I was in my friends' apartment this weekend trying to explain how much Tony Hoagland means to me. He profoundly changed the way I thought about my poetry. Here's what I couldn't articulate properly on Sunday. I came into grad school writing safe, pseudo-confessional jibba-jabba. These were poems that felt "deep," but actually just skimmed the surface of deeper issues. They were fun to read to a group of a strangers--it felt risky. It wasn't. Hoagland sat me down, and we had a meeting that I think about almost every time I work on a poem. At the meeting, Hoagland read one poem to me. One poem. W.S. Merwin's "Yesterday" touched my ears and I began to weep. It was the poem. It was the sound of Hoagland's voice, reading.
It was that I realized just how far off-course I was going.
To this day, I think Hoagland knew exactly what would happen. We talked a bit more, and I left the meeting almost shaken. What I took away from that meeting is difficult to express, but I have thought about it like this: Don't go the edge of the fire. Step into it.
I will be disoriented, on fire: that's fine. I can worry about line breaks and rhythm later--after I'm sure that I've found the center of the fire. And, even if I don't find the center, it's at least productive for me to stumble around with honest sentences and diction trying to find that point of heat where things matter.
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