Tony Hoagland Quotes & Sayings

Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness.
As long as there is desire, we will not be safe — 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

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

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

Why did it take me so long to figure out that my special talent was trying? — 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

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

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

And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely — Tony Hoagland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters — Tony Hoagland

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

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

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

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

We would give anything for what we have. — Tony Hoagland