Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda DynastyBy Tony Hoagland |
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Reviewed by Corinna McClanahan Schroeder
Tony Hoagland, the author of three previous poetry collections, including What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003), Donkey Gospel (Graywolf Press, 1998), and Sweet Ruin (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), is at his strongest in his newest book, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. The poems included are full of lyrical moments and extended metaphors, and Hoagland employs democratic language and subject material throughout. These poems brim with self-awareness and those social critiques that readers have come to expect from Hoagland, critiques that are at once as implicating as they are accurate. In the best poems, he reaffirms why he deserves a place as a major American poet today.
Unincorporated Persons consists of one- to two-page individual poems that generally hold to the left margin and break into even lines and stanzas. These poems are held together by their regulated free verse and by the poet’s consistency of voice. They tackle a variety of subjects—the mall, race, pop stars, cancer, aging love, the DC sniper, the strap of a hostess’s dress—showcasing Hoagland's belief in the democracy of the American poem, in its ability to address the real lives of its readers. Interestingly, if anything is missing from this book, it is the natural world, but this poet of suburban life explains, saying that “it has been forever since I pushed my head / under the wild silk skirt of the waterfall.” The world here is not pastoral; rather it is a world of “the breathalyzer moon,” “oddly sexy running shoes,” and “49-dollar Chinese-made TVs.” A poem like “Plastic,” for example, critiques the pervasive presence of plastics in the lives of Americans: “One could probably explain the whole world in terms of Plastic.” There are “the toothbrush and the flip-flops” but also the “[p]lastic companions into which the lonely heart was poured.” The poem turns, suddenly and radically, and a couple sits at a picnic table near breakup, taking turns drinking from a plastic water bottle “as if the water was helping them to wash down something hard to ingest.” In one of the poem’s best lines, the poet wants to tell the couple “[a]bout how [plastic] is so much easier to stretch than human nature”—plainly spoken, yes, but subtle and precise. Hoagland’s psychological gaze is piercing, and the poems in this book are celebrations, apologies, and elegies, as much as they are implications and critiques.
One of the more psychological poems tells “the story of the father / after the funeral of his son the suicide.” At the poem’s close, the speaker admires “the old intelligence of pain” which “knows exactly what to do with human beings / to stay inside of them forever.” Indeed, one of Hoagland’s strengths is a mastery of final lines. Even poems full of irony and distancing critique make an impressive and often unexpected turn toward the lyrical near their end. So too Hoagland is a master of rhetoric—a technique many contemporary poets avoid. Not all writers can get away with lines like:
It is so human to turn a freedom into pain
and it is so sweet when life
comes to teach you suffering
by giving you a choice
Hoagland is able to employ such rhetorical abstractions by building them on specific and concrete scenarios. He is wonderfully unafraid of language that teaches its readers, that tells them how to feel.
Most characteristic of this book, though, is Hoagland’s poetry of social and cultural examination and critique. He doesn’t shy away from anything, and one learns quickly that Hoagland believes in poetry’s ability to say something relevant, even to accomplish some change. If the reader feels discomfort at any time, it is entirely indicative of the problems Hoagland is addressing. In “Expensive Hotel,” for example, “the middle-class black family in the carpeted hall / passes the immigrant housekeeper from Belize” and “[o]ne pair of eyes is lowered.” The poet tells us, “[t]hat’s how you know you are part / of a master race—when someone / humbles themselves without even having to be asked.” Of course such poems run the risk of preaching, but throughout the book the poet admits his own complicity in the problems about which he writes, and that works to alleviate this potential tension, and to draw in the reader to admit his/her own complicity too:
I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—
Despite such powerful moments, there are a handful of ineffectual poems in the book. “Wild,” a tired poem in which “bears inherit the earth,” and also “‘Poor Britney Spears,’” which needs no summary beyond its title, are two such examples. Such poems come across as too clever and thus, seeming to lack substance and genuine meaning, fail to resonate. At times, Hoagland stretches his allegories too far, even admitting the dangers of this device in “The Allegory of the Temp Agency,” a poem about a painting that, “heavy-handed in concept,” “is an allegory of how difficult it is / to be both skillful and sincere.”
Regardless, Unincorporated Persons is a success, and its most effective poems combine Hoagland’s well-known examination and critique with specific and grounded scenes—like “Rhythm and Blues” which is set just after the funeral of his friend Rolf Jordahl—and with the small lyrical (and often conclusive) moments that he is so skilled at writing. His is a poetry that allows its lines to both sting and sing, that truly makes its readers ask, as Hoagland does, “Are you sure we know what the hell we’re doing?”