Tony Hoagland Will be Tenth Westminster Poet

Acclaimed poet and teacher Tony Hoagland will visit Westminster School in the spring of 2010 as the 10th Westminster Poet. Although he is one of the funniest poets in America, Hoagland writes poems that zip along with wit and humor and irony until all of a sudden they either explode or implode and the reader is left breathless in the face of some profound human truth. No topic is too mundane or too sacred for Hoagland, which is precisely why his poems appeal to so many different kinds of readers.

Hoagland will read in the Werner Centennial Theater at 7:30 p.m. on April 20, 2010, and then will spend time with English classes throughout the morning on April 21. Hoagland’s visit will be made possible through support from the Ford-Goldfarb Fund, which was established in 2005 by former trustee Maureen Ford-Goldfarb and her daughter Kirsten Ford ’00 to support English Department enrichment activities.

Hoagland has published three award-winning volumes of poetry, a book of essays (Real Sofistikashun), and a chapbook of poems (Hard Rain). His latest book, entitled Unincorporated Persons of the Late Honda Dynasty, will be published in January 2010. Hoagland’s first book of poems, Sweet Ruin (1992), won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His second collection, Donkey Gospel (1998), won the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, while his third book What Narcissism Means to Me (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters claims that “Hoagland’s imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, and kinds of speech lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild. His is the poetry of an adult capable of engaging the wonder and torments of childhood.”

In addition to his published books, Hoagland is a frequent contributor to many different kinds of journals and magazines. English Department Head Michael Cervas first became acquainted with Hoagland’s poetry through sets of his poems that appeared in the late 1990s in American Poetry Review. Later Cervas introduced the English Department to Hoagland’s poetry in an English Department off-campus retreat. The next year, English teacher Mel Graham used Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel in his English 4 course and found the poems eminently teachable, not to mention great fun to read, for his students as well as for himself.

In addition to the prestigious awards Hoagland has won for his books of poems, he has also received The Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award in 2005 for his contribution to humor in American poetry and the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, which is presented for outstanding teaching, as well as for excellent writing.

Anthony Dey Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, N. C. His father was an Army doctor, so the young Hoagland grew up on various military bases throughout the South. He studied briefly at Williams College, among others, before finally getting a B.A. at the University of Iowa. Hoagland later earned an M.F.A. at the University of Arizona. He has taught at a number of colleges and currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston.

The novelist Don Lee says that Hoagland “attended and dropped out of several colleges, picked apples and cherries in the Northwest, lived in communes, [and] followed the Grateful Dead . . .” Westminster School is delighted that those many and diverse paths will bring Tony Hoagland here to Williams Hill for two days in April.

Below are a few samples of Hoagland’s poetry:

"Safeway"

Even after an hour in her room
with eye shadow and rouge,
moisture whip, lip gloss, and perfume
my mother still looked like she was dying

unexotically,
still looked like a person
trying to impersonate a person
going somewhere other than the grave,

though she was only going to the store,
after weeks of living
horizontally
while her blood was scoured by detergents
bleached by blasts of subatomic light.

Riding on her bony little head,
the glossy auburn wig
looked like something stolen,
the lame hip pulled her to one side
like the stuck wheel of the shopping cart we pushed

past pyramids of fruit,
down mile long corridors of breakfast food
where cartoon animals shot sugar stars
over an infinity of bowls,

— a landscape which seemed,
in the brightness and abundance of its goods,
like somebody’s idea
of paradise —

and the bright, continual ringing of the registers
was like the sound of happiness
for sale.

I was angry, dutiful, and seventeen,
afraid she was going to read her obituary
in the faces of the shoppers;

frightened they would stop and stare
at the black cloud hovering above our heads
as we moved slow as history
up and down the aisles.

Maybe months of sickness had burned away my mother’s shame
and left in her dry mouth
a taste for irony, maybe she wanted
to show the populace

what death looked like in person
or maybe it was simply her last chance
to make small talk with the neighbors
who stopped to say hello —

Mrs. Johnson, Mrs. Green,
whose kindness I imagined, then despised,
caught awkwardly among them as I was,
between the living and the dead.

But looking back across the years,
the scene looks different to me now. I see
a little group of people, halted
in the midst of life,
their carts jammed up
against the lettuce and the tangerines.

There is no gallows standing there,
no spectral executioner fingering his blade.

And I seem sweet at seventeen, innocent
even in my rage —
trying to protect
what didn’t need protecting
from what couldn’t be saved.
——————————————————————
"Romantic Moment"

After seeing the nature documentary we walk down Canyon Road,
into the plaza of art galleries and high end clothing stores

where the mock orange is fragrant in the summer night
and the smooth adobe walls glow fleshlike in the dark.

It is just our second date, and we sit down on a bench,
holding hands, not looking at each other,

and if I were a bull penguin right now I would lean over
and vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved

and if I were a peacock I’d flex my gluteal muscles to
erect and spread the quills of my cinemax tail.

If she were a female walkingstick bug she might
insert her hyperdermic proboscis delicately into my neck

and inject me with a rich hormonal sedative
before attaching her egg sac to my thoracic undercarriage,

and if I were a young chimpanzee I would break off a nearby treelimb
and smash all the windows in the plaza jewelry stores.

And if she was a Brazilian leopard frog she would wrap her impressive
tongue three times around my right thigh and

pummel me lightly against the surface of our pond
and I would know her feelings were sincere.

Instead we sit awhile in silence, until
she remarks that in the relative context of tortoises and iguanas,

human males seem to be actually rather expressive.
And I say that female crocodiles really don’t receive

enough credit for their gentleness.
Then she suggests that it is time for us to go

to get some ice cream cones and eat them.