 You are invited to A POETRY READING by TONY HOAGLAND SUNDAY, JANUARY 4. 2015 7 PM TEATRO PARAGUAS 3205 CALLE MARIE SUITE B, SANTA FE, NM 87505 Donations appreciated Tony Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He earned a BA from the University of Iowa and an MFA from the University of Arizona. 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, who continued: “At his frequent best … Mr. Hoagland is demonically in touch with the American demotic.” Hoagland’s books of poetry include 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); and Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010). He has also published a collection of essays about poetry, Real Sofistakashun (2006). Hoagland’s many honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He has 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 teaches at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. A Color of the Sky Windy today and I feel less than brilliant, driving over the hills from work. There are the dark parts on the road when you pass through clumps of wood and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean, but that doesn’t make the road an allegory. I should call Marie and apologize for being so boring at dinner last night, but can I really promise not to be that way again? And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing in what certainly looks like sexual arousal. Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail; the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves are full of infant chlorophyll, the very tint of inexperience. Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio, and on the highway overpass, the only metaphysical vandal in America has written MEMORY LOVES TIME in big black spraypaint letters, which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back. Last night I dreamed of X again. She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets. Years ago she penetrated me but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, I never got her out, but now I’m glad. What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. What I thought was an injustice turned out to be a color of the sky. Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind; overflowing with blossomfoam, like a sudsy mug of beer; like a bride ripping off her clothes, dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds, so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene. It’s been doing that all week: making beauty, and throwing it away, and making more. Tony Hoagland, “A Color of the Sky” from What Narcissism Means to Me. Copyright © 2003 by Tony Hoagland. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org. America Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials, And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is, He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds Of the thick satin quilt of America And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain, or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade, And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night, It was not blood but money That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—, He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were Clogging up my heart— And so I perish happily, Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”— Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad Would never speak in rhymed couplets, And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes And I think, “I am asleep in America too, And I don’t know how to wake myself either,” And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life: “I was listening to the cries of the past, When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.” But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable Or what kind of nightmare it might be When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river Even while others are drowning underneath you And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters And yet it seems to be your own hand Which turns the volume higher? Tony Hoagland, “America” from What Narcissism Means to Me. Copyright © 2003 by Tony Hoagland. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org. |
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