Chain Reading

This collection by Tony Hoagland is pretty fantastic. To be fair, I didn’t love it at first. I thought it was slightly boring. But I pushed myself through the first few poems that I didn’t like, and by page 15, I was totally hooked.

Hoagland’s narrator in this collection has a very laid-back voice, a kind of “We’re just having a cup of coffee together” approach to addressing the reader (indirectly). There are occasions where the narrator becomes a little more high-falutin’ than usual, but Hoagland seems to use this to poke a bit of fun at himself – for instance, in the poem “Time Wars”:

and I said "Kathleen, my talents are not capacious enough / to properly exaggerate your virtues,” / and we both burst out laughing

But for the most part, his narrator sticks to easily familiar speech with a conversational tone. Which works well, because Hoagland uses his poems to tackle some subjects that less brave poets would shy away from: race, sexuality, self-examination and hatred.

Throughout the collection, the reader meets a cast of Hoagland's friends portrayed as characters in the poems - Marie, Kath, Peter, Dean, Terrance. In the very beginning, a good many of the poems in-character: "Peter said this, Ann said that, Boz said this." I found this style to be a little tedious, although there were a few lines thrown around which were absolute gems:

the bony blondes, the lean-jawed guys / who decorate the perfume and the cars - // the pretty ones / the merchandise is wearing this year. // Alex said, "I wish they made a shooting gallery / using people like that."

But the tedium doesn't last long. Hoagland doesn't shy away from uncomfortable ideas:

n Delaware a congressman / accused of sexual misconduct / says clearly at the press conference, / speaking / right into the microphone / that he would like very much / to do it again.

and he seems to talk about things one might think he shouldn't. He tackles those very real concepts having to do with race in the poem "The Change," which is ostensibly about watching a tennis match in which a black tennis player (clearly modeled after one of the Williams sisters) beat the pants off a white tennis player. Hoagland talks about watching the match and being unable to help identifying with the white player, at being unable to help finding the black player so entirely foreign. It's a dangerous poem that walks the very fine line between a racist remark and a politically incorrect - but socially correct - observation:

because she was one of my kind, my tribe, / with her pale eyes and thin lips

Hoagland's observation is simply that of human nature: we side with what we know; we can't help it. He expresses a parallel sentiment in the poem "Rap Music" - that we fear what we don't understand:

I don't know what's going on inside that portable torture chamber, / but I have a bad suspicion / there's a lot of dead white people in there

Hoagland also touches on homophobic hysteria; his poem "Dear John" starts with the following lines:

I never would have told John that faggot joke / if I had known that he was gay;

And with that simple confession, Hoagland begins an observation about the nature of political correctness and how it interferes with our best intentions. He does it again with the poem "Leaving Yourself Behind":

Carrie says it's more rude to stare at a blind man on the street / than to make a fat-person joke about someone on TV.

He plants these uncomfortable ideas right up front in his poems, and you might think it's really just for shock value - "Oh, he's just trying to get a hook." Well, yes, he is just trying to get a hook. But then he delivers, nearly every single time, with a gut-punch that just makes you wish the poem wasn't actually ending.

Not only is Hoagland a fine walker of those dangerous tightropes, but he also seems to enjoy being the class clown a bit. In the poem "Wasteful Gesture Only Not," he contrasts the sadness of a woman visiting her mother's grave with humor:

She knows her mother isn't there but the rectangle of grass / marks off the place where the memories are kept, // like a library book named Dorothy. / Some of the chapters might be: Dorothy, / Better Bird-Watcher Than Cook;

And he also knows his way around beautiful images:

Yet the only tattoo I want / is of a fist and rose, together. / Fist, that helps you survive. / Rose, without which / you have no reason to. (from "The News")

Hoagland is an easy place to start if you're looking to get in to poetry. And if you're already in, he's satisfyingly simple - a far cry from the over-obscure poems in some of the mainstream journals today.