Sweet Ruin: Tony Hoagland

It’s one o’clock on a Friday afternoon and while the day is warm, the sky is overcast, which is a dangerous combination for someone who just finished teaching their last class of the day—the weekend is upon me, and if I’m not careful I’ll be eating pizza and watching Justified on hulu (You deserve this!), until four hours later it’s Friday night and I’m recovering from a Hot-N-Ready hangover. So, in an effort to stay productive, I’m sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee and my library copy of Tony Hoagland’s Sweet Ruin (1992).

I picked up Sweet Ruin last week along with Adam Zagajewski’s Tremor (Selected Poems) and Thomas Lynch’s Still Life in Milford, both of which I loved despite their very different aesthetics. Lynch is something of a neo formalist—he reminded me of Spencer Reece at times—while Zagajewski is more of a lush surrealist. Just to briefly point out a moment in each book where the differences between the two poets are laughably apparent, Lynch has a long poem in the second section of his book titled “The Moveen Notebook” which is essentially a history of his family (and their origins in Ireland). I read this poem before I began reading Tremor, and I really liked it. Lynch is concise (which is right up my alley) while remaining lyrical, and I love his use of occasional rhyme that knit his poems together. In contrast to “The Moveen Notebook,” I was reading Adam Zagajewski’s poem “Ode to Plurality” when I hit this stunning sequence:

…Who once
touched philosophy is lost
and won’t be saved by a poem, there is
always the rest, difficult to reckon,
a soreness. Who once learned a wild
run of poetry will not taste anymore
the stony calm of family narratives
whose every chapter is the nest
of a single generation.

It gets better and better as it goes on (Who has once met/ irony will burst into laughter/ during the prophet’s lecture), but the line “the stony calm of family narratives” made me laugh because I just finished reading one. I liked both the wild run and the family narrative. But, the title of this post is starting to function like one of John Ashbery’s poem titles, so on to Sweet Ruin.

This is my first encounter with Tony Hoagland, and while I know there’s some controversy over “The Change,” I haven’t read it, and wanted to start by reading something earlier in his career. Sweet Ruin left me with a bad taste in my mouth, but I decided to wait a few days before writing about it in case it was just the wrong afternoon to read it. But as I was flipping through it again yesterday, rereading some of the poems, it started to bother me even more than on my initial reading. I’ll say right off the bat that I think Hoagland’s style might be a little too loose for me, and I’m fully aware that goes back to my aesthetic tastes. I’ve already said I like the constriction of Thomas Lynch, and Thom Gunn appeals to me for the same reason, but I also like lots of contemporary poets who don’t apply the same amount of pressure—Philip Levine, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rebecca Wolff in Manderley, Ilya Kaminsky, and on and on. So my inclination for pressured language is only part of the problem.

In general, the images of Sweet Ruin always seem just short of interesting and original—and many times, they either seemed cheesy or like a reworded cliché, as if Hoagland knew some figurative language would spice up the poem but wasn’t sure what to write. The first poem of the book, “Perpetual Motion,” has some good examples. The voice of the poem is that of someone who has “the traveling disease,” and Hoagland writes that this drive to always be moving “makes a highway look like a woman/ with air-condition arms. With a/ bottomless cup of coffee for a mouth / and jewelry shaped like pay phone booths / dripping from her ears.”

A woman with air-condition arms? Jewelry shaped like pay phone booths? Dripping from ears? It seems like Hoagland’s trying too hard, and while one could argue that Hoagland isn’t taking himself seriously in this poem, the imagery should still be engaging, right? Or at least not make me cringe? In the following stanza, the narrator tries to pull the poem into a more introspective moment, saying that: In a little while the radio will/almost have me convinced/ that I am doing something romantic,/ something to do with “freedom” and ‘becoming”/instead of fright and flight… But this attempt still falls short of insight. I can almost see Hoagland filling composition notebooks with this stuff on a bus headed west. And “fright or flight” is an example of what I mean by rewording cliché—fight or flight springs to mind, all Hoagland did is tweak a cliché so that it takes a moment longer to recognize. Or how about these lines toward the end of the same poem: With my foot upon the gas,/between the future and the past/ I am here... Upon! Significance is suddenly communicated, and doubled with the slant rhyme of gas/past!

Maybe I’m getting carried away, and if I'm starting to sound strident, I apologize. Like I said, by the end of this book I was perturbed, because it's loaded with similar examples. For example, in “Poem for Men Only”: When/Like a weighty oak, my father fell… Or later, in “Doing This,” where Hoagland writes: I know, with a ten-pound sadness in my chest,/ that I can’t keep doing this. A “ten-pound sadness” is what I would write and then stare at, knowing it wasn’t much better than writing “really sad.” Obviously, Hoagland is successful at times, but I suppose my problem is that more often than not I was pausing at places that struck me as particularly mediocre, as opposed to particularly wonderful.
Here’s another snippet, about a father-figure from the title poem, “Sweet Ruin”:

He sat there, he said later, in the middle
of a red, imitation-leather sofa,
with his shoes off and a whiskey in his hand,
filling up with a joyful kind of dread—
like a swamp, filling up with night

The last poetic image—a swamp filling up with night—is just so nebulous and strained, especially when this instance of Hoagland ascribing a concrete quality to an otherwise intangible subject (For instance: night can’t be poured, it can’t fill something up) is compared to a master like Emily Dickenson effortlessly doing the same thing. This is from “359,” where she’s describing a bird coming down the walk:

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home—


Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.

The sky suddenly manifested as an ocean, noon with banks like a river…ED’s poetic language transforms the scene. This comparison is a little unfair because of the length of quotations I used for both pieces, but I also think that reflects back on Hoagland’s decision to even try pulling off an image like a swamp filling up with night in a single line. It just takes up space, it’s mannerism void of real feeling, a poetic tool utilized without power. But, now I’m erring into harshness again, so I’ll stop. Perhaps someone disagrees?

I’ll end by reiterating that although the moments of enjoyment were too often bogged down by my irritation, there were some. Despite my distaste for his sudden, epiphany driven endings, the conclusion of “A Change in Plans” and the book was really striking:

Remember how the reptiles,
after generations of desire
to taste the yellow flowers,
thrust out wings one day and lifted from
the ground?
Being birds by that time,
their appetites had changed.
But they kept on flying.