Tony Hoagland

Tony Hoagland was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He earned a BA from the University of Iowa and an MFA from the University of Arizona. Hoagland was the author of the poetry collections Sweet Ruin (1992), which was chosen for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and won the Zacharis Award from Emerson College; Donkey Gospel (1998), winner of the James Laughlin Award; What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Rain (2005); Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010); Application for Release from the Dream (2015); Recent Changes in the Vernacular (2017); and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2018). He has also published two collections of essays about poetry: Real Sofistakashun (2006) and Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays (2014). Hoagland’s poetry is known for its acerbic, witty take on contemporary life and “straight talk,” in the words of New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner: “At his frequent best … Hoagland is demonically in touch with the American demotic.” Hoagland’s many honors and awards included fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He received the O.B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award, and the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. Hoagland taught at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. He died in October 2018.

Special Problems in Vocabulary

There is no single particular noun

for the way a friendship,

stretched over time, grows thin,

then one day snaps with a popping sound.

No verb for accidentally

breaking a thing

while trying to get it open

—a marriage, for example.

No particular phrase for

losing a book

in the middle of reading it,

and therefore never learning the end.

There is no expression, in English, at least,

for avoiding the sight

of your own body in the mirror,

for disliking the touch

of the afternoon sun,

for walking into the flatlands and dust

that stretch out before you

after your adventures are done.

No adjective for gradually speaking less and less,

because you have stopped being able

to say the one thing that would

break your life loose from its grip.

Certainly no name that one can imagine

for the aspen tree outside the kitchen window,

in spade-shaped leaves

spinning on their stems,

working themselves into

a pale-green, vegetable blur.

No word for waking up one morning

and looking around,

because the mysterious spirit

that drives all things

seems to have returned,

and is on your side again.

Published:

2015

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Faith & Hope

Friendship

Nature

Poems of the Everyday