Happy Birthday Tony Hoagland – Two Days Late!

American Poet, Teacher and Essayist, Tony Hoagland

from Faulkner

That is what I learned from Faulkner: there is evil in the world
like a virus, or a lingering disease
that sleeps inside the rivers and the trees—

the reason for suffering isn’t some bad choice you made,
or something you did wrong,

it isn’t anybody’s fault; it just exists,
it is a condition of this place;

and the only purpose it serves
is that it wakes us up,
at certain moments in our lives, it rouses us

to get up on our feet and find the door.

.

Tony Hoagland (1953 – ) from Application for Release from the Dream, Graywolf Press, 2015

American poet Tony Hoagland, who turned 62 on November 19th, just might be one of the bravest poets of his generation. I say this not just based on his past four books of poetry but especially his latest book which came out a few months ago. He has a way of challenging complacency: not just his readers’ but his as well. He has a fearlessness wrapped inside a vulnerability of feeling that makes me feel sometimes he not only sticks his own hand inside a light socket, but mine too!

I have taken the risk of excerpting the huge “tell” statement, which I use as an epigraph for this post, from Hoagland’s longer poem, Faulkner. The complete poem can be read below. (But first an apology to Hoagland and my readers. After hours of trying I cannot make WordPress keep the indents that are required in Faulkner.)

This “tell” of Hoagland’s stands on its own for me as a mantra I repeat to myself in these days of violent madness (in far too many places). When I am overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness and hopelessness – I can’t stay the hand of the Saudi executioner about to kill the Palastinian poet Ashraf Fayadh or the terrorist about to pull a trigger or detonate a suicide vest or stop a bomb falling on the innocent. It is in these moments Hoagland reminds me what I can do. I can wake up. I can be wholehearted in the face of evil and suffering. It is my truest answer back to terror.

Yes, I cherish these lines of Hoagland’s on their own but I cherish them even more inside the poem where they belong. Hoagland is painstaking in how he constructs the poetic structure, like the casing of a bomb, that contains these words. It’s how they become even more explosive and emotionally believable.

First and foremost Hoagland pays attention – to the outside and his own vulnerable inside. No detail or image is too small for Hoagland to notice and from his rootedness in the everyday no statement he makes (and he makes a lot of them) seems too big. It has how he makes the unexpected leaps from matter of fact observations and descriptions to his bold statements that give his poems their bark and bite. See how he does it in Faulkner!

Faulkner

Afterward, I tried to find the Faulkner story
where a man on horseback rides deep into the swamp
to find the Indians who are breeding runaway Negroes

whose children they will sell as slaves
back to the same white man
from whom their parents ran away –

If I remember right, he wears a green-gray military cloak,
and knee-high leather boots
and he is singing a song about a girl he met in New Orleans
named Lilly Malone,
as he passes under the great parasitic orchids
that hang like milk-white lanterns from the trees.

I just wanted to sink
into the cool water of literature,
to drift and rest among the pages for a while

and not to think about my own life
crushed like an aluminum can,
where my wife was asking me to move out of our apartment,

weeping so hard she was difficult to understand
because she didn’t love me anymore,

and me flipping and flopping around inside myself
like a poor armadillo or raccoon that
doesn’t know he has been hit by a car.

But I fell asleep among the boxes, and the open crates of books,
and dropped into a dream
where I was driving through a city in my old green van, looking for
the address of a guy I used to know

and when a policeman jumped out in the middle of the street
in an attempt to make me stop,
I ran right over him,
and just kept going,
hoping I had killed the stupid bastard.

That is what I learned from Faulkner: there is evil in the world
like a virus, or a lingering disease
that sleeps inside the rivers and the trees—

the reason for suffering isn’t some bad choice you made,
or something you did wrong,

it isn’t anybody’s fault; it just exists,
it is a condition of this place;

and the only purpose it serves
is that it wakes us up,
at certain moments in our lives, it rouses us

to get up on our feet and find the door.

Tony Hoagland, ibid

What a ride: Faulkner, slavery, marriage breakdown, armadillo and raccoon, dream of a murdered policeman, evil, suffering, choice. And at the end the call to wake up. To be present to life in spite of everything.

Hoagland, here in this densely layered poem practices what he preaches. I have heard him teach many times the concept of layered poems full of images from the everyday. This poem is a great example. Full of shifts and surprises.

The banality of evil – the term coined by Hanna Arendt – plays out so vividly in this poem. The way Hoagland in a deadpan way describes the clothes of the man committing unspeakable evil, described so matter of factly. Then, watch as Hoagland side swipes us as he segues with such irony from Faulkner (just wanted to sink into the cool water of literature) to his own despair (crushed like an aluminum can) then to a dream (what?) where he runs over a policeman. The way he describes it: hoping I had killed the stupid bastard. The banality of that.

What a move. Hoagland’s offhand description, chillingly casual, of his murder of the policeman brings evil much closer. His own evil impulses. Even if only seen in his dreams. That’s the moment he closes the circle; the moment he connects his evil back to Faulkner. And now, only after he has identified evil and suffering both out in the world and inside himself (his marital grief and deadly dreaming), does he risk making his huge statements:

the reason for suffering isn’t some bad choice you made,
or something you did wrong,

it isn’t anybody’s fault; it just exists,
it is a condition of this place;

I say risk because without the details that come before these statements would have little foundation to stand on. They would not have earned the right to be believed and accepted by his readers.

This poem has been such comfort to me especially in light of the massive suffering being inflicted every day in the Middle East now and the horrific spillover of that suffering in Paris last week and Mali this week.

The reason for suffering isn’t some bad choice you made,
or something you did wrong,

it isn’t anybody’s fault; it just exists,
it’s a condition of this place;

and the only purpose it serves
is that it wakes us up.

But the ultimate power of this poem as far as I can see is how it speaks, not to the reader, but first, how it speaks to the narrator, to Hoagland. How in the writing of the poem something changes inside him. How it may have started a profound healing inside him after the collapse of his marriage.

For me, the genius of the poem is that, far from receiving comfort in literature as Hoagland sits packing up his apartment, his soon-to-be ex wife has asked him to leave, he is forced to face and acknowledge his own suffering and the suffering his is capable of inflicting on others.

Once Hoagland faces his own complicity in the suffering of the world and once he stops fighting, but accepts his own suffering, then it gives him the courage to get on with his life.

and the only purpose it serves
is that it wakes us up,

at certain moments in our lives, it rouses us
to get up on our feet and find the door,
at certain moments in our lives, it rouses us

to get up on our feet and find the door.

I, his reader, imagine him reaching for the door of that apartment, the door of his marriage, and beginning again, as the poet Jane Hirschfield says, the story of his life.

After absorbing Hoagland’s poem, Faulkner, I, his reader, am challenged to reach for the door of the places where I am imprisoned in my own suffering and walk out to face the world, not on my terms, but on the world’s terms.

For me, Like Hoagland, the suffering I chose to hang on is not just the suffering of a world going mad around me but also from my marital failures (two of them) even though my last broken marriage ended eight years ago and even though I am now deeply and happily married to my third wife, my sweetheart, Somae.

Today I chose to be roused, to reach for the door………for the beauty right outside the cabin where I write this.