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How I Escaped from the AutobiographicalNarrative of Crisis and Resolution andDiscovered Oscar Wilde and theTradition of Theatrical Repartee
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5 Tony Hoagland How I Escaped from theAutobiographical Narrative of Crisis and Resolution and Discovered OscarWilde and the Tradition of Theatrical Repartee A tortured tAle of PsychiAtry And MAkeuP tiPs A philosophical poet, that’s what I wanted to be—a concept juggler, something along the line of Wallace Stevens. I had visions I wanted to communicate.What they were, I no longer can entirely recall. But no one understood the poems I wrote.Words scattered around the page, congested as a head cold, here; neo-ideas, rife with noncontext, there. What is the adjectival form of oblivion? The response I got from my odd few readers had the flavor of polite encouragement based on the premise that poetry is allowed to be shapeless, like a raccoon in a burlap sack. Then one day, in Tucson, Arizona, after I had been writing and reading for five or eight years, I accidentally turned three metaphors into a sort of story. My poem was lucid! And so I drifted pragmatically toward narrative structure, driven to shore by default. It turns out that I needed story, landscape, causality, and a time signature to make a poem; I did not have much interest in stories, really, especially my own, but I had learned that if I put a car and a stop sign and a moon into a poem, people could pay attention. Narrative: “When X happened, I felt Y; then W happened, and I understood F.” Such elementary concessions gave my poems what the movie people call a“through-line.” It was a big breakthrough for me. It’s true, these narratives used the first-person singular pronoun, looked like autobiography, bore a strong resemblance to products of the Confessional era 6 The RAg-PIckeR’S guIde To PoeTRy that had just passed. They tried to generate an escalating emotional pressure. I was just happy to write a poem that more or less worked. But I had a slightly faux feeling about those narratives. I felt counterfeit, like a narrative impersonator. The narratives themselves seemed secondary to me. Narrative was just the tree on which I was hanging my real linguistic stock-intrade : jokes, images, and metaphor. That “ornament,” which may have seemed secondary to the narratives, was primary for me. I guess a typical example of such a poem is “My Country” from my first book, Sweet Ruin: My couNTRy When I think of what I know about America, I think of kissing my best friend’s wife, in the parking lot of the zoo one afternoon, just over the wall from the lion’s cage. One minute making small talk, the next my face was moving down to meet her wet and open, upturned mouth. It was a kind of patriotic act, pledging our allegiance to the pleasure and not the consequence, crossing over the border of what we were supposed to do, burning our bridges and making our bed to an orchestra of screaming birds and the smell of elephant manure. Over her shoulder I could see the sun, burning palely in the winter sky and I thought about my friend, who always tries to see the good in situations—how an innocence like that shouldn’t be betrayed. Then she took my lower lip between her teeth, I slipped my hand inside her shirt and felt my principles blinking out behind me like streetlights in a town where I had never [54.147.110.47] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:37 GMT) How I Escaped 7 lived, to which I intended never to return. And who was left to speak of what had happened? And who would ever be brave, or lonely, or free enough to ask? “My Country” is an extended act of analogy, with a bunch of extra images andmetaphorsthrowninforgoodmeasure.Theimaginativefireworksareyoked to a political notion, but it would be difficult for me to say which is the corpus and which is the appendage. If the poetry customs agent looked me in the face and said, “And what is the purpose of your trip, Mr. Hoagland—business or pleasure?” what would I tell him?“I wanted to liken undressing a woman to the invasion of a country; and manifest destiny to betrayal of friendship”? Years later, when I read the poems of Larry Levis, I recognized a similar hocus-pocus; he too was a “figurative thinker,” and he made the opportunity for that“thinking” by appending metaphor to narratives. Levis’s narratives seem mostly a matter of...