Tony Hoagland: Flying in the Face Of it All

Is poetry relevant in the current political climate or in the face of mass culture?  The late Tony Hoagland answered that question eloquently in the essay, "Mass Culture and the American Poet: The Poem as Vaccination" recently published in Gulf Coast Magazine:

The symptoms of our commercialized environment are familiar—a loss of fundamental contact with reality, an inability to think and feel clearly, a sense of proportion that is relentlessly invaded, destabilized and distorted. The end result is a sense of being both magnificently stimulated and trivialized, and an anesthetized condition of self that is, paradoxically, a radical kind of suffering. The problem we have inherited is a permanent one: how is it possible for the American poet to grapple with these aspects of mass culture, whose mind-bending presence is equal to any event in our private lives? How is it possible to include the marketplace in our report on the world, without being engulfed by it? Is irony sufficient? Will aloof superiority serve well enough?

Hoagland provides nice examples of how well poetry can rise to the challenge.  Read the essay at https://gulfcoastmag.org/online/blog/mass-culture-and-the-american-poet-the-poem-as-vaccination/

In a second essay "The Pursuit of Ignorance..." published in the New Ohio Review, Hoagland meditates on poetry's ability to articulate not knowing: Dante, Emerson, Transtromer, Merwin, and others. "The greatest human intellectual achievement of the twentieth century was the discovery of how fucking clueless we human beings are," he writes in the first sentence.  To read more, go to 
https://www.ohio.edu/nor/a/content/pdfs/hoagland-ignorance.pdf

Hoagland himself was a master at creating poems that were pointed cultural critiques and also full of wit and compassion.  In his obituary in the NYTimes in October 2018, Neil Genzlinger wrote: "He found insights and imagery in the everyday: a pool in an Austin, Tex., park; a spaghetti strap on a woman’s dress that won’t stay put; an old man dying from too much Fox News. " Read this poem by Tony Hoagland, "Coming and Going," at  https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/coming-and-going

Tony Hoagland has several poetry books. These are some of my favorites titles:  Recent Changes in the Vernacular, Application for Release from the Dream, What Narcissism Means to Me, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, and Donkey Gospel.  

The Pleasure Principle by Philip Larkin

According to Philip Larkin:

It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance, the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.

To read the entire essay, go to
http://www.mrbauld.com/larkinpl.html