few days ago at the library I picked up the unusually named, "Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty". A great discovery! Turned out to be Tony Hoagland's fourth full-length poetry collection and a stunner. Clear, witty, insightful poems perfectly tuned to today's America -- and I had never even heard of the guy! My fault, since Tony Hoagland's work has appeared in the full range of magazines where clever poetry first appears: American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Agni, Ploughshares and the like. The fellow is even the recipient of two fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim and the National Endowment for the Arts. His last collection, "What Narcissism Means To Me: Poems", was the finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. I hope "Honda" wins it for him this time.
Tony Hoagland did win the Jackson Prize, and the citation reads in part, "He is a poet of risk: he risks wild laughter in poems that are totally heartfelt, poems you want to read out loud to anyone who needs to know the score and even more so to those who think they know the score." He is incisively contemporary. Take his first poem, "Description", from "Honda" where "A bird with a cry like a cell phone.." is the start of the engagement that goes on to describe, it seems to me, a bevy of people we know:
"In all of this a place must be
reserved for human suffering:
the sick and unloved, the chemically confused;
the ones who believe desperately in insight;
the ones addicted to change."
His insights are straight forward but no less compelling in being so. In "Big Grab" he says:
"In a story whose beginning I must have missed
without a name for the thing
I can barely comprehend I desire,
I speak these words that do not know
where they're going
No wonder I want something more or less large
and salty for lunch.
No wonder I stare into space while eating it."
Go check out Tony Hoagland's poetry in Agni and at the Poetry Foundation. You will not be disappointed.
Recent Comments