Your Sunday Poem

The reference to this sly, witty Tony Hoagland poem comes from Henry Louis Gates, Jr, the black Harvard professor who was arrested while trying to get into his own home by a white cop, and after the usual race-fueled kerfluffle, both of them ended up having a beer at the White House with President Obama.


Gates had a PBS series wherein he’d trace ancestry via DNA and other historical documents for “famous people.” He also had done his own. The program wonderfully illustrated the perils of this country’s constant fear of The Dreaded Other by reminding all of us to be careful who you hate and fear (and arrest) because they’re probably your second cousin.


From Hoagland’s book, “Unincorported Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty.”

Hinge

Last night on TV the light-brown African-American professor
looked at the printout analysis of his own DNA
and learned that he was mostly Irish.

I can’t go back to Africa now, he thought,
controlling the expression on his face,
his big moment onscreen already turning out
different than he had imagined.

Nor would he ever be able to say the sentence,
“I be at the crib”
with the same brotherly ease as before.

I was tired from work, and I wanted to
turn off the television and go to bed,
but I couldn’t stop watching that transformation,

the bones in his face rearranging,
his freckles becoming explicable

thanks to the hinge on a 18th-century door
between the kitchen of a Massachusetts merchant
and the southernmost room where a slave-woman slept;

thanks to the macramé of chromosomes, and the electron microscope
and the longing for knowledge
which sometimes makes things more
confusing than they were before.

That’s how I feel while I watch, as if
eavesdropping on the family next door, --
pressing my ear to the wall

slowly starting to make out the words,
not certain why I am so interested.
My ear glued to the wall.

The merchant raising a tiny oil can, and tilting it
to squeeze three drops
into the hinge to keep it quiet.

Your Sunday Poem

Interesting snippet from the Aug 2 L.A. Times, “E-poems? A wait o’er font, integrity issues.” Seems that poetry and the new e-books won’t be an easy fit because “publishers and e-book makers have not figured out how the integrity of a poem can be guaranteed. “A three-line stanza might be expanded to four if a line is to long or a four-line stanza compressed into three if the second and fourth lines have sharp indentations . . . and a displaced word, even a comma can alter a poem’s meaning as surely as skipping a note changes a song.”

“The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into,” poet Billy Collins says. “Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break.”

So, for now, there may be limited e-poetry work available as technology tries to catch up this ancient form. And many people think poems are just words arranged weirdly on a page, any page. Nope. Which is why book designers are so critical for any printed work, and why a well designed book is just a joy to look at while turning each page over and over and over. This is especially true for a book of poetry. Which is why I keep reminding you to support your favorite (and some new) poets; buy their (real) books.

And now for Tony Hoagland, from his latest book, “Unincorporated persons in the Late Honda Dynasty.”

The Loneliest Job in the World.

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.

Your Sunday Poem

Tony Hoagland, a new (to me) poet, is described on the book jacket thusly: “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 totallyheartfelt, 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.” And as a writer whose work is “Funny, combative, intimate, and public, these poems advocate that we must fight for clarity, reinvent our affections, and remain, as best we can, unincorporated.” From his new book of poems, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty.

Sentimental Education

And when we were eight, or nine,
our father took us back into the Alabama woods,
found a rotten log, and with his hunting knife

pried off a slab of bark
to show the hundred kinds of bugs and grubs
that we would have to eat in time of war.

“The ones who will survive,” he told us,
looking at us hard,
“are the ones who are willing to do anything.”
Then he popped one of those pale slugs
into his mouth and started chewing.

And that was Lesson Number 4
in The Green Beret Book of Childrearing.

I looked at my pale, scrawny, knock-kneed, bug-eyed brother,
who was identical to me,
and saw that, in a world that ate the weak,
we didn’t have a prayer,

and next thing I remember, I’m working for a living
at a boring job
that I’m afraid of losing,

with a wife whose lack of love for me
is like a lack of oxygen,
and this dead thing in my chest
that used to be my heart.

Oh, if he were alive, I would tell him, “Dad,
you were right! I ate a lot of stuff
far worse than bugs.”

And I was eaten, I was eaten,
I was picked up
and chewed
and swallowed

down into the belly of the world.