chiseled, muscular belly

and at the perfect thirty-year-old breasts

and the fine blond purse of her pussy

and I kneel and weep a little there.

I am not the first person to locate god

in erectile tissue and the lubricating gland

but when I kiss her breast and feel

the tough button of her nipple

rise and stiffen to my tongue

like the dome of a small mosque

in an ancient, politically incorrect city,

I feel holy, I begin to understand religion.

I circle around to see the basilica

of her high, Irish American butt

and I look at her demure little asshole

and I am sorry I didn’t spend more time with it

And her mouth and her eyes and her white white teeth

Its beauty beauty  beauty which in a way Ellen

herself the person distracted me from .

It’s beauty that has been redistributed now

By the justice of chance and temporal economy.

Now I’m like a sad astronaut living

deep in space, breathing the oxygen of memory

Out of a silver can. Now I’m like an angel

Drifting over the surface of the earth

brushing its meadows and forests

with the tips of my wings

with wonder and regret and affection.

I guess I can overlook the  female objectification in economic terms—the purse of her pussy, her beauty  redistributed in some other economy—and I can overcome the tedium  of the religious imagery-- however hackneyed—the domes of her breasts, the basilica of her butt.  Lord knows, there are poems and poets vastly more dull. Yet notice how he describes Ellen’s teeth  as white, white.   Maybe he ran out of economic or religious images, but is this anything other than just bad bad?

The lines

and I look at her demure little asshole

and I am sorry I didn’t spend more time with it.

really beg everyone’s pardon.  One wonders  if he had spent more time with Ellen’s demure little asshole, what would that have looked like?  Could we have looked? Where would they spend this quality time? 

One can only guess, but I imagine they’d certainly take advantage of Appleby’s Two for Twenty Menu (http://www.applebees.com/menu/2-for-20), then perhaps off to a hockey game or an AWP Conference.  Hoagland ends this poem by having the speaker turn into an angel and flap around waxing wistful.  He then applies the brakes of polysyndeton with three more or less shameful abstractions.  

Of course, everyone is entitled to write a bad poem and despite this poem, I am still a Hoagland fan because, oddly enough, there are many poems in this collection that are as wildly good as this one is wildly bad. 

Tony Hoagland’s Unicorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty  (Graywolf Press) consists of 46 poems  divided, like seemingly all collections of poetry, into three sections.  Hoagland has an almost constant acerbic tone which generally veers away from righteous superiority towards empathy.  This is the standard arc of many of his best poems. The following  poem, though from an earlier collection, best shows how Hoagland subverts our expectations and moves towards a difficult connection and away from easy derision.

America

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 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 be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

I like this poem with its speaker adopting Whitman’s democratic position:

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

No more modest than immodest.

At the same time I can't help but wonder to what extent it was influenced by William Carlos Williams’ great early poem Yachts which also deals with the indifference of the rich and demonstrates the superior power of Williams’ images over Hoagland’s prose

It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair

until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind;

the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies

lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold. Broken,

beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up

they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising

in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.

Writing a good political poem is as hard as driving black hogs in the dark. There are so many things that can go astray. Here is a successful poem by Hoagland—one that targets Capitalism’s ability to transform and deflect all ideological criticism back into the capitalist system where it becomes, eventually, some toothless commodity. Like an enormous constrictor, there is nothing Capitalism can’t out-flank.  I think of this whole process whenever I walk into Wells Fargo and see a print of a mural by Diego Rivera.

Hard Rain

After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there’s nothing
we can’t pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
About all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,

one day at a time—

and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood-
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.

Good poems subvert expectations, offer a surprise, an unexpected volta, and this one does just that by referencing the talk show therapist and his pacifying ideologemes, by switching to Dear Abby, that ultimate index of social cluelessness, then implicating the speaker in the entire process.                                  

Read straight through, I can see how Hoagland’s poetry with its occasionally whiny and neurotic voice would be tiresome—like a Woody Allen movie marathon. But this comparison is flawed. These are, for the most part, poems of witness, outward looking. When they are not, Hoagland retreats into the same aesthetic self- preoccupation that he so dislikes in other poets. All in all, spotty or not, these poems represent a badly needed change of pace.

The Wilson Review: Independent Reviews of Contemporary Poetry: Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s Poetry in America (Univers...

The Wilson Review: Independent Reviews of Contemporary Poetry: Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s Poetry in America (Univers...: Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s Poetry in America (University of Pittsburgh Press) is her third collection of poems. It consists of forty-four poe...

Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s Poetry in America (University of Pittsburgh Press) is her third collection of poems. It consists of forty-four poems organized, like so many books of poetry, into three sections, with more than half of the poems cast in invitingly readable two or three line stanzas.  This collection has been a dozen years in the making. Her last collection, Eve’s Striptease, was a quiet triumph of lyrical and narrative poems. 

With her latest book, what announces itself to me on first read is a vein of Western Pennsylvania toughness and, related to this toughness, a fondness for all that is no-nonsense, plain-spoken, and expedient.  The poem Garlic, for example, concludes:

Oh think of the time a person can waste

All her life, she said, trying to peel off

Impossible paper skins when you can just

Strike the thing with whatever’s at hand.

In the poem Cardio Kickboxing in an Town of 6,000  the citizens of the town are all punching through and toughening up—

Harder, harder! She screams, I know you can

Hit harder than that! She’s a third grade teacher

And mother of four. Yes! That’s better, now

Give me your uppercut. Swing from your legs!

Harder, harder! Whatever you got, I can take.

The toughness even bleeds into the landscape as in this excellent poem entitled Westmoreland

Jewel weed thrived along Stink Crik, water rusted

in ponds of runoff and in parking lots slag chips

were flamingo feathers. The Del Bene brothers rode to fires

hanging off the fire truck their bloody butcher aprons

flapping brides rode to their wedding receptions

clinging to that truck, veils trailing smoke tongues.

This is the world and time where—

Band members were faggots, thespians were faggots, brains

Hid in the library during Activity Period

Yep, Kasdorf definitely renders the zeitgeist of the mill towns along Monongahela Valley in the mid- to late 1940s and early 1950s, accurately.  The steel industry was king and few questioned the king because the king provided jobs.  Few questioned the fact that there was absolutely no vegetation of any sort growing in an half mile radius of the U.S. Steel’s Zinc Works in Donora Pennsylvania. The infamous Donora smog inversion of 1948, that forced school children, my own mother among them, to squint their way to school wearing bandanas over their faces like bandits, that blotted out the sun for four days, that killed twenty people and sickened thousands, finally forced the American Steel and Wire Company and the U.S. Steel Zinc Works to cease operations, but, rest assured, full operations resumed in the less than 24 hours.

What separates Julia Kasdorf from the run-of-the-mill town poets is her refusal to condemn. Even though the time and towns were undeniably toxic, like living in a lit cigarette, finally there is no place like home.  Kasdorf treats the landscape not with a judging, critical eye, but looks back with the almost absolving fondness of a native:

Like all the Hawthorne they forced

us to read in the 11^th grade, was Westmoreland County wasted

on us, so young, all we could learn was to hate it?

Perhaps part of the Western Pennsylvania grittiness that saturates many of these poems comes from Kasdorf’s repeated use of that apotheosis of steel—the automobile.  Fully half of the poems either involve cars overtly like the poems Doubling the Digits, 78’ Chevy, The Baby Screaming in the Backseat and The Girl in the Backseat Returns to Pittsburgh” or indirectly like the poems Gettysburg 1996  or Gravity Hill.   In her poem English 213: Introduction to Poetry Writing, she writes

A car is not a metaphor, is a machine made of countless metal parts

that keep us mindful  of oil, coolant, a milk jug in the truck

in which to dilute it, mindful of all the ways a day can turn. . .

Perhaps it is only right that a collection entitled Poetry in America should have the automobile figure in so prominently, but lest I leave you with impression Kasdorf is solely the poet of mill town blight, the Phillip Levine of the Monongahela Valley, I hasten to highlight other aspects of the book.

As Kasdorf is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State, you might expect a number of poems that deal with the classroom—teaching or memories of being taught.  There are several of these, and the poem Elegy Against----Ten Years Later is the best among them:

When I read the news, I imagined him bloody

in a claw foot bathtub back home. Surely

in poor Oklahoma the tubs are ordinary, but

How could a plain tub hold his body? I want
the graceful curve, white and smooth and cool

And tender against his large hard shoulders.

The second section of the book also features poems about motherhood.  In writing these poems, these songs of innocence, Kasdorf joins the chorus of female poets-- Sharon Olds, Naomi Nye, and Robin Behn spring to mind—who have written effectively of the new magic of childhood. The book also features several fixed form poems—several deft sonnets and even a ghazal.  This was a pleasant surprise.  The final section of the book finds Kasdorf returning to the familiar ground of life in the Mennonite community.  Her first award winning collection, Sleeping Preacher, gave the world a glimpse into the Amish-Mennonite community and dealt with the speaker’s problematic cultural adjustments.  This new collection’s most powerful and memorable poem, Rachel on the Threshing Floor, returns to Mifflin County and the poet’s own family tragedy:

All that is left of her: a long, gray apron,

steel rimmed spectacles with one shattered lens,

two diaries, her name Rachel embroidered

on a quilt patch, and the photograph from 1948.   

…

She was so beloved, the stable was full and horses

had to be tied to fence posts the length of the lane

Follow though buggy ruts and dung piles, enter the barn

Find her body and children too stunned to know she is gone

Kasdorf’s Poetry in America sounds every note on the scale of tones, forms,  and intensities. There are notes of toughness and tenderness, notes of witness and experience—all the notes, to my ear,  in tune.  

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