Tony Hoagland

American Poet and Writer

May 21, 2009 Sarah Scott

A short feature on the award-winning poet's life and work so far, including his collection "What Narcissism Means to Me."

Tony Hoagland was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina in 1953, while his father was stationed there with the army. The family later moved to a succession of military bases, mostly in the South, spending most of his adolescence in Louisiana. This is a part of his life Hoagland claims he "barely survived."

Early Career

In the course of earning a B.A. from the University of Iowa (after a stint at Williams College), and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona, Hoagland spent time wandering through the Northwest, living in communes, and became a Buddhist. This time in his life seems to have been a big influence for his poetry in the James Laughlin Award-winning collection Donkey Gospel (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1998), evidenced by the treatment of themes which often shows the same concerns and subtleties as Buddhist philosophy, while applied to rather American subject matter (as in a poem entitled "Fred Had Watched a Lot of Kung Fu Episodes").

Hoagland has been quoted as saying he was "incredibly untalented" when he started writing poetry, and admits to being somewhat of a late bloomer; his first three chapbooks were published by independent presses starting in his early thirties, though he is in good company with plenty of other poets of note in that respect.

Success

Although not published until 1992, Hoagland's first full-length collection of poetry, Sweet Ruin immediately gained him a wide recognition. Winner of the Brittingham Prize for Poetry, a major American literary award sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it was also awarded the John C. Zacharis Frist Book Award from Emerson College two years later.

What Narcissism Means to Me (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2003) clearly continued on the same insightful irony of Hoagland's earlier poetry. In interviews, he has talked about locating himself as a poet somewhere between the confessional style of Sharon Olds and the social mode of Frank O'Hara and the rest of the New York school, saying he started from the former and aims toward the latter.

Artistic Approach

Hoagland's hybrid of modes, combining an unflinching look at the self with its interaction in a sometimes pathological social atmosphere, seems to address even wider, universal themes about the inevitable dilemma of individual expression which is meaningless without society. However, where his earlier work often used everyday occurrences as springboards to transcendence, Hoagland has not become so formulaic that he continues to offer resolutions where they might seem facile.

His concern seems to be for the truth itself, where inward and outward observation facilitate eachother, as in Virginia Woolf's dictum that "If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

His most recent chapbook, Hard Rain, was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005. His book of essays about poetry, characteristically titled Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2006.

A biography of Tony Hoagland can be found here and an interview with Ploughshares is here.

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Tony Hoagland