The Abrasive Tony Hoagland

To the casual reader of What Narcissism Means to Me, ultra talk poet Tony Hoagland comes off as offensive and alienating, with much of his poems containing racist and homophobic epithets. Undoubtedly, Hoagland does not shy away from being himself in his poetry, which in turn welcomes potential criticism. “I am prone to certain misperceptions,” Hoagland admits in “Patience.” Hoagland distrusts the notion of being “liked/by every person on the goddamn face of the earth.” He is prepared for the critics, as he divulges in “Reasons to Survive November,” “I hate those people back/from the core of my donkey soul.” The donkey image is an important one to consider when studying Hoagland, as his poetry reflects a personality of little compromise. “The Change,” “Dear John,” and “Rap Music,” all convey prejudice with regard to African-American culture and homosexuals, but within each is a message of honest self-deprecation, or a statement of an evolving society.

When watching a participant in a sporting event, a fan will typically root for the participant with whom they can most identify. In “The Change,” Hoagland grudgingly depicts an African-American woman handily defeating a white European woman in tennis. He claims to support the white woman over his fellow countryman, as the white woman with “her pale eyes and thin lips,” is of his “tribe.” Further he likens the African-American’s volleying to “driving the Emancipation Proclamation/ down Abraham Lincoln’s throat,” an archaic analogy to be sure. “Everything was changing,” writes Hoagland, seemingly much to his chagrin. Perhaps the tone Hoagland writes with in “The Change” is an adopted one, reflecting the attitude a predominately Caucasian tennis-watching community, one that has oddly not adapted to the abolishment of slavery.

This would be an encouraging perspective of “The Change” were it not for another culturally insensitive poem later in the volume. In “Rap Music,” Hoagland divulges an abhorrence for rap music, which he likens to “Twenty-six men” who are “trapped in a submarine/…pounding on the walls with a metal pipe,/shouting what they’ll do when they get out.” Having a dislike for rap music is one thing, but Hoagland takes it a step further, effectively pouring salt on a healing wound between White and Black America:

I don’t know what’s going on inside that portable torture chamber

But I have a bad suspicion

There’s a lot of dead white people in there

On a street lit by burning police cars

Where a black man is striking the head of a white one

Again and again with a brick,

Then lifting the skull to drink blood from the hole—

This excerpt is admittedly dramatized, but the violence with which he characterizes black people cannot be ignored. Thus, what begins as a playful, if a bit excessive criticism of rap music becomes a poem of racial dissidence, in which Hoagland admits, “Black for me is a country/more foreign than China.” Hoagland flips the white-victimizing-black analogy on its head, inciting resentment from the black community.

But Hoagland does not stop with the black community. In “Dear John,” Hoagland admits to telling an off-color joke to an unreceptive audience:

I never would have told John that faggot joke

If I had known that he was gay

As the poem opens, Hoagland continues to demonstrate his inclination of insensitivity of people unlike himself, but attempts redemption through self-deprecation:

There’s something democratic

About being the occasional asshole—

You make a mistake, you apologize

And everyone else breathes easier

Hoagland’s suggestion that his perversion is done for the sake of self-sacrifice is an intriguing one, but hardly makes up for his offensiveness. Telling a “faggot joke” in mixed company is evidence of poor judgment, just as imagining black against white violence in a poem ranting about rap music is out of line and overboard. But that is just what makes Hoagland’s poetry effective: he portrays contemporary issues in a caustic manner, eliciting the emotions of the readers in a way that makes them respond to his works in real terms.