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.