American poet Tony Hoagland (1954-2018) Photo Credit: Lithub

The Hero’s Journey

I remember the first time I looked at the spotless marble floor of a giant hotel lobby
and understood that someone had waxed and polished it all night

and that someone else had pushed his cart of cleaning supplies
down the long air-conditioned corridors of the Steinberg Building across the street

and emptied all two hundred and forty-three wastebaskets
    stopping now and then to scrape up chewing gum with a
         special flat-bladed tool
                         he keeps in his back pocket.

It tempered my enthusiasm for “The Collected Letters of Henry James, Volume II”
and for Joseph Campbell’s “Journey of the Hero”

Chapter 5, “The Test,” in which he describes how the
“tall and fair-complexioned” knight, Gawain,
                            makes camp one night beside a cemetery

but cannot sleep for all the voices rising up from down below—

Let him stay out there a hundred nights, 
                            with his thin blanket and his cold armor and his
                                   useless sword,

until he understands exactly how
the glory of the protagonist is always paid for
                         by a lot of minor characters.

In the morning he will wake and gallop back to safety;
he will hear his name embroidered into
                            toasts and songs.

But now he knows
        there is a country he had not accounted for,
                     and that country has its citizens:

the one-armed baker sweeping out his shop at 4 a.m.;

the prisoner sweating in his narrow cell;

and that woman in the nursing home,
                       who has worked there for a thousand years,

taking away the bedpans,
lifting up and wiping off the soft heroic buttocks of Odysseus.

Tony Hoagland from Application for Release from the Dream, Graywolf Press, 2015 (Please note this version differs from the original first published in the New Yorker in 2012)

Such a vintage Tony Hoagland poem! Funny, sad, heart-breaking. And it questions all our (my) assumptions of who is a male hero and who isn’t! Here, Hoagland, as he is so often, is poet as shit disturber and trouble maker.  Poet as seismic disturbance! Poet as changer of the lens I use to look at my accustomed world.

But there’s a risk! A shit disturber can get shit blown back all over him. A poet who sends shock waves against cultural complacency and blindness can get shaken up badly in the aftershocks. Hoagland was a shit disturber and did get blow back. Are you prepared to face that? Am I? Especially in this time of mob on-line shaming? Are you, am I, prepared in good faith to write a so-called bad poem that suddenly transforms you on-line into a “bad or shitty” person?

American poet Marie Howe said this about Hoagland a few weeks after his death last October:

Tony Hoagland tore into subjects that are not comfortable. Many think he blundered. He was not an apologist, not ever. Many believe the speaker in his later poems was Tony Hoagland himself: of course it is; of course it isn’t. He wanted to see into the shadow and to expose it. He did that, and in doing that he did what few of us are willing to risk or endure.

Marie Howe from Marie Howe Remembers Tony Hoagland, LitHub, November 9th, 2018
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