Tony Hoagland Quotes

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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“The glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters”

— Tony Hoagland

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

“Because if marriage is a kind of womb,
divorce is the being born again.”

— 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

“And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely”

— Tony Hoagland

“We would give anything for what we have.”

— Tony Hoagland

“The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.”

— 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

“These poems possess intelligence, erudition, gravitas and urgency. Serious and moving in voice and ambition, this passionately lyrical and articulate work reminds me very much of the capacious, fierce and intelligent work of Adrienne Rich.”

— Tony Hoagland

“We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy, we've all tried to start a fire, and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own. In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty ...”

— Tony Hoagland

“What we know for sure is that metaphor is the raw uranium of poetry, and that an urge to say that one thing is like something else is one of the earliest markers of the poetic spirit, the nascent poet.”

— Tony Hoagland

“The nobility of Teresa Leo's poems is that they are not disposed to hide from the dark-rather, they display a mind that tends toward obsession and brooding, that works against fatality like fingers at a knot. The firm, attentive mind on display and the lucid unfolding of the poems are the life instinct seeking and finding its way through again and again. Love and beauty are the argument, but they don't win easily. Bloom in Reverse works through elegy toward survival with moving persistence, both driven and compelling.”

— Tony Hoagland

“Peter Hyland's poems are both elegantly wrought and meditatively wild. They testify to an original, restless intelligence. He can cast his imagination into a woman's dress, the mind of a grasshopper, or into the glass eyeballs of a buffalo head mounted on the wall of a home in suburban Texas to contemplate 'man's tireless ingenuity.'”

— Tony Hoagland

“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

“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