Tony Hoagland
Award-winning Poet & Teacher
“[O]ne of the smarter, and funnier, poets of his generation, well balanced between absurdity and confession.” —Publishers Weekly
"It's hard to imagine any aspect of contemporary American life that couldn't make its way into the writing of Tony Hoagland or a word in common or formal usage he would shy away from. He is a poet of risk: he risks wild laughter in poems that are totally heartfelt, poems you want to read out loud to anyone who needs to know the score and even more so to those who think they know the score. The framework of his writing is immense, almost as large as the tarnished nation he wandered into under the star of poetry." —Jackson Prize Citation
“Tony Hoagland's imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, kinds of speech both lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild. His is the poetry of an adult capable of engaging the wonder and torments of childhood. In his volumes, he reminds us that a book of poems can offer the thrills of discovery: purposeful, swift, agile, ambitious and irreverent: fresh.” —American Academy of Arts and Letters citation 2002
Tony Hoagland is the author of three volumes of poetry: Sweet Ruin, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry; Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets; and What Narcissism Means to Me, as well as a collection of essays about poetry, Real Sofistakashun, all by Graywolf Press. His newest collection, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, was released in January 2010. His poems and critical essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Ploughshares.
He is the winner of the 2008 Jackson Poetry Prize, awarded by Poets & Writers magazine. In 2005 he received the O.B. Hardison Jr. Prize, awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library; this is the only national prize to recognize a poet's teaching as well as his art. Hoagland also received the 2005 Mark Twain Award, given by the Poetry Foundation in recognition of a poet's contribution to humor in American poetry; of this award Stephen Young said,“There is nothing escapist or diversionary about Tony Hoagland’s poetry. Here’s misery, death, envy, hypocrisy, and vanity. But the still sad music of humanity is played with such a light touch on an instrument so sympathetically tuned that one can’t help but laugh. Wit and morality rarely consort these days; it’s good to see them happily, often hilariously reunited in the winner’s poetry.”
Tony Hoagland's poems have been described as moving unerringly with wit and irony, like an arrow through its target—we, the readers—with exhilarating results. His poems sprint across the page and unexpectedly blow apart a single moment, exposing its contradictory nature—and often our folly. Hoagland explores the spiritual bereftness of American satisfaction, creating poetry that is scathing, funny, rich, and refreshingly intelligent. Steven Cramer writes of Hoagland's poems, "[They] grapple with selfhood and manhood, but they also consider the mysteries of the national identity—how the social and the personal mutually impinge." Hoagland currently teaches in the poetry program at the University of Houston.
About UNINCORPORATED PERSONS IN THE LATE HONDA DYNASTY (2010)In Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Tony Hoagland is deep inside a republic that no longer offers reliable signage, in which comfort and suffering are intimately entwined, and whose citizens gasp for oxygen without knowing why. With Hoagland’s trademark humor and social commentary, these poems are exhilarating for their fierce moral curiosity, their desire to name the truth, and their celebration of the resilience of human nature.
About REAL SOFISTIKASHUN (2006)
In 2005 Tony Hoagland received The Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award, recognizing a poet’s contribution to humor in American poetry, and also the Folger Shakespeare Library’s O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, for teaching as well as writing. Real Sofistikashun, from the title onward, displays Hoagland’s signature abilities to entertain and to instruct as he forages through central questions about how poems behave and how they are made. In these taut, illuminating essays, Hoagland explores matters of poetic craft—metaphor, tone, rhetorical and compositional strategies—in a buoyant conversational style less that of the scholar than of the serious enthusiast and practitioner. Real Sofistikashun is a vigorous and provocative collection of essays, which may be as pleasurable a book as it is useful.
