Building a Mystery

Building a Mystery Bradford Gray Telford Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft Tony Hoagland Graywolf Press http://www.graywolfpress.org 224 pages; paper, $15.00 Ahh, the craft book. Coming into vogue sometime between the publication ofHowl (1956) and that fateful day brown acid zonked half-a-million soggy Woodstockers, books dedicated to discussing poetic craft testify both to the health and feebleness of the American literary mind. On the one hand, ours is a radical tradition. Since Whitman, American poets have invented their methods and vernacularized their prosodies as a means to sing themselves and make it new. A contemporary craft book, then, is a unique art object—a lyrical meditation revealing the self-reliant, unpretentious, yet always curious Americanness of the American poet writing it. On the other hand, ours is a nation ofbumpkins, ofmountebanks, ofa collectively low forehead. Since Whitman, American poetry has been oversuspicious ofContinental fancies, gone far too long on dull self, gone woefully short on metrical, allusive song. Ifwe hadn't so churlishly seceded from the Mother Country, we'd know all this craft stuff cold by now and be writing, presumably, like Larkin. So a contemporary craft book, harrumph, is a simplistic reduction—an uncouth hackjob—an architectural model for a Palladian villa executed by a developmentally challenged spider. For baby boomers, the craft impasse is particularly taxing. This whole demographic—eighty million strong, emotionally needy, with an inordinate fondness for bellbottoms (then) and SUVs (now)—weaned itself on the multitiered rejection ofthe craft-obsessed New Criticism proffered by the Confessionals, the Projectivists, the Beats, the New York School, the Deep Image writers, among others. To the young American poet in 1975, poetic craft must have seemed as hopeless as statecraft (thanks to Watergate) and war craft (ditto Ford's pulling out of Vietnam). Into this breech steps Tony Hoagland with his generous, humane, and inoffensively learned Real Sofistikashun. Fingering the peeling laminate on his Me Generation membership card, Hoagland is open, direct, even a bit sheepish: For many poets of my generation, entering American poetry in the 1970s and '80s meant indoctrination into the plain style and/or the confessional mode, a fundamentalism of straightforwardness and sincerity. We inherited or acquired an allergy to grandeur, flourish, and most special effects. The object of Real Sofistikashun, then, is twofold: America! to appraise the many gifts offered by Hoagland's plain and Confessional inheritance, and to redress any number of its real and perceived gaps. As such, the book is both conservative and liberal, is rigorous yet open, is interested in knowing what it knows and, wonderfully, in knowing what it doesn't know. As reflected by his teaching persona (a thing I know well—for two years I was his student at the University of Houston), Hoagland's critical voice is more elder brother than elder statesman. In these fourteen essays published over a dozen years and collected in kind ofa midcareer retrospective, the poet Hoagland looks carefully at those tools, traditions, and tics that have made him a terrific poet and those methods and strategies that will, one imagines, make him more of one. Hoagland's canny knowingness is to not know so darn much. The most refreshing aspect of Real Sofistikashon is its refusal to deléctate. As opposed to James Logenbach's mesmerizing Resistance to Poetry (2005), in describing and analyzing certain means and methods of poetry Hoagland refrains, in his prose, from overenacting them. This is a real gift. The basics of image, diction, rhetoric, and metaphor get laid out and inventoried in such a way that prompts beginning writers to understand them, pushes advanced writers to bother understanding them anew. The basics are "the basics" because they're the basics . Yet there always exists a respect for and playful wonder at these nutty essentials. In his case for the elusive mystery ofmetaphor, Hoagland defers to the concise though enigmatic Stephen Dobyns, who writes that these figures "are forms ofcomparison that exist to heighten the object of the comparison.... A metaphor consists of the object half and the image half." Satisfied with this unsatisfactory definition, Hoagland spends much of the remaining essay playing with objects and images. Citing...