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Donkey Gospel
Winner of the 1997 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets
In his second collection of poems, Hoagland's generous effervescence and a jujitsu cleverness sparkle through line after line confronting negotiation and compromise, gender and culture, sex and rock music, sons and lovers, truth and beauty, and so forth. From the boy who speaks only in "Kung Fu" dialogue to the guy who visits a lesbian bar and sees his mother, this often funny and always thoughtful book of poems offers fresh, surprisingly frank meditations on the credentials for contemporary manhood.
In his second collection of poems, Hoagland's generous effervescence and a jujitsu cleverness sparkle through line after line confronting negotiation and compromise, gender and culture, sex and rock music, sons and lovers, truth and beauty, and so forth. From the boy who speaks only in "Kung Fu" dialogue to the guy who visits a lesbian bar and sees his mother, this often funny and always thoughtful book of poems offers fresh, surprisingly frank meditations on the credentials for contemporary manhood.
80 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1998
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About the author
Tony Hoagland
48 books191 followersTony 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..
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..
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August 10, 2017
This collection of poems offers a great mix of topics from Hoagland's own coming-of-age, marriage, family/parents to meditations on sex, what it means to be "a man," (a word that begs quotation marks in a big way) to popular culture (the category that freezes me on Jeopardy! every time).
You get Hoagland's signature, conversational style (see Collins comma Billy and Bilgere comma George) and, in this book, more than usual poetic flourishes and fine finishes.
By way of illustration, I give you Hoagland's poem about his sister's loss of beauty, called, reasonably enough, "Beauty":
Beauty by Tony Hoagland
When the medication she was taking
caused tiny vessels in her face to break,
leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,
my sister said she knew she would
never be beautiful again.
After all those years
of watching her reflection in the mirror,
sucking in her stomach and standing straight,
she said it was a relief,
being done with beauty,
but I could see her pause inside that moment
as the knowledge spread across her face
with a fine distress, sucking
the peach out of her lips,
making her cute nose seem, for the first time,
a little knobby.
I’m probably the only one in the whole world
who actually remembers the year in high school
she perfected the art
of being a dumb blond,
spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab,
tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill
which was her specialty,
while some football player named Johnny
with a pained expression in his eyes
wrapped his thick finger over and over again
in the bedspring of one of those pale curls.
Or how she spent the next decade of her life
auditioning a series of tall men,
looking for just one with the kind
of attention span she could count on.
Then one day her time of prettiness
was over, done, finito,
and all those other beautiful women
in the magazines and on the streets
just kept on being beautiful
everywhere you looked,
walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance
in which you sense they always seem to have one hand
touching the secret place
that keeps their beauty safe,
inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it—
It was spring. Season when the young
buttercups and daisies climb up on the
mulched bodies of their forebears
to wave their flags in the parade.
My sister just stood still for thirty seconds,
amazed by what was happening,
then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head
as if she was throwing something out,
something she had carried a long ways,
but had no use for anymore,
now that it had no use for her.
That, too, was beautiful.
Beauty as a practical item in a toolbox, then. And a variation on the age-old theme of getting old (see Marvell comma Andrew's "To His Coy Mistress" and Herrick comma Robert's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time").
Here, from the perspective of a teacher, is another musing on time and age and death, only this time in the first person point of hearing:
Memory as a Hearing Aid
Somewhere, someone is asking a question,
and I stand squinting at the classroom
with one hand cupped behind my ear,
trying to figure out where that voice is coming from.
I might be already an old man,
attempting to recall the night
his hearing got misplaced,
front-row-center at a battle of the bands,
where a lot of leather-clad, second-rate musicians,
amped up to dinosaur proportions,
test drove their equipment through our ears.
Each time the drummer threw a tantrum,
the guitarist whirled and sprayed us with machine-gun riffs,
as if they wished that they could knock us
quite literally dead.
We called that fun in 1970,
when we weren’t sure our lives were worth surviving.
I’m here to tell you that they were,
and many of us did, despite ourselves,
though the road from there to here
is paved with dead brain cells,
parents shocked to silence,
and squad cars painting the whole neighborhood
the quaking tint and texture of red jelly.
Friends, we should have postmarks on our foreheads
to show where we have been;
we should have pointed ears, or polka-dotted skin
to show what we were thinking
when we hot-rodded over God’s front lawn,
and Death kept blinking.
But here I stand, an average-looking man
staring at a room
where someone blond in braids
with a beautiful belief in answers
is still asking questions.
Through the silence in my dead ear,
I can almost hear the future whisper
to the past: it says that this is not a test
and everybody passes.
And, to the tune of "wish I knew then what I know now," I give you this:
Jet
Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth
and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,
and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.
And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though
no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.
Unlike that much loathed category of inscrutable poems (dark shades of high school), Hoagland's poems are waiting out back, engine running and all warmed up. You'll get lines like "At the bronze hour when the sun meets on the horizon like an old doubloon" and "the velvet sibilance of waves" and "the almond trees drop their white petals of applause."
It's almost like the almond's petals have read this book. It's that rare type of collection that might be better owned for rereading (if your apprenticeship in conversational-yet-poetic-writing-that-might-tempt-poetry-phobic-readers-to-bite has a ways to go).
Mine, alas, is a library book. Still, if there's one Tony Hoagland collection I might want on my shelf for dip and re-dips, this one's in contention. What better can you say about a book of poesies than that?
You get Hoagland's signature, conversational style (see Collins comma Billy and Bilgere comma George) and, in this book, more than usual poetic flourishes and fine finishes.
By way of illustration, I give you Hoagland's poem about his sister's loss of beauty, called, reasonably enough, "Beauty":
Beauty by Tony Hoagland
When the medication she was taking
caused tiny vessels in her face to break,
leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,
my sister said she knew she would
never be beautiful again.
After all those years
of watching her reflection in the mirror,
sucking in her stomach and standing straight,
she said it was a relief,
being done with beauty,
but I could see her pause inside that moment
as the knowledge spread across her face
with a fine distress, sucking
the peach out of her lips,
making her cute nose seem, for the first time,
a little knobby.
I’m probably the only one in the whole world
who actually remembers the year in high school
she perfected the art
of being a dumb blond,
spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab,
tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill
which was her specialty,
while some football player named Johnny
with a pained expression in his eyes
wrapped his thick finger over and over again
in the bedspring of one of those pale curls.
Or how she spent the next decade of her life
auditioning a series of tall men,
looking for just one with the kind
of attention span she could count on.
Then one day her time of prettiness
was over, done, finito,
and all those other beautiful women
in the magazines and on the streets
just kept on being beautiful
everywhere you looked,
walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance
in which you sense they always seem to have one hand
touching the secret place
that keeps their beauty safe,
inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it—
It was spring. Season when the young
buttercups and daisies climb up on the
mulched bodies of their forebears
to wave their flags in the parade.
My sister just stood still for thirty seconds,
amazed by what was happening,
then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head
as if she was throwing something out,
something she had carried a long ways,
but had no use for anymore,
now that it had no use for her.
That, too, was beautiful.
Beauty as a practical item in a toolbox, then. And a variation on the age-old theme of getting old (see Marvell comma Andrew's "To His Coy Mistress" and Herrick comma Robert's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time").
Here, from the perspective of a teacher, is another musing on time and age and death, only this time in the first person point of hearing:
Memory as a Hearing Aid
Somewhere, someone is asking a question,
and I stand squinting at the classroom
with one hand cupped behind my ear,
trying to figure out where that voice is coming from.
I might be already an old man,
attempting to recall the night
his hearing got misplaced,
front-row-center at a battle of the bands,
where a lot of leather-clad, second-rate musicians,
amped up to dinosaur proportions,
test drove their equipment through our ears.
Each time the drummer threw a tantrum,
the guitarist whirled and sprayed us with machine-gun riffs,
as if they wished that they could knock us
quite literally dead.
We called that fun in 1970,
when we weren’t sure our lives were worth surviving.
I’m here to tell you that they were,
and many of us did, despite ourselves,
though the road from there to here
is paved with dead brain cells,
parents shocked to silence,
and squad cars painting the whole neighborhood
the quaking tint and texture of red jelly.
Friends, we should have postmarks on our foreheads
to show where we have been;
we should have pointed ears, or polka-dotted skin
to show what we were thinking
when we hot-rodded over God’s front lawn,
and Death kept blinking.
But here I stand, an average-looking man
staring at a room
where someone blond in braids
with a beautiful belief in answers
is still asking questions.
Through the silence in my dead ear,
I can almost hear the future whisper
to the past: it says that this is not a test
and everybody passes.
And, to the tune of "wish I knew then what I know now," I give you this:
Jet
Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth
and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,
and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.
And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though
no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.
Unlike that much loathed category of inscrutable poems (dark shades of high school), Hoagland's poems are waiting out back, engine running and all warmed up. You'll get lines like "At the bronze hour when the sun meets on the horizon like an old doubloon" and "the velvet sibilance of waves" and "the almond trees drop their white petals of applause."
It's almost like the almond's petals have read this book. It's that rare type of collection that might be better owned for rereading (if your apprenticeship in conversational-yet-poetic-writing-that-might-tempt-poetry-phobic-readers-to-bite has a ways to go).
Mine, alas, is a library book. Still, if there's one Tony Hoagland collection I might want on my shelf for dip and re-dips, this one's in contention. What better can you say about a book of poesies than that?
December 15, 2010
There’s a dreadful humor to these poems. I’ve read “Self-Improvement” at least a hundred times now:
Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents’ summer home,
Bruce’s college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:
Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.
Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind’s eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math…
You really need to read the rest of the poem because it becomes just heartbreaking. “Medicine”, “Lawrence”, “Here in Berkeley”, “Mission”, “The Confessional Mode”, and “Adam and Eve” are also memorable, often leaving you laughing with a sunken feeling in your chest.
Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents’ summer home,
Bruce’s college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:
Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.
Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind’s eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math…
You really need to read the rest of the poem because it becomes just heartbreaking. “Medicine”, “Lawrence”, “Here in Berkeley”, “Mission”, “The Confessional Mode”, and “Adam and Eve” are also memorable, often leaving you laughing with a sunken feeling in your chest.
August 12, 2008
Hoagland quite obviously writes from a male perspective. This is stating the obvious, though, even if you tried to think a woman wrote them, you can’t (too much sex from his side!). This is not to criticise, it is simply to place the author in perspective; a perspective that is mainly autobiographical as one learns plenty about his parents without having known the details before. In several poems he states that a memory or feeling originated in the late 1960s early ’70s and, let’s face it, those days were filled with experimentation with drugs and seeing how far sex can be pushed. He comes up with amazing descriptions for things, which unfortunately fell flat for me occasionally. The magic of some poems were dispelled in their closing lines.
I really liked “Lawrence” (Hoagland 1998: 31), where he describes wanting to make a stand for this famous writer, but is unable to in social situations. I can completely identify with that! How often have we thought we’re being ‘nerds’ just because we want to defend someone we admire, but are too ashamed to do so? “Lawrence” depicts that experience/feeling perfectly! “Hearings” (Hoagland 1998: 29) starts with the beautiful phrase: Autumn, and the leaves decide again they don’t / need leaves. This poem moves from nature to the nature of politics and does it so subtly you don’t recognize it until you reach the end of the poem and the poet’s point is made. How he manages to connect all these things is part of the spell he weaves with his adjectives. I end with another ‘heart wrencher’ (stanza 3/4 “Here in Berkeley” Hoagland 1998: 35):
Close your eyes,
swing a baguette horizontally,
you’ll hit someone with a Ph.D.
in sensitivity,
someone who,
if not a therapist himself,
will offer you the number of his therapist,
which – it may take you years
to figure out – is a hostile act on his part
designed to send you on a wild-goose chase
through the orchard of your childhood
to fetch the tarnished apple of your mother’s love.
I really liked “Lawrence” (Hoagland 1998: 31), where he describes wanting to make a stand for this famous writer, but is unable to in social situations. I can completely identify with that! How often have we thought we’re being ‘nerds’ just because we want to defend someone we admire, but are too ashamed to do so? “Lawrence” depicts that experience/feeling perfectly! “Hearings” (Hoagland 1998: 29) starts with the beautiful phrase: Autumn, and the leaves decide again they don’t / need leaves. This poem moves from nature to the nature of politics and does it so subtly you don’t recognize it until you reach the end of the poem and the poet’s point is made. How he manages to connect all these things is part of the spell he weaves with his adjectives. I end with another ‘heart wrencher’ (stanza 3/4 “Here in Berkeley” Hoagland 1998: 35):
Close your eyes,
swing a baguette horizontally,
you’ll hit someone with a Ph.D.
in sensitivity,
someone who,
if not a therapist himself,
will offer you the number of his therapist,
which – it may take you years
to figure out – is a hostile act on his part
designed to send you on a wild-goose chase
through the orchard of your childhood
to fetch the tarnished apple of your mother’s love.
December 3, 2021
To whomever taught me the word dickhead,
I owe a debt of thanks.
Now that is how to start a poem!
I owe a debt of thanks.
Now that is how to start a poem!
October 10, 2010
I became interested in Tony Hoagland through Hun Lye. He is a very witty turning into insightful, often to the point of laughter, yet also sometimes shockingly pointed. All of these qualities make for a very contemplative, enjoyable read, and I found myself earmarking the poems so that I could read them to somebody later.
Because I have lately been immersed reading Mary Oliver's Rules of the Dance, which is all about metrics and rhythm, I was particularly sensitive to these qualities, and while I've never had much interest in contemporary poetry because they lacked these qualities, and thus a significant "in" to my sensibilities, I nonetheless enjoyed the richness of his language, often enjoying a quasi-metric, quasi-rhythmic quality, that I could at least pinpoint and see, at least, that he was doing something. That aside, his language, especially diction, is rich, and has metaphors that seem straight out of a Haruki Murakami novel. Or maybe it's the other way around?
Because I have lately been immersed reading Mary Oliver's Rules of the Dance, which is all about metrics and rhythm, I was particularly sensitive to these qualities, and while I've never had much interest in contemporary poetry because they lacked these qualities, and thus a significant "in" to my sensibilities, I nonetheless enjoyed the richness of his language, often enjoying a quasi-metric, quasi-rhythmic quality, that I could at least pinpoint and see, at least, that he was doing something. That aside, his language, especially diction, is rich, and has metaphors that seem straight out of a Haruki Murakami novel. Or maybe it's the other way around?
October 24, 2021
An absolutely amazing collection of emotional and sociological poetry, touched by humor. I'm a huge Hoagland fan after this read.
Read
June 6, 2023A group of students convinced me to get this collection for my classroom, and I’m glad they did! Hoagland has this great mix of humor and earnestness and he’s always finding ways of making comparisons that feel surprisingly familiar. In many of the poems here he uses that combination to reflect on and question different aspects of masculinity— the result is a collection of poems that are welcoming but never complacent, making this a nice resource for the boys in my Intro to Poetry class.
September 16, 2012
Reading this, I wanted to roar with rage and recognition, finally, a living poet I adore! And this poem in particular will be dear to my heart as long as I live with a still functioning brain:
Lawrence
On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,
a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder
to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name
the way pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
“O Elephant,” they say,
“you are not so big and brave today!”
It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven’t earned,
and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people
don’t defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,
I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say, “I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,”
or, “You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life
as to deserve to lift
just one of D. H. Lawrence’s urine samples
to your arid psychobiographic
theory-tainted lips.”
Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven’t come that far
in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more
than fight, and fuck, and crow,
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.
-----
Other delights: Self-Improvement, Candlelight (probably my second favorite), The Replacement, and this passage about singing a song thought hated, "that's how it goes when your head and heart are in different time zones— you often don't find out till tomorrow what you felt today." Really was a pleasure reading this. Lots of lovely language and cleverness.
Lawrence
On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,
a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder
to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name
the way pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
“O Elephant,” they say,
“you are not so big and brave today!”
It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven’t earned,
and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people
don’t defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,
I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say, “I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,”
or, “You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life
as to deserve to lift
just one of D. H. Lawrence’s urine samples
to your arid psychobiographic
theory-tainted lips.”
Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven’t come that far
in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more
than fight, and fuck, and crow,
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.
-----
Other delights: Self-Improvement, Candlelight (probably my second favorite), The Replacement, and this passage about singing a song thought hated, "that's how it goes when your head and heart are in different time zones— you often don't find out till tomorrow what you felt today." Really was a pleasure reading this. Lots of lovely language and cleverness.
May 22, 2008
Donkey Gospel, the first book I encountered by Tony Hoagland, is very easily one of the best books of poetry I've ever seen. All of his poems are taut with lyrical courage, tempered with great risk, and resplendent with what I like to call a refreshing, emotional honesty.
Hoagland seems on every page to be both ferocious and vulnerable in a manner that is sadly lacking in much of today's elitist verse. In "Donkey Gospel", Hoagland overwhelmingly disproves the thesis of so many other poets--that good poetry must be accessible only to an uber-educated handful. Here, we see poems whose accessibility, lyricism, and good humor are matched only by their brilliance.
As a frequent reader of poetry books, I am often disappointed by what strikes me as the work of tone-deaf snobs who instill no real compassion in their work. Not the case with Hoagland. I literally dog-eared nearly every page of Donkey Gospel, and I happily share his stuff with my creative writing students. The looks on their faces says it all.
Hoagland seems on every page to be both ferocious and vulnerable in a manner that is sadly lacking in much of today's elitist verse. In "Donkey Gospel", Hoagland overwhelmingly disproves the thesis of so many other poets--that good poetry must be accessible only to an uber-educated handful. Here, we see poems whose accessibility, lyricism, and good humor are matched only by their brilliance.
As a frequent reader of poetry books, I am often disappointed by what strikes me as the work of tone-deaf snobs who instill no real compassion in their work. Not the case with Hoagland. I literally dog-eared nearly every page of Donkey Gospel, and I happily share his stuff with my creative writing students. The looks on their faces says it all.
September 1, 2015
Excellent and wise collection of poetry.
September 22, 2024
“Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.
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.
The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.
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.”
—
“Now I have myself become
a beautiful ugliness,
and my weakness is a fact
so well established that
it makes me calm,
and I am calm enough
to be grateful for the lives I
never have to live again;
but I remember all the bad old days
back in the world of men,
when everything was serious, mysterious, scary,
hairier and bigger than I was;
I recall when flesh
was what I hated, feared
and was excluded from:
Hardly knowing what I did,
or what would come of it,
I made a word my friend.”
—
“Daydreaming comes easy to the ill:
slowed down to the speed of waiting rooms,
you learn to hang suspended in the wallpaper,
to drift among the magazines and plants,
feeling a strange love
for the time that might be killing you.
Two years ago, I was so infatuated
with my lady doctor, Linda,
I wanted to get better just to please her,
and yet to go on getting worse,
to keep her leaning toward me,
with her sea green eyes and stethoscope, asking
Does that hurt?
Does it hurt? Yes, it hurts
so sweet. It hurts exquisitely.
It hurts real good. I feel as if I read it
in some Bible for the ill,
that suffering itself is medicine
and to endure enough will cure you
of anything.”
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.
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.
The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.
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.”
—
“Now I have myself become
a beautiful ugliness,
and my weakness is a fact
so well established that
it makes me calm,
and I am calm enough
to be grateful for the lives I
never have to live again;
but I remember all the bad old days
back in the world of men,
when everything was serious, mysterious, scary,
hairier and bigger than I was;
I recall when flesh
was what I hated, feared
and was excluded from:
Hardly knowing what I did,
or what would come of it,
I made a word my friend.”
—
“Daydreaming comes easy to the ill:
slowed down to the speed of waiting rooms,
you learn to hang suspended in the wallpaper,
to drift among the magazines and plants,
feeling a strange love
for the time that might be killing you.
Two years ago, I was so infatuated
with my lady doctor, Linda,
I wanted to get better just to please her,
and yet to go on getting worse,
to keep her leaning toward me,
with her sea green eyes and stethoscope, asking
Does that hurt?
Does it hurt? Yes, it hurts
so sweet. It hurts exquisitely.
It hurts real good. I feel as if I read it
in some Bible for the ill,
that suffering itself is medicine
and to endure enough will cure you
of anything.”
January 10, 2025
"But wherever I was going, I don't care anymore, / because no place i could arrive at / is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience / but to which experience will never measure up. / And that dark and soaring fact / is enough to make me renounce the whole world / or fall in love with it forever."
March 16, 2015
I just realized that I've read three Tony Hoagland books in a week, though this is the first of his own poetry. I deeply enjoyed this. While I've read some of Hoagland's poems in anthologies or heard them via The Writer's Almanac, I'd never read them in context or seen several in a row.
It was delightful to read this collection right after having read his two books regarding craft, Real Sofistikashun, and Twenty Poems That Could Save America. I can see the poetics he advocates for (though he believes all forms and styles are welcome) reflected clearly in these poems---a kind of humorous intelligence which constantly grasps for light rather than the dark this poet is fully aware of. The best poems here are "Totally," "From This Height," "Memory As A hearing Aid," "Candlelight," and "Jet."
Hoagland's style is a really interesting amalgam of intuitiveness and reliance on unconscious association on the one hand, and an ecstasy regarding the events of real life on the other. Predictably, the poems which succeed the most are a marriage of these two impulses. Perhaps because I'd just read his strong feelings about Robert Bly's "Leaping Poetry" and Lorca's "duende," I expected a bit more surrealism here. But Hoagland remains (dare I say it) accessible in the best possible way that could be said; he is aware of the slipperiness and explosiveness of language, but that doesn't stop him from giving its use a try anyway…As he says in "From This Height," the stories and language which we can relate to, "considering their enormous price, would be a sin not to enjoy." In that poem, he's referring to "high-calorie pate," but the metaphor is strong here and it's clear that Hoagland intends to go about enjoying and celebrating the very small bit of order and equilibrium which, in Twenty Poems That Could Save America "a great athletic achievement." Indeed, as he reminds us at the end of "Jet": "we would give anything for what we have."
It was delightful to read this collection right after having read his two books regarding craft, Real Sofistikashun, and Twenty Poems That Could Save America. I can see the poetics he advocates for (though he believes all forms and styles are welcome) reflected clearly in these poems---a kind of humorous intelligence which constantly grasps for light rather than the dark this poet is fully aware of. The best poems here are "Totally," "From This Height," "Memory As A hearing Aid," "Candlelight," and "Jet."
Hoagland's style is a really interesting amalgam of intuitiveness and reliance on unconscious association on the one hand, and an ecstasy regarding the events of real life on the other. Predictably, the poems which succeed the most are a marriage of these two impulses. Perhaps because I'd just read his strong feelings about Robert Bly's "Leaping Poetry" and Lorca's "duende," I expected a bit more surrealism here. But Hoagland remains (dare I say it) accessible in the best possible way that could be said; he is aware of the slipperiness and explosiveness of language, but that doesn't stop him from giving its use a try anyway…As he says in "From This Height," the stories and language which we can relate to, "considering their enormous price, would be a sin not to enjoy." In that poem, he's referring to "high-calorie pate," but the metaphor is strong here and it's clear that Hoagland intends to go about enjoying and celebrating the very small bit of order and equilibrium which, in Twenty Poems That Could Save America "a great athletic achievement." Indeed, as he reminds us at the end of "Jet": "we would give anything for what we have."
July 26, 2007
He has some good lines it's true. His tone is personable, allowing him to craft interesting scenarios from seemingly commonplace and overdone subject matter (i.e. life on the West Coast, masculinity,etc.) while juxtaposing these scenearios with increasingly intense and surreal imagery/speech.
My tiff with Hoagland is that he can get forumalic: his weaker poems don't struggle for their insight; and because Hoagland doesn't stray too far from his general project of "critiquing of our cultural values via my ironic/tempered tone", the poems can, at their worst, blend into a obnoxiuos mix of confession and didacticism.
However, on the whole, Hoagland is a pleasant guy, though not one I would bother going back to.
My tiff with Hoagland is that he can get forumalic: his weaker poems don't struggle for their insight; and because Hoagland doesn't stray too far from his general project of "critiquing of our cultural values via my ironic/tempered tone", the poems can, at their worst, blend into a obnoxiuos mix of confession and didacticism.
However, on the whole, Hoagland is a pleasant guy, though not one I would bother going back to.
August 27, 2008
I took a poetry writing course this summer with David Clewell (more on his collections later), and it has gotten me back among the poetry stacks. Well, I didn't know anything about Tony Hoagland but one of his collections was cited in THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE (see my reference to this Nick Hornby book)and though the one he mentioned wasn't currently available at my library, DONKEY GOSPEL was. What a great title!!! And the poems follow the title's promise of being true but oh so funny. Many of the poem's touch on the politics of gender--what does it mean to be a man in this day and age? I can't wait to get my hands on the other collection mentioned by Hornby. Get this title...WHAT NARCISSISM MEANS TO ME. Awesome stuff.
January 14, 2009
My plan was to read a couple poems per day or per week or something, but I ended up going through the entire book in one sitting. It was like eating chips. Not entirely surprising, because the same thing happened when I read What Narcissism Means to Me, which came five years after this one. I did not, however, have the immediate compulsion to buy five more copies of this one and mail them to friends, like I did with Narcissism. Nothing in this collection grabbed me in quite the same way as, say, A Color of the Sky. But it was still very good. Edgier. Repeated themes of sex and parents instead of friends and identity. The best metaphors again involved anthropomorphic trees.
July 11, 2012
I can't remember the last time I read an entire book of poetry. I liked it very much. Very male, very American, very San Francisco.
I found it through Nick Hornby, from The Polysyllabic Spree: A Hilarious and True Account of One Man's Struggle With the Monthly Tide of the Books He's Bought and the Books He's Been Meaning to Read
I found it through Nick Hornby, from The Polysyllabic Spree: A Hilarious and True Account of One Man's Struggle With the Monthly Tide of the Books He's Bought and the Books He's Been Meaning to Read
August 6, 2008
I went out and immediately bought 'Donkey Gospel" after reading "What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems" by Tony Hoagland. I was not disappointed, a lot poems where I just laughed out loud while reading. Some really great writing about the day events in life and how we view them, remember them, or wish them to be. Favorite poems include "Mission," "Research," and "Beauty." Read this book and you will not be disappointed.
April 20, 2009
Hoagland's poems deal with a variety of topics, but at their core they deal with masculinity in the contemporary world. He finds wonderful metaphors and images that speak to the frustrations, joys and confusions of being a man. Highly recommended.
You can sample some of his poetry here. (The first two poems are in this collection.)
You can sample some of his poetry here. (The first two poems are in this collection.)
July 3, 2007
This is a decent collection of poems. I enjoyed some of them a lot but there were also a few that felt a little trendy. Hoagland writes strong last lines that are shocking and well crafted.
January 7, 2010
Master of strong endings!
Read
December 8, 2014Was given to me by another poetry-inclined student but didn’t really speak to me.
January 14, 2015
I just really like Tony Hoagland.
February 24, 2015
Just great, really.
One of the few recent contemporary American poets who still you know, has fun sometimes.
One of the few recent contemporary American poets who still you know, has fun sometimes.
December 19, 2015
"Bruce never played the light switch again,"
February 28, 2016
Excellent collection of poetry. Hoagland is full of humor, beauty, irreverence, self flagellation and forgiveness... one of my favorite living poets.
December 28, 2016
Arrows
by Tony Hoagland
When a beautiful woman wakes up,
she checks to see if her beauty is still there.
When a sick person wakes up,
he checks to see if he continues to be sick.
He takes the first pills in a thirty-pill day,
looks out the window at a sky
where a time-release sun is crawling
through the milky X ray of a cloud.
* * * * *
I sing the body like a burnt-out fuse box,
the wires crossed, the panel lit
by red malfunction lights, the pistons firing
out of sequence,
the warning sirens blatting in the empty halls,
and the hero is trapped in a traffic jam,
the message doesn’t reach its destination,
the angel falls down into the body of a dog
and is speechless,
tearing at itself with fast white teeth;
and the consciousness twists evasively,
like a sheet of paper,
traveled by blue tongues of flame.
* * * * *
In the famous painting, the saint
looks steadfastly heavenward,
away from the physical indignity below,
the fascinating spectacle
of his own body
bristling with arrows;
he looks up
as if he were already adamantly elsewhere,
exerting that power of denial
the soul is famous for,
that ability to say, “None of this is real:
Nothing that happened here on earth
and who I thought I was,
and nothing that I did or that was done to me,
was ever real.”
by Tony Hoagland
When a beautiful woman wakes up,
she checks to see if her beauty is still there.
When a sick person wakes up,
he checks to see if he continues to be sick.
He takes the first pills in a thirty-pill day,
looks out the window at a sky
where a time-release sun is crawling
through the milky X ray of a cloud.
* * * * *
I sing the body like a burnt-out fuse box,
the wires crossed, the panel lit
by red malfunction lights, the pistons firing
out of sequence,
the warning sirens blatting in the empty halls,
and the hero is trapped in a traffic jam,
the message doesn’t reach its destination,
the angel falls down into the body of a dog
and is speechless,
tearing at itself with fast white teeth;
and the consciousness twists evasively,
like a sheet of paper,
traveled by blue tongues of flame.
* * * * *
In the famous painting, the saint
looks steadfastly heavenward,
away from the physical indignity below,
the fascinating spectacle
of his own body
bristling with arrows;
he looks up
as if he were already adamantly elsewhere,
exerting that power of denial
the soul is famous for,
that ability to say, “None of this is real:
Nothing that happened here on earth
and who I thought I was,
and nothing that I did or that was done to me,
was ever real.”
Read
September 14, 2025So so good. “Adam and Eve” gave me a lot to chew on. My favorite thing about Hoagland is his ability to imbue the most stupid things with primordial power. The word “dickhead,” regaling the bar with one’s sexual escapades, being locked up for a night in a local jail, etc. It takes so much skill to do this without veering into the realm of bathos—and Hoagland always manages to do it. Reminds me of John Darnielle’s work.
Also has some really great turns of phrase. I decided to buy the book bc when I opened to a random page I saw the line “the unmown field is foaming at the mouth with flowers” and I thought that was just utterly fantastic. Ginsberg-esque in my head? Maybe I’m just equating the two because of their semi-similar subject matters tho.
Some faves from this collection: “Self Improvement,” “Lawrence,” “Lie Down with a Man,” “From This Height,” “Totally.” Also ofc “Fred Had Watched a Lot of Kung Fu Episodes” which introduced me to Hoagland in the first place.
Also has some really great turns of phrase. I decided to buy the book bc when I opened to a random page I saw the line “the unmown field is foaming at the mouth with flowers” and I thought that was just utterly fantastic. Ginsberg-esque in my head? Maybe I’m just equating the two because of their semi-similar subject matters tho.
Some faves from this collection: “Self Improvement,” “Lawrence,” “Lie Down with a Man,” “From This Height,” “Totally.” Also ofc “Fred Had Watched a Lot of Kung Fu Episodes” which introduced me to Hoagland in the first place.
April 15, 2019
a poets ability to utilize humor is a true test of their. mastery of the english language. Hoagland effortlessly blends a chuckle and a deep sigh in every poem, masking his somber reflections on love, fear, and self doubt in a welcoming coat of a pleasant joke or coy quip. like a dog eating a heart-worm pill wrapped in kraft american cheese, i too have been tricked into consuming what is, though at first tough to swallow, ultimately crucial to my existence
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