Tony Hoagland

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Tony Hoagland's zany poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He is American poetry's hilarious 'high priest of irony', a wisecracker and a risktaker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushes the poem not just to its limits but over the edge.

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty was his first new collection after What Narcissism Means to Me: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005). The poems – and title – try to make sense of the situation of the individual in our time, and in America in particular – Hoagland's obsessive main subject. They worry over how to preserve a sense of self and values, connectedness and cohesiveness, in an era of market-driven culture, dazzling but toxic entertainment, and degraded and degrading idiocies cultivated by mass culture.

'He belongs to that wagon-circle of American poets who believe in a "common reader"…Hoagland is a poet of a ragged, half-satirical, half-lyrical intensity. If Billy Collins is Updike, Hoagland is Salinger, or perhaps Holden Caulfield…making us think we know the ground we are on, then showing us that we don’t…For me, he not only pulls the rug from under my feet when it comes to the moral complacencies and platitudes that I don’t notice I live by, he does the same with my given poetic certainties' – Henry Shukman, Poetry London

'Hilarious, searing poems that break your heart so fast you hardly notice you’re standing knee deep in a pool of implications. They are of this moment, right now – the present that we’re already homesick for' – Marie Howe

USA: Graywolf Press

Tony Hoagland on D.H. Lawrence, Britney Spears and being lucky or romantic

When Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed Tony Hoagland in August 2008, he was still living near Wellfleet on Cape Cod, and had published his UK selected What Narcissism Means to Me with Bloodaxe. In this film he reads two poems from that book, ‘Lawrence’ and ‘Benevolence’, and two poems from the manuscript which later became Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, ‘Romantic Moment’ and ‘Poor Britney Spears’. This film is from the DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce & edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). 

Tony Hoagland live at Ledbury Poetry Festival

Tony Hoagland reads and introduces a selection of his poems from all his books at Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2017, where he shared a stage with Thomas Lynch.

Tony Hoagland: The American Poetic Voice

What is most distinctive about the American poetic voice? It may be its democratic vernacular, its elasticity, its plainness of style, its life-giving vulgarity, its pragmatism, its materialism, its self-regard, or its humour. All of these features are embedded in that mysterious element we call Voice, that rhythmic undulating metabolism which transports and delivers whatever "information" a poem contains. In this talk, given at Ledbury Poetry Festival on 3 July 2017, Tony Hoagland uses examples to analyse, admire and illustrate some of the specific secrets of the American voice, providing a means for considering the craft of any poetic voice. His examples include poems by Frank O'Hara, Ezra Pound, Louise Glück, Adrian Blevins and Genevieve Taggard.