Miriam Sagan held the following interview with Tony Hoagland.

Miriam : ...On influence and chattiness. Your poems are full of actual people talking--sometimes it feels like eavesdropping--as if the reader knows these people too. Is this consciously New York style or from O’Hara or even Lew Welch or just something you like that happens naturually, or?

Tony Hoagland : You are right that my chattiness in these poems is a borrowed affect of the New York School; O’Hara is an important poet for me, one who combines feeling and social wit in a way that any sensible poet would covet. In fact, if I were going to place myself on some aesthetic graph, my dot would be equidistant between Sharon Olds and Frank O’Hara, between the confessional (where I started) and the social (where I have aimed myself). They are much better poets than I am, of course, but they are relatives.
There are a few other aspects of the chattiness I might mention. After Donkey Gospel, I got tired of what we might call ‘the autobiographical narrative of crisis,’ the first-person dramatic story of some past crisis, the narrative-meditative build up of pressure, the representational artifice of breakthrough into insight or resolution. That arc, artistically powerful though it may be, came to seem to me inaccurate to my own experience. For example, the insight experience, we know, doesn‘t necessarily result in a transformation of character; nor does it make daily life especially easier. The self retains its garbage, as does life, and we continue to trip over it in ways that are truly un-Shakespearean. Also, as I grow older and more mature, as my sense of survival becomes more secure, my experience of the world becomes more ambient, more diverse and simultaneous, and less linear than the narrative structure suggests.
Having multiple speakers in a poem makes the poems less dominated by a single voice, and that felt like a relief to me. It meant that one person didn’t have to ‘solve’ the issues presented by the poem, and maybe that nobody has to solve anything-- that the poem could become more of an exploration than an experience of crisis and resolution. Less like therapy and more like a salon of interesting talkers.
Finally, having different speakers gathered together and chatting in a minimal narrative context makes it possible to have more various KINDS of speech, more rhetorical variety, in a single poem. And that provides a rich form of entertainment for writer and reader that is an exploration of its own, and that perhaps makes up for the loss of narrative. (I’m still not sure that narrative can wisely be dispensed with. It’s such a primal pleasure and form of meaningfulness.)

Miriam : This book [What Narcissism Means to Me, Grey Wolf, 2003] feels emotionally lighter than Donkey Gospel--not exactly less cynical (which is part of what my 14 year old daughter Isabel loves about your poetry) in tone but somehow more affectionate towards the foibles of the poet and other people. Is this even true, and were you aware of it, what changed if anything.

Tony: If you find the poems more kind hearted, that’s probably because I’ve been happier in the last five or six years. Yet there are some meannesses in the poems that I worry about, and others that I feel quite good about. I think the book is less desperate-- which connects to the earlier question above, and in that sense is perhaps more open-hearted, less protective. I certainly think the poems are more generally social-- both in the sense of finding other people (besides our heroic narrator) more interesting, and also in the sense of being more socially observant and responsive; more politically aware. There was a time when I looked at a scene and saw a man and a woman kissing. Now I am aware that the man has a credit card in his pocket and that just behind the woman a beer commercial is on the tv, interrupting war coverage from Afghanistan.
But I would worry about becoming too easy going. To me, a good poem threatens the reader a little, crosses over some line of the social contract, or the poetic contract, which sets off alarms. A really good poem is the poem which breaks through the television screen into the world and reminds the reader that reading or listening is not a safe, living-room-lazy-boy-museum-tea-party experience, but that poetry is about open heart surgery, being woken up, or taken somewhere unexpected and dangerous.

Miriam : The title, What Narcissism Means to Me, makes me feel it is about the kind of trap/liberation of poetry--talking about the self, borderline confessing, but also speaking from inside a mask of form. Can you say something about looking at the self, trying to escape or expand it, or anything along these lines that relates to these poems? Humor seems like the salvation here, too.

Tony : Though the book title is obviously ironic, it’s intended to have multiple playful and serious dimensions. I don’t think the poems are pro-narcissism, nor are they exactly anti-narcissism. The dillemna I want to represent is the dillemna I feel: the dillemna of the self, to recognize that self-centeredness is often a kind of confinement in a small space, a blindness, a self-made separation from the world, an entertaining prison. A swamp. At the same time the self is a necessary address, and without self-love, where would we be? But some people give self-love a bad name. And there is so much space in the world, so much to know and learn, one wants to move outwards and to relate to it and to celebrate and explore it. So the title refers to growing out.
Also, I think that narcissism is a particularly American dilemma right now; our culture being a satin-lined nightmare of materialism, corporate-sponsored self-preoccupation, short attention spans and disintegrated social structures. In response to the loss of connectedness and of boundaries, we suffer, and we are trained to medicate that suffering with what our culture and age provide. It’s like eating candy when you re starving: it makes you crazy, so you eat more candy. Maybe if we can name those circumstances more precisely, describe that suffering more creatively and articulately, maybe that will help us out individually. At least it will be entertaining. It’s such a fucking circus out there. And such a madhouse in here.

back to top