Tony Hoagland > Quotes

“What I thought was an end
turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall
turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.”
― Tony Hoagland

“Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing

is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.”
― Tony Hoagland

“Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.”
― Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me

“There’s Socialism and Communism and Capitalism and there’s Feminism and Hedonism, and there’s Catholicism and Bipedalism and Consumerism, but I think Narcissism is the system that means the most to me.”
― Tony Hoagland

“When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.”
― Tony Hoagland (Editor), Ploughshares

“No matter how you feel you have to act
like you are very popular with yourself;
very relaxed and purposeful
very unconfused
and not
like you are walking through the sunshine
singing
in chains.”
― Tony Hoagland

“So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.”
― Tony Hoagland

“Then there was someone else I met,
whose face and voice I can’t forget,
and the memory of her
is like a jail I’m trapped inside,

or maybe she is something I just use
to hold my real life at a distance.”
― Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me

“A poem is a heroic act of integration that binds into rough harmony the chorus of forces within and outside the soul. A poem struggles to orchestrate, prioritize, cohere, and coordinate these potentially shattering forces.”
― Tony Hoagland, Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft

“Why did it take me so long to figure out that my special talent was trying?”
― Tony Hoagland

“Because if marriage is a kind of womb,
divorce is the being born again.”
― Tony Hoagland, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty

“the glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters”
― Tony Hoagland

“I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.”
― Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me

“What I like about the trees is how
They do not talk about the failure of their parents
And what I like about the grasses is that
They are not grasses in recovery
And what I like about the flowers is
That they are not flowers in need of empowerment or validation. They sway
Upon their thorny stems
As if whatever was about to happen next tonight
was sure to be completely interesting”
― Tony Hoagland

“Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness.
As long as there is desire, we will not be safe”
― Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel

“But the story stays the same: some of us
would rather die than change. We love
what will destroy us”
― Tony Hoagland, Sweet Ruin

“The future ours for a while to hold, with its heaviness—

and hope moving from one location to another
like the holy ghost that it is.”
― tony hoagland

“There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of time until
bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity
—which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort—
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief,

a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense,
though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.”
― Tony Hoagland

“And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely”
― Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me

“Who would have imagined that I would have to go a million miles away from the place where I was born to find the people who love me? And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people?”
― Tony Hoagland

“as we clashed together and commenced our collaboration on another chapter of the famous, familiar and amusing saga of human relations—choosing heat instead of grace, possession over possibility—trading the kingdom of heaven one more time for two arms full of beautiful, confusing earth.”
― Tony Hoagland, Sweet Ruin

“The dark ending does not cancel out
the brightness of the middle.
Your day of greatest joy cannot be dimmed by any shame.”
― Tony Hoagland

“many of us read poetry in order to learn as well as to be entertained. We enjoy being in the company of someone who knows what she is talking about, or who acts like she does. For the time it takes to read a poem, we will entrust ourselves, even subordinate ourselves, to a convincing speaker, and we will relish or be enraptured by their mastery. When you are in the hands of an assured language user and an experienced thinker or feeler—to surrender is one of the true pleasures of community and art.”
― Tony Hoagland, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice

“O’Hara famously said that a poem was something one wrote instead of making a phone call to a friend, and his poems are indeed as conversational and friendly as phone calls.”
― Tony Hoagland, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice

“The idea that writerly originality appears from nowhere, or exists as something in isolation, a thing to be guarded and protected from influence, is lunacy. Anyone who doesn’t school themselves by deep, wide, and idiosyncratic reading is choosing aesthetic poverty. Such aesthetic cloistering is like protecting your virginity in the belief that it will make you better at sex.”
― Tony Hoagland, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice

“So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once.”
― Tony Hoagland

“We like to say "I changed my mind," but the human mind alters its direction so rapidly and constantly, we might as well say "My mind changed me.”
― Tony Hoagland, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice

“So I’ve grown up to be one of those people who gets angry at trees for behaving like trees,”
― Tony Hoagland, Application for Release from the Dream: Poems

“When I get hopeless about human life,
which, to be frank, is far too difficult for me,
I try to remember that in the desert there is a little butterfly that lives by drinking urine.”
― Tony Hoagland

“Poems build our capacity for imaginative thinking, create a tolerance for ambiguity, and foster an appreciation for the role of the unknown in human life.”
― Tony Hoagland