Tony Hoagland's latest, third, collection of poetry is a newspaper full of stories we all see acted and lived on the street and behind doors every day but that no one's talking or writing much about. This particular newspaper collection is called What Narcissism Means to Me, and it sprints pretty far afield of his prior two books, principally because what Tony Hoagland's practicing in his poetry, and is doing better than all but one or two living United States poets, is precision. His eye is a diamond and the poems are sometimes mean, usually funny, but are always unerringly, seamlessly clear.
'Ann lit a cigarette and said, Only miserable people will tell you / that love has to be deserved, / and when I heard that, a distant chime went off for me,' he writes in the title poem, and the fun of Tony Hoagland's work, like that of his brother Dean Young, is that there's no way to point to a line of his, anywhere, and say 'That's it, that's what Tony Hoagland writes like.' That said, this line's as good as any a boat launch to get to his river. There's a cigarette, there's misery and love and unspoken defeat and there's a small phrase that rings a chime in someone else. While those are the ingredients, it's the casual ease of the poetry that makes the work sing just so: nowhere in the collection is a frantic love-sick madman running from belltower to belltower, and more often than love showing its actual, intimate, bizarre face, there's some Ann glovelessly back-handing love.
Which, to me, is a great thing—I want to read a book of poems wherein the author talks about his room at the Hate Hotel, poems in which the poet can describe, better than most of us (hence the difficulty of poetry), his wife standing on a step ladder with a nail in her mouth and how seeing her like that offers clarity about just what love is.
There's suicide and racism and acronymical disease and death, and it's as telling as anything else about Narcissism that the four section titles are, in order, 'America', 'Social Life', 'Blues' and 'Luck'. I don't know when the right time to say it would be, but it's imperative to state, for the record, that Tony Hoagland writes some of the fucking best, most zinging lines anywhere. To wit: 'The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,' 'Killing yourself is wasteful, like spilling oil / At sea or not recycling all the kisses you've been given,' 'I don't want to scream forever / I don't want to live without proportion / like some kind of infection from the past,'.
I don't know who first said that survival is an instinct but living takes guts (my money is on a football coach or Army sergeant) but survival—elemental, feeding-off-whatever-there-is, find-some-light-in-the-tunnel-or-else—is among the core nuclear reactions going on in Narcissism: 'It was this kind of day inside of us: off-season:' he writes in 'Grammar of Sparrows', and the distant chime that goes off is inside yourself.
The stern, almost damned shade that creeps around the edges of most of these poems isn't, after all, the grayness or any shade of despair that it might seem at first blush. Nearly every poem in one way or another nods in the direction of the big sign hanging constant in the world that reads 'Life's fucking hard', absolutely. In the end, though, it is the clarity Hoagland's poetry offers, obdurate and brutal as it can be, that is what you, as a reader, are left with—the admission of how hard things can be adds to what small sweetness and light Tony Hoagland can find and bring. Of course he says it better than I could (from 'Fortune'):
'So, while you are paying what is owed,
the sweet juice fills your mouth for free.
And the fortune cookie too
which offers you the pleasure of Breakage
and then the other pleasure of Discovery,'
- Weston Cutter