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Tag Archives: Tony Hoagland

Buzzed Books #37: Application for Release from the Dream

09 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

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Amy Watkins, Application for Release from the Dream, Buzzed Books, Poetry, Tony Hoagland

Buzzed Books #37 by Amy Watkins

Tony Hoagland’s Application for Release from the Dream

Application for Release from the Dream

I enjoyed the second half of Tony Hoagland’s fifth poetry collection, Application for Release from the Dream (Graywolf Press, 2015), so much that I almost felt guilty for how critical I was of the first half.

Many of the poems in the first half of the book have a thematic counterpart in the second half. For example, one of the poems in the first section is “Special Problems in Vocabulary,” a poem about the limitations of language. It begins:

There is no single particular noun
for the way a friendship,
stretched over time, grows thin,
then one day snaps with a popping sound.

Those lines could almost be an early draft of one of the last poems in the book, “There Is No Word”:

…we have reached the end of a pretense
–though to tell the truth,
what I already am thinking

is that language deserves the credit–
how it will stretch just so much and no further;
how there are some holes it will not cover up…

The book contains several of these pairs–two poems about language, two poems about his father, two poems about divorce. I’m not certain whether the later poems are meant to be further reflections on the themes or answers to the earlier poems. I’m not sure if I would respond differently to the early poems upon a second reading, but in all these pairs, I prefer the second poem.

Both halves of the book contain plenty of Hoagland’s signature humor. He gives the business to corporate tools, uptight academics, clueless suburbanites, his father, his ex-wife, and the fool who blasts his radio at 2 in the morning. In the second half of the book, he turns his wit on himself. “Summer Dusk,” for example, is as close to a pastoral as you’re likely to get from Hoagland. It begins, “I put in my goddamn hearing aid / to listen to a bird…” The poems in the second half in particular are funny, a little melancholy, sometimes a little mean, but they work because they “aim up” or, better yet, aim in.

In “The Story of the Mexican Housekeeper,” his father recalls “family friends” who “hired a woman from across the border, // then kept her hostage for seven years.” The poet/speaker is disgusted that his father apparently finds the story amusing, but when the exploited woman appears near the end of the poem, he imagines her anger directed at him, not his father or even her captors: “she’s mad as hell / not at my dad, but me–yelling // that she doesn’t want to be in this poem for one more minute.” Does using the story in the poem make him complicit in her exploitation? The poem doesn’t answer that question, but it is full of a powerful tension worth exploring.

Like much of Hoagland’s work, these poems “balance on the fence / between irony and hope.” It’s a difficult position to maintain gracefully. When he does, the poems are wry, challenging, and emotionally complex.

Pair with: a Princeton, a pre-Prohibition drink of Old Tom gin layered over chilled port. It’s pretty. It’s classy. Its two flavors don’t totally mix.

_______

Amy Watkins

Amy Watkins (Episode 124, 161, 164) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. Her chapbook, Milk & Water, was published in 2014 by Yellow Flag Press.

Episode 132: Joanna Rakoff and Tony Hoagland!

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Memoir, Poetry

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Brittany McIntyre, Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year, Sharon Olds, Tony Hoagland, Twenty Poems That Could Save America, Twilight

Episode 132 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I interview novelist and memoirsit Joanna Rakoff,

Joanna Rakoff

Photo by David Ignaszewski

and then talk once again with the poet Tony Hoagland,

Hoagland, Tony (Ann Staveley)

Photo by Ann Staveley

plus Brittany McIntyre writes bravely about how a book I never expected to learn more about changed her life.

Brittany McIntyreTEXTS DISCUSSED

My Salinger YearTwenty PoemsTwilight-coverNOTES

Carlton Melton‘s “Country Ways” accompanied Brittany McIntyre’s essay.

In Orlando, come hear me, Kimberly Lojewski, Robert Metcalf, and Tiffany Razzano read at There Will Be Words on January 13th.

Learn more about J. Bradley’s love poem workshop at the Orlando Public Library here.

Check out the dreamy surf rock of The Bambi Molesters.

_______

Episode 132 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Episode 40: Tony Hoagland!

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, David Foster Wallace, Drinking, Episode

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Chuck Wachtel, Craft of Writing, Creative Writing, David Foster Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Robert Paul Lamb, Tony Hoagland, Writing Podcast

Episode 40 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

On this week’s show, I talk to the poet Tony Hoagland,

Tony Hoagland

Plus Bob Lamb Explains How Ernest Hemingway saved him from Rendition.

Bob Lamb

Texts Discussed

Sweet Ruin

Donkey Gospel

What Narcissism Means to MeReal Sofistikashun

Unicorproated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty

Stupid HopeArt Matters Hemingway

Complete Stories of Hemingway

Show Notes

This episode begins with a limerick written and read by Chris Booth, in honor of our pal Steve Kelly:

Just a few, and Steve’s eyes ‘gan to wander;
Then day next he was mute and a-ponder:
When he saw where he woke,
In sad tones, thus he spoke:
“It’s Absinthe makes the heart to grow fonder.”

Tonight, Saturday, and Sunday are the last days in Orlando to see Charlie Bethel’s awesome performance of The Odyssey.

Charlie Bethel's Odyssey
Saturday (March 16th) is also the last day to see this season’s superb Othello at Orlando Shakespeare Theatre.

Othello

Episode 40 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing, literature, and drinking, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

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