Tony Hoagland  has published three collections of poetry: Sweet Ruin ( winner of the 1992 Brittingham Prize), Donkey Gospel (winner of the 1998 James Laughlin award), and What Narcissism Means To Me, (2003),  which   was a finalist   for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005 he received the Mark Twain Award for humor in American poetry, and the Folger Library’s O.B. Hardisson Prize.  He teaches in the graduate writing program of the University of Houston, and in the Warren Wilson MFA program.  A book of prose about poetry, Real Sofistakashun, was published by Graywolf Press in September 2006.


Some of My Poetical Beliefs

I believe in the clarity and availability of good poems. I believe in materialism—in other words, in a poetry populated and furnished by the things (nouns) of the manifold world. I especially love the twisting, long-flung sentence full of fishhooks and candy, and the mercurial tonal complexities of a speaker’s voice. I believe in the poem as a train ride, a dream-submergence, a roller coaster that is capable of complete transportation of the passenger and making him say thank you afterwards. I believe in the voice of experience, and in poetry that bears the smudge marks of having been in the human fire—time, failure, error, distress, loss, rage, attachment. I believe that the most joyful poem has to bear the logo of suffering, our sponsor. I believe in assault and battery as a method to the end of trying to wake up. I believe in spending time with people who love Poetry more than their poetry. I believe that work is the great compensation. I am not opposed to trickiness. I believe in unending apprenticeship and perpetual amateurism. I believe in saying things experimentally. I believe in reading widely, in holding still, in “bowing not knowing to what.”


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