Hard Rain

by Tony Hoagland

New poetry from award-winning poet Tony Hoagland.

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2005

About the author

Tony Hoagland was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He earned a BA from the University of Iowa and an MFA from the University of Arizona.

Hoagland was the author of the poetry collections Sweet Ruin (1992), which was chosen for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and won the Zacharis Award from Emerson College; Donkey Gospel (1998), winner of the James Laughlin Award; What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Rain (2005); Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010); Application for Release from the Dream (2015); Recent Changes in the Vernacular (2017); and Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2018).

He has also published two collections of essays about poetry: Real Sofistakashun (2006) and Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays (2014). Hoagland’s poetry is known for its acerbic, witty take on contemporary life and “straight talk,” in the words of New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner: “At his frequent best … Hoagland is demonically in touch with the American demotic.”

Hoagland’s many honors and awards included fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. He received the O.B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award, and the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. Hoagland taught at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. He died in October 2018..

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tony Hoagland is a funny, smart and appropriately bitter man. I am not speaking of Tony Hoagland the person here, but the poet. He is funny in a poem like "Romantic Moment," when a speaker, on a second date and after a movie that has some of his more primal instincts going, has to censure his fantastical mating rituals in the face of ettiquette, and Tony Hoagland is smart in a poem like "Cement Truck" or "Allegory of the Temp Agency," when he examines the stuff of poetry itself through the need (or lack thereof) of a cement truck in a poem or in the easy conclusions offered by a painting out to make a point and the need to curtail self-indulgence for the sake of art. And he is appropriately bitter in "Foodcourt" or "Operations," where he takes to task the essence of the American character through mall culture and the political rhetoric of war and what it could be as opposed to what it allows itself to be.

But the Hoagland I like best is when there is something of all three Hoagland's wrapped together. Of late, as in _What Narcissism Means to Me_, as well as here, Hoagland has taken on cultural challenges and has taken on, with both humor and a shaking finger (in all directions, of course), our political and national identities. He doesn't resort to dogma, fortunately (although I would love to see the twists and turns he would execute if brought onto Hannity & Colmes), and his commentary is wonderfully biting and full of smirks, but I get far more interested in poems like "Hostess" and the aforementioned "Romantic Moment," where the personal includes in its background the cultural and even political, but doesn't take steps that unfortunately snap back on themselves, albeit in even somewhat anticipated ways.

Hoagland the man has been wonderfully argumentative and confrontational in otherwise overly (and boringly) polite poetic settings, and attitude that manifests in his poetry as work that constantly challenge what the stuff of poetry really is, though this chapbook at times feels more like the ground work that may build him up to working all this together into an inspired whole down the line. If Hoagland challenges himself as much as he challenges others towards that art, I am sure he will strike the motherlode soon.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I see that three people have rated this chapbook one single star. I often wonder about those people. The ones on Amazon who rate a product one star because it was delivered to their neighbor by mistake or some likewise unrelated rationale. What poetry do these people read that this was so off-putting to them?

I enjoyed the book. I love the way Hoagland thinks and writes and what he puts out there. I've seen some of these in his other books. Understandable. I do that myself. I am extremely impressed with what the poet did with "Dialectical Materialism". For my own selfish reasons, I also enjoyed "Cement Truck". It made me recall watching a gravel truck make a hard left turn and overturn. So I took Hoagland's cement truck and my dump truck and married them in a Fantasia-like ballet poem. I could not have made those thought leaps without his thought leaps.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe I just finished the last Tony Hoagland book
I'll ever get to read for the very first time...
and my heart is thoroughly broken.

I did not want it to end...
like I didn't want him to end.

So, I'm hoping this will say it all.

[Tom Romig · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to miss his sharp and honest poetic take on life, such as these opening lines from the poem "Hard Rain":

After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,
nothing we can't turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.

[Gillian McDermott · Rating 3 out of 5]

The cynicism, familiar settings, and self-consciously figurative language work well in a small subset of these poems. The best are probably “Breaking up Is Hard to Do,” “Allegory of the Temp Agency,” and “Responsibility in Metaphor.”

[Michael Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just wow!

[Charis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly down to earth and fun to read. Excited to read more by this author.

[Bjorn Sorensen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tony Hoagland is a breath of fresh air coming through the window of a house full of dogs, who breathe loudly and put their heavy, slobbering heads on their owner's knees as if to say "LOVE ME, PRETTY PLEASE!!".

Hoagland earned my love and adoration (sans drool) by being funny, revealing and making points about society and politics without beating this reader over the head (see previous part of sentence about "being funny"). He excels at pointing out the foibles and shortcomings about humanfolk, yet recognizes the instincts in being human, the instincts we'd like to have control over - but just don't. Take "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do":

On Friday afternoon David said he was divesting his holdings
in Stephanie dot org.
And Cindy announced she was getting rid of all her Dan-obelia,
and did anyone want a tennis racket or a cardigan?

Alice told Michael that she was transplanting herself
to another brand of potting soil
And Jason composed a 3-chord blues song called
"I Can't Rake Your Leaves Anymore Mama,"
then insisted on playing it
over his speakerphone to Ellen.

The moon rose up in the western sky
with an expression of complete exhaustion,
like a 38-year old single mother
standing at the edge of the playground. Right at that moment

Betty was extracting coil after coil of Andrew's
emotional intestines
through a verbal incision she had made in his heart,
and Jane was parachuting into an Ani Difranco concert
wearing a banner saying, GET LOST, MARK RESNICK.

That's how you find out:
out of the blue.
And it hurts, baby, it really hurts,
because breaking up is hard to do.


There is magic in the mixture of playfulness ("I Can't Rake Your Leaves Anymore Mama") and somber realities ("a 38-year old single mother standing at the edge of the playground") in so many of Hoagland's poems, which never strays into boyish immaturity or heavy-handed political stances. He is who he is and he's not upset about it.

Sure, he can carry on a little too long with a poetic ploy, as in "Operations", which could have ended after the first stanza, and his lines can seem a little too long because he uses the same style throughout the book. On the other hand, his conversational style and dense, interesting commentary fits well here in a shorter, chapbook format. And when he does stray a little from his style - as in the rhyming stanza at the end of "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" - it really works.

Hoagland, in short, is like a useful conversation among political opposites - congenial, filled with humor and empathy and ending with the deep realization that we're all human. Regardless of quality of the stereo, the guitar solos, the B sides and the funky harmonization, we all want it to end on a good note.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great chapbook from a very funny poet. I can't wait to see if these poems will end up part of a larger work, or if Hoagland has moved on and started working on something else. If you like Hoagland, this is a nice addition to your collection. If you haven't read him before, start with Donkey Gospel. It's his best.

[Geoff Wyss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really liked this one. A few poems overindulge in the kind of coy, cutesy cleverness that often makes Billy Collins hard to take, but Hoagland's self-aware idiom is usually put in service of poems that are exactly about that self-awareness, about language's complicity in our compulsion to analyze. But the book's a lot more fun than that makes it sound.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a little more political than I was expecting Tony to be. Should have looked at the publisher and I might have guessed that before reading this chapbook. Not my favorite, but there are some beautiful lines.

[Parksy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good poetry. Like his contemporary take on things.

[Sade · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite of these poems is Responsibility in Metaphor.

[W. Benson Cartwright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book.

[Wilbur · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revisiting an old friend. A delightful poet.

[Davelowusa · Rating 4 out of 5]

In light of last week's Pepsi commercial (which treated the protesting of police brutality as an opportunity to bond over cola), the title poem of this 2005 collection continues to resonate.


After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood: there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can't turn into a soft-drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

"You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy,"
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
"about all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time—"

And everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood—
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.