Bad or Failed Poems vs Bad Person – In the Age of Social Media Another Look at Tony Hoagland (1954-2018)

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

There, maybe the best summation I have read of the poetry and life of Hoagland. Huge thanks for this to Howe. Earlier on in her memorial piece on Hoagland she said:

Tony Hoagland was committed to letting the shadow out of the box—to exposing the loneliness and lostness of men, and the violence that almost inevitably erupts when the nerve of that loneliness is exposed. “I wanted to punch her right in the mouth and that’s the truth.”

Howe doesn’t stop there. She adds this:

He might have stalled there, but in the last books, without losing any of the humor that made his poems so accessible (and popular), the poems begin to insist on the catastrophic effect of male dread. Tony Hoagland writes a poem called “The Change” in which his speaker enacts his own racism; he writes ”Cause of Death: Fox News” where the old male, having refused vision, begins to glimpse the end of his reign of terror; and finally he writes “Peaceful Transition,” a poem soaked with grief for what men have done to the living world, a grief that finally disables the rage that has created the absolute catastrophe. [To read Cause of Death: Fox News, please see below.]

One of the poems Howe mentions has been the elephant in the room when it comes to measuring the legacy of Tony Hoagland. That’s the poem The Change written from the voice of a white man expressing offensive and uncomfortable, to say the least, views on race as he watches a tennis match between and a white and a black woman. To read The Change please click here.

The Change has been sliced, diced and micro-analyzed to death, it seems to me. And so has the written public dialogue between Hoagland and the celebrated black American poet Claudia Rankine who in a talk at a huge writers’ convention in 2011 publicly stated had badly the poem affected her as a black woman. Hoagland’s response, typically, as Howe says, was unapologetic.(Do I wish Hoagland has responded differently? For sure. But then he wouldn’t be Hoagland.) That defensive response didn’t help! That’s when accusations of Hoagland as racist (read, bad or shitty man) began in earnest. Perhaps Hoagland’s brave poetics and his unapologetic nature (for good or for bad) go hand in hand. I know I am not as brave poetically as he was.

Canadian journalist Ian Brown, in a feature article on Hoagland in The Globe and Mail in February 2019 says this about the impact of Rankine’s talk on The Change: Her talk went viral, and Hoagland’s reputation was slightly, but permanently, stained. I would wish this wasn’t true. I think it might be. This doesn’t mean I excuse the poem in the way it hurt and offended a lot of readers both black and white and including Rankine. But I won’t agree that this deserves to stain his reputation permanently.

It seems clear to me Hoagland meant this poem to provoke a discussion about how embedded racism was in the U.S. but he misjudged how badly it would be received and that perhaps it was not well written enough to succeed in achieving what he hoped it would. As black Jamaican/American poet Kwame Dawes said to American poet Dion O’Reilly (see further comments by O’Reilly below): Hoagland thinks it’s enough to be honest about his worst thoughts, but it’s not.

Ok, I can get that. But then I come back to Howe’s words: 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. I think we need writers who are not afraid to do that.

In an age of mob on-line shaming which convicts and sentences so called wrong-doers summarily, poets like Hoagland that take big risks by poking their fingers in the eye of culturally sensitive issues can expect to be excoriated. And as Howe says that is something only a few of us are willing to risk or endure.

American poet Keetje Kuipers who curated a series in Poetry Northwest last year called On Failure that deals with writing on touchy subjects, especially race, considers that Hoagland got his poem The Change wrong but that doesn’t make him or the poem racist as some have suggested:

For me, Hoagland’s mistake wasn’t writing or even publishing “The Change” (which Daisy Fried does an excellent job of breaking down here). No, the mistake was in not fessing up to the obvious fact that the poem was, in many ways, a failure, a belly flop, a full-on mess of an attempt by a white poet to engage with race in America today.

But apologizing wasn’t Tony’s style. And yet, and yet… in his poems he could admits his own fallibility, complicity and vulnerability. Or what Howe calls the lostness and loneliness of men. I think of his poem Faulkner and his poem Coming and Going and Message to a Former Friend. And this is where I say before we excoriate a poet with a record of courage and truth-telling in his poems, we must consider an “ouchy” poem in the context of a poet’s overall oeuvre.

So, for me the challenge as a poet is to take the risk to publish a difficult poem. Even if it fails, badly or seems to, based on public response. Yes, The Change is, for me, for sure, a disturbing, painful, upsetting and difficult poem. But based on a thorough reading of all Hoagland’s books I would, at worst, consider it, as Kuipers and others do, an honest but ultimately flawed and failed attempt at dealing with the painful and hot-button issue of racism. But I am grateful for how this failure has opened up the topic for me of writing on race.

Someone who has looked closely at the issues surrounding the controversy triggered by The Change is American poet Dion O’Reilly in a recent article for Cathexis Northwest Press. Although O’Reilly admits she is a strong supporter of Hoagland and his poetry, as I am, she has struggled with The Change and in particular she challenges a key premise of the poem at its end that racism is changing for the better: ….the truth is, we know that post-Serena and post-Obama, “we” indeed, are not changed. Racial issues persist at the forefront of American politics. Furthermore, if the assertion is the speaker is changed, the reader is likewise unconvinced.

O’Reilly ends her article with a pointed question:

Why didn’t he provide a true revelation?

If his detractors had raised that question, perhaps the conversation would have been more edifying and less divisive. Still, I can understand why African Americans would not feel a responsibility to school Tony about his insulting prosody. But as a White writer and an admirer of Hoagland, I’m saying the following: As difficult as it is, let’s speak our shameful truth. Like Hoagland, let’s speak it with clarity and power, but let’s not pretend that is enough.

This is the point that Kuipers makes in her series On Failure. To write these difficult poems on race, gender or injustice we must by the very nature of these poems fail. But we must try anyway. And maybe:Try again. Fail again. Fail better, as Samuel Beckett once said.

Black American poet Terrance Hayes, who insists Hoagland was no racist, feels that the problem with The Change is that was a bad poem. Using my own words: bad poem vs bad or shitty man! But  Hayes in an interview with American poet Rachel Zucker, says poets should never give up trying to write the difficult poems:

Zucker: Can you write a good racist poem? Hayes: A persona poem, sure. Patricia Smith has done it: Skinhead. But it’s not really clear that the persona is working. Zucker: I don’t want to see a white person write that persona poem. Hayes: That’s is the risk! As Gertrude Stain says, “If it can be done, why do it.” So it’s like, only do that shit that can’t be done. That’s a very basic Gertrude Stein argument[…] [The poem] is under more pressure when you get into zones of race, class and gender but it’s still the same. There’s nothing you can’t do, you just have to do it well.

Another poet who addresses the need to take risks is the American poet J. Michael Martinez. I found his comment in Evening Will Come – A Journal of Poetics, Issue 10, October 2011:

I love Juliana Spahr’s statement, “ that writing about race should be as odd and as peculiar and maybe even as frightening as anything else is allowed to be or can be. Something here about risk. About how it can’t be all good intentioned and well meaning and safe.” I think this right on. I think the problem may come after the poem is written, in publishing and the poem’s subsequent consumption by the social body.”

For those that may only know Hoagland through the lens of The Change controversy I would suggest giving his other poems a chance.  See how he goes after toxic (including racist) masculinity or unbalanced masculinity  with a vengeance (read his poem, a favorite of mine: Why the Young Men are so Ugly). Or simply read this poem in his last collection:

Toward the end he sat on the back porch,
sweeping his binoculars back and forth
over the dry scrub-brush and arroyos,

certain he saw Mexicans
moving through the creosote and sage
while the TV commentators in the living room

turned up loud enough for a deaf person to hear,
kept pouring gasoline on his anxiety and rage.

In the end he preferred to think about illegal aliens,
about welfare moms and healthcare socialists,
than about the uncomfortable sensation of the disease

crawling through his tunnels in the night,
crossing the river between his liver and his spleen.
It was just his luck

to be born in the historical period
that would eventually be known
as the twilight of the white male dinosaur,

feeling weaker and more swollen every day,
with the earth gradually looking more like hell
and a strange smell rising from the kitchen sink.

In the background those big male voices
went on and on, turning the old crank
about hard work and god, waving the flag

and whipping the dread into a froth.
Then one day the old man had finished
his surveillance, or it had finished him,

and the cable-TV guy
showed up at the house apologetically
to take back the company equipment:

the complicated black box with the dangling cord,
and the gray rectangular remote control,
like a little coffin.