Awake, in the real world
Tony Hoagland’s new poetry collection, “Application for Release From the Dream,” is all-inclusive. He wants out of the personal dreams we all have for love, work and everyday living. He also wants “release” from the big, literary American dream that eludes us and has transmogrified into something that mocks us, even as it persists.
Hoagland teaches at the University of Houston and in an MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He has published four previous collections of poetry (including the perfectly titled “What Narcissism Means to Me”) and two essay collections. At times, his poems seem like small “essays” in verse, in the best sense of the word (from the French essayer, to try). Hoagland’s imagination usually outstrips reality, but compensation comes through the reflective creation of the poem. His modus operandi in this new collection — typically, he recounts a failure, some hurt, then stages an alternate triumph in the recollection of the poem — is captured in his opening epigraph from Thomas Owens: “The experiment failed; / the lead did not change into gold./ But the alchemist remembered/ the lute hidden in his closet.” For Hoagland, the “experiment” is every personal endeavor you might have tried that did not work out and also, simultaneously, the “experiment” of the American dream.
What makes Hoagland so memorable is the moment you think you are going to sink into a level of cynicism from which there is no recovery, there’s a recovery, whether it be a wry comment, a humorous line, an arresting image or even acknowledgment of the pained resignation we all have to feel sometimes.
Hoagland asks, in the first section, for “A Little Consideration,” but really he asks us to rethink almost everything. In the brilliant opening poem, “The Edge of the Frame,” the poet refers to Joseph Cornell, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill — an artist, a writer and a politician, all notable people who had their own miseries, fears and migraines, yet endured and created for a long time.
After confessing that he reads biographies “because I want to know how people suffered/ in the past; how they endured, and is it different, now, for us/” Hoagland asks, “What is a human being? What does it mean?/ It seems a crucial thing to know, but no one does.” But these big questions that punctuate the collection are surrounded by such specific images (“Someone’s up late, painting the inside of Ernie’s Pizza Parlor,/ which will be opening in June”) that the reader intuits the “edge of the frame” is filled with everyday people whose idealism endures. In the last line, which saves us from slitting our throats, the poet passes the pizza parlor: “As I walk by, all I can see/ is the ladder, and two legs near the top, going out of sight.”
The best poems are the personal ones — the desire to connect in “The Wetness,” the heartsick reflection in “Dreamheart” of “the way you removed your first wife from your life,” the terrible moments in “Misunderstandings” in which one “believed the desire for revenge was a fossil fuel that you could drive a/lifetime on.” We know what he means. There is a lot of “trying and failing” in these poems, and triumph in the persistence of continuing anyway: “Why did it take me so long to figure out/that my special talent was trying?”
Hoagland is not afraid to unleash a poetic rant, and who doesn’t like a Whitmanesque critique or a “Howl” moment? He expresses some discontent with political correctness, or rather political incorrectness, but perhaps that is de rigueur now in many poetry collections.
In “Ode to the Republic,” we have to feel guilty about our American deficiencies and our inability to “handle history with irony,” but in the “application” for his “release” from the glittering American dream, the reader realizes things are not exactly terrible all over and that Hoagland has done pretty well as an artist and professor under the flawed status quo. He still gets to “talk about chickens and rain,” investigate the economic injustices of life in “Proportion,” and contemplate corruption and class inequality in “Romans.” Master of the memorable line, Hoagland comes up with the images and wry insights that force readers to ask “whether a third choice exists/between resignation and/ going around the bend.” We sure hope so.
Perhaps what I admire most is Hoagland’s sheer wit. “Update,” which you think might be some sort of homage to William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” turns out to be a subversion of the Imagist agenda to get the preachiness out of poetry. Instead of an image of white chickens, it’s a political jab at “a red-multi-/ corporation/glazed with/ tax credits/beside the white/ politicians.” Good one! I love it and hate it all at the same time. In “Special Problems in Vocabulary,” we experience a Billy Collins-like moment in which we learn that there are no words for the worst disasters that befall us: “No verb for accidentally/breaking a thing/ while trying to get it open/—a marriage, for example.”
In “Application for Release From the Dream,” so much is accomplished in an efficient way. Yet in spite of his brevity, Hoagland seems closely aligned with Walt Whitman, providing a less optimistic song of himself that rings true, lingers in the mind and reminds us that even when dreams are dashed, joy sometimes interferes. Yes, we have what he calls “misunderstandings,” but we also have poems with words to help clear them up.