Post by adlupic35 on May 21, 2012 21:50:14 GMT -5
Good Evening.
Tony Hoagland claims that he “barely survived” his childhood. Born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina and constantly moving from one military base to another with his father, an Army doctor, Hoagland had an emotionally difficult childhood. Lacking instruction on how to deal with emotional troubles from his parents, Hoagland was left to deal with the tumultuous period by himself. Fortunately, using poetry, Hoagland was able to fight his way through a difficult adolescence, survive, and become the great contemporary poet that he is today.
Hoagland found his roots in poetry early, during adolescence and young adulthood, as a tool to organize his thoughts and ease his psyche. As a college student, he was eager to find a mentor to help him with his poetry, but unable to find someone to help him in his journey with poetry, Hoagland turned to reading the poetry of others to in order to teach himself the art. Although he always thought of a career in poetry as laughable, Hoagland soon learned the value of poetry as a means of social commentary. He has published four volumes of poetry, including the James Laughlin Award winning Donkey Gospel and the Bittingham Poetry Prize winning Sweet Ruin, and uses his poetry to comment on the “celebrity culture and consumerism” of America which offers “no authentic values” as well as to touch on such controversial topics as “race–America´s big old dirty secret”.
As a self-taught poet, Hoagland has developed a truly unique style of poetry that is famous for its accessibility, humor, and delivery of the cold, hard truth. Proclaimed a “poet of risk” that “risks wild laughter in poems that are totally heartfelt” by the judges of the Jackson Poetry Prize, Hoagland is not afraid to poke fun at controversial topics while bringing out a deeper truth about American society. Through his observations of society, he takes us on a journey through the “big steel pan” that is America in which everything is “all chopped up and stirred together” as he examines “a student with blue hair and a tongue stud”, a “corn-chip engineer”, and “two boys from the suburbs…/ ready to pronounce their first sentences/ in African-American”.
Furthermore, his poetry leads us to examinations of himself, “a very typical American”, that bring out personal confessions of narcissism in his poem “Narcissus Lullaby” and confessions of hate in “Hate Hotel” as we laugh and maybe even cry a little bit as we realize after our own self-examinations that we are the same as him.
Ultimately, Hoagland believes that the purpose of his poetry is to “perform operations on the diseased patient of American culture and individual psyches” and dissect what truly makes up an American in order to help us better understand ourselves and the society we live in. He attempts to show us the American experience and make us believe that “yes, it really is demented, and there actually are some choices [we] can take to make [ourselves] less crazy, and to be less complicitous with these structures of collective dementia."
It has been an honor introducing Tony Hoagland. Please join me in welcoming him to our reading tonight as he redefines our image of the American culture.
Word Count: 538
Tony Hoagland claims that he “barely survived” his childhood. Born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina and constantly moving from one military base to another with his father, an Army doctor, Hoagland had an emotionally difficult childhood. Lacking instruction on how to deal with emotional troubles from his parents, Hoagland was left to deal with the tumultuous period by himself. Fortunately, using poetry, Hoagland was able to fight his way through a difficult adolescence, survive, and become the great contemporary poet that he is today.
Hoagland found his roots in poetry early, during adolescence and young adulthood, as a tool to organize his thoughts and ease his psyche. As a college student, he was eager to find a mentor to help him with his poetry, but unable to find someone to help him in his journey with poetry, Hoagland turned to reading the poetry of others to in order to teach himself the art. Although he always thought of a career in poetry as laughable, Hoagland soon learned the value of poetry as a means of social commentary. He has published four volumes of poetry, including the James Laughlin Award winning Donkey Gospel and the Bittingham Poetry Prize winning Sweet Ruin, and uses his poetry to comment on the “celebrity culture and consumerism” of America which offers “no authentic values” as well as to touch on such controversial topics as “race–America´s big old dirty secret”.
As a self-taught poet, Hoagland has developed a truly unique style of poetry that is famous for its accessibility, humor, and delivery of the cold, hard truth. Proclaimed a “poet of risk” that “risks wild laughter in poems that are totally heartfelt” by the judges of the Jackson Poetry Prize, Hoagland is not afraid to poke fun at controversial topics while bringing out a deeper truth about American society. Through his observations of society, he takes us on a journey through the “big steel pan” that is America in which everything is “all chopped up and stirred together” as he examines “a student with blue hair and a tongue stud”, a “corn-chip engineer”, and “two boys from the suburbs…/ ready to pronounce their first sentences/ in African-American”.
Furthermore, his poetry leads us to examinations of himself, “a very typical American”, that bring out personal confessions of narcissism in his poem “Narcissus Lullaby” and confessions of hate in “Hate Hotel” as we laugh and maybe even cry a little bit as we realize after our own self-examinations that we are the same as him.
Ultimately, Hoagland believes that the purpose of his poetry is to “perform operations on the diseased patient of American culture and individual psyches” and dissect what truly makes up an American in order to help us better understand ourselves and the society we live in. He attempts to show us the American experience and make us believe that “yes, it really is demented, and there actually are some choices [we] can take to make [ourselves] less crazy, and to be less complicitous with these structures of collective dementia."
It has been an honor introducing Tony Hoagland. Please join me in welcoming him to our reading tonight as he redefines our image of the American culture.
Word Count: 538