One could hardly be blamed for assuming that the title essay of Tony Hoagland’s collection Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays is meant as cheeky provocation rather than literal prescription. Poetry, after all, is an obscure art, no less so in contemporary America. The very notion that it could be so relevant as to “save” an entire nation stretches credulity. Surely, this is meant in jest.
Hoagland does not, however, seem to intend it this way. This is an intriguing and ambitious premise to which this review will return, but there are 200 pages in Hoagland’s collection before the essay that presents this premise, so perhaps it’s best to address some of that material first.
The better part of Twenty Poems That Could Save America is given to poetry criticism. Here, it bears noting that if poetry is obscure these days, criticism of it is even more so; its most visible province in the larger culture of literature is on the jackets of volumes of poetry in the form of endorsements, usually given by other poets. This, of course, is problematic, and some 20 years ago, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and poet Dana Gioia lamented the state of critical art by fulminating against the inflationary praise heaped upon poetry collections and poets by other poets. “Criticism” had become, by his lights, simply a venue for expression of mutual admiration at best, at worst, simply part of the professional game for careerist poetry mandarins looking to advance in academic departments of literature and, by his lights, other provinces equally remote from the broad river of relevant culture. This is to say; it is not critical at all in the sense of carefully discerning the merits and demerits of a given poem or set of poems and determining the overall quality and enduring value.
Readers of poetry who share Gioia’s concerns should welcome Hoagland’s contributions. He is a fine judge of poetry and writes about it with impressive knowledge, wit, and verve—even when the poetry at hand hardly seems to merit such attention. For example, in several essays, Hoagland takes as his subject a body of work that, for lack of a better term and admittedly vaguely, might be called post-modern poetry, though Hoagland sometimes uses the term “New” poetry.
Before excerpting some of Hoagland’s observations in Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays, it must be said that Hoagland actually seems to enjoy poetry and wants to see his chosen examples succeed, which would seem to be a prerequisite for this line of work. But one need look no further than William Logan for an example of how a sharp critical mind can lend itself to cantankerous and sometimes repellent hatchet work that makes one wonder if it is even capable of appreciation (more on that in a moment). Tough as they can be, Hoagland’s evaluations generally begin sympathetically and with an eagerness to reap whatever rewards the poems at hand might offer. But when the time comes for threshing, the chaff is cut away cleanly. Here are a few examples:
[The] poem is representative of a certain strain of contemporary American poetry, an aesthetic whose idea of art is to withhold context. The idea is to cultivate the pleasure of elusiveness, which is close to the pleasure of mystery. But there is a difference between elusiveness and evasiveness, and between mystery and obfuscation.
Most profoundly, in their emphasis on style and subversive forms, in the enshrinement of idiosyncrasy, too few of the New Poems aspire to the most ambitious mission of poetry, namely, to enlarge our sense of the world: of possibility and human nature, of thought and feeling.
The predominant feeling-tone of such poems is a kind of melancholia that registers the speaker’s sensitivity, while also communicating that she or he is powerless. But, we might ask, is the ambience of sensitivity worth the price of passivity?
Beneath these measured assessments lies an implicit and substantial assumption about the ethical value of poetry and its purpose. For example, meditations on the impossibility, or at least artifice, of communication (so prevalent in contemporary poetry, Hoagland maintains) may evince a kind of mental and philosophical complexity, but do they help us to understand our humanity more profoundly?
Hoagland’s answer is clearly no. And, to his credit, he is willing to press his case against relatively unknown poets, as in the examples above, and those who enjoy estimable reputations. For example, here is what Hoagland has to say about John Ashbery, a kind of doyen of contemporary verse that is (at least for many readers) utterly impenetrable: “Ashbery’s anarchy is dissociative—his aesthetic intent is simply to make a kind of Lego lyric of odd parts.” That dismissive claim is sure to rankle some scholars, but it constitutes a witty and thought-provoking contrariness in an area where portentous same-mindedness often abounds.
Over the course of Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays, it becomes clear that Hoagland, like any good critic, is in the business of fashioning taste, of making the case for certain poets and certain kinds of poetry. His choices—among them, Robert Bly, Dean Young, and Sharon Olds—may be a surprise to some readers who might find these writers rather low-brow. For example, in some circles, Olds has been viewed as, well, a little untoward, her work a kind of poetic equivalent of the sex tips articles in Cosmopolitan magazine. Here we return to Logan, who, a few years ago, took his hatchet to Olds’s poetry in a brutal article published in The New Criterion. Hoagland responds to that harsh assessment with some evisceration of his own. Here is some of it:
The kindest thing you could say about [the piece] is that it is shockingly ungenerous—but that would be too kind. In fact, Logan’s tone is so swollen with spleen and so obsessive that its private underpinnings seem obvious. What’s additionally disturbing and even embarrassing about this review is the unconcealed fascination of the critic with naming body parts, like a little boy looking through a knothole in a neighbor’s fence, touching himself while cursing in Latin.
After reading that, who says poetry criticism and controversy can’t be entertaining? This is raucously funny enough to knock the dust off of a thousand academic journals.
But there’s more at work in Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays than mere rhetorical one-upmanship. Its implicit assumption is that poetry matters so much that it can and should generate fierce debate. The larger point (and this is not particularly relevant to the quarrel with Logan), is that Hoagland has a very clear sense of what poetry should be like and what is wrong with so much poetry and the culture that surrounds it (at least in academia): “In the corridors of higher education, where intellect is often self-regarding and self-perpetuating, official artistic value often seems to be assigned on the basis of aesthetic difficulty.”
That is a pretty damning assessment, but it has a populist, rabble-rousing energy that is hard to resist … until Hoagland takes down one of your own favorite poems, in this reviewer’s case Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (which Hoagland summarily dismisses as not worth the labor of interpretation). One might make the case that for all its status as a chestnut, the poem remains an unsurpassedly surreal and unsettling meditation on death and the transitory nature of pleasure. Perhaps part of its canonical staying power is due to as much.
In any case, Hoagland prefers a more immediate and vernacular—indeed populist—poetry and has little use for esotericism. That is well and good, but one might note that the house of poetry is large and has many rooms. After all, imagine someone writing a defense of “music”—the variety of the form would instantly introduce pressing questions: what kinds of music? Is it possible for a listener to value both a brilliant three-minute pop song and an extended track of avant-garde jazz? How can anyone say one form is inherently better than the other?
Hoagland stumps for the kind of poetry he most appreciates by way of suggesting that it has an unparalleled power to speak directly to the reader’s emotional life and the challenges, complexities, and disappointments of life. Indeed, the 20 poems of the title all fit the bill—and Hoagland makes a fine case for the ones he considers in detail.
Still, how likely is even the most accessible poetry to claim a larger purchase in the culture? Near the conclusion of the essay, he writes, “Our hunger for myth, story, and design is very deep … If we are not in love with poems, the problem may be that we are not teaching the right poems.” First of all, this numinous “we” is problematic. Surely, some people in a given society have loved and will continue to love poetry, so its appreciators need not be a collective with universal membership.
Moreover, those who are outside of that collective are hardly bereft of what Hoagland believes poetry can provide. Surely, they find “myth, story, and design” in a range of works—rock and hip-hop songs, television programs, movies, graphic novels, and so on. So it may be that most of us do not require saving and that if poetry offers any, it is but one means in a full and diverse congregation. That being acknowledged, Hoagland, as a kind of evangelist for his denomination of poetry, presses the case with zeal and eloquence that is hard to resist, even if, on reflection, its articles of faith seem a little shaky.