Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays by Tony Hoagland

Author:Tony Hoagland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-329-2
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2014-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Hejinian deals in the same contemporary verities as the other poets considered here—unknowability and transience, the illusory nature of self hood, the limits and instabilities of language—and, like them, she is deliberately irregular in her progressions. But Hejinian handles her material in a quasi-discursive, quasi-autobiographical manner, comforting for its intimacy and intermittent physicality. “B wants to liberate phrases / from the structural confines and coercive syntax of sentences and so / does C but C is in France”: it’s the worldly acknowledgment of that last but—“but C is in France”—that makes Hejinian lovably worldly.

The relationship of the vertiginous to flatness in poetry makes an interesting sidebar: LANGUAGE poets like Clark Coolidge and Charles Bernstein have sometimes insisted on the flatness of text as a purist principle, a kind of ascetic prohibition of illusion. Hejinian’s The Fatalist, though intentionally disjunctive, is nonetheless stubbornly three-dimensional. With her pedigree in deconstruction, Hejinian naturally accounts for language as material, and fractures the rules of predictability in syntax and sentence. Yet in her dippy, erratic mapping of the human condition, all concepts are not created equal. This poet does not balk at sincerely asserting some hierarchies: “A sense of the uniqueness / and interrelatedness of things” she says, “is fundamental here.” The passages of The Fatalist are weighted with various dimensions and tones: the sensuous gratifications of nature, the history of other persons’ sayings. The effect is to keep us on our toes and, at the same time, to keep us company. At times I feel that Hejinian, in her generous claims about the spaciousness of human nature, has become the unlikely humanitarian of her tribe:

Time is filled with beginners. You are right. Now

each of them is working on something

and it matters. The large increments of life must not go by

unrecognized. That’s why my mother’s own mother-in-law

was often bawdy. “MEATBALLS!” she would shout

superbly anticipating site-specific specificity in the future

of poetry.

……

Materiality, after all, is about being

a geologist or biologist, bread dough rising

while four boys on skateboards attempt to fly.

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