The initiation into knowledge will infect the learner with the virus of self-consciousness.
–Tony Hoagland

The dog ate my homework, but I don’t have a dog, and all work is homework when you like what you do. Though I’m only finding the time to post right now because I couldn’t fall asleep, I have been reading more of Tony Hoagland’s Real Sofistikashun, and one short chapter seems worth talking about in particular.

You see, I’ve been going through a dry spell for awhile now — long enough that I’ve come to admit it too often, and I’m sure a few people around me are sick of hearing about it. I’ve had fits and starts, a few random pieces — usually prose — that I really like, but I haven’t been writing consistently for over a year now.

I don’t know what the cause. There are many candidates: I read too much poetry, I read too much bad poetry, I don’t read enough good poetry, I have too little free time, I’ve become fixated on a brand of mystery that can’t be resolved through poetry*, I’ve become filled with too much contentment, I’ve become too career-oriented, I’ve become too goal-oriented, my creative energies are being expressed in other ways, I used to not give a shit, I used to read more philosophy, I used to read more history, I used to be an insomniac. You name it.

In the middle of his book, Hoagland names one (presumably) of his own: self-consciousness. I’ve thought a lot about this in between desperate rain dances, and it was comforting to see it brought up here.

As a poet, ignorance really is bliss, in many cases. Poetry is mostly a private exercise, with few tangible, external rewards. If you’re not writing because you enjoy the process of writing, you should probably get another hobby. So as long as you feel good about what you’re producing, it feels good to be producing it.

Yet there’s more to it than that. The naive bring their own naivete to what often works best when seeming an artless art. The happy accident is a useful tools for a poet, and its easy to find serendipity as a bumbling novice following your own spontaneous impulses. What’s more, I’ve come to see poetry as a fundamentally arrogant pursuit — not necessarily the sin of vanity, but one that requires a certain level of confidence that what you have to say is worthwhile. A poet who isn’t self-conscious can crank out the poems, fill up pages every day of dreck — I see it all the time, I’ve done it myself. It’s easy to long for such freedom.

Like any good teacher, Hoagland finds a way to twist this problem into a gift — it’s only the self-conscious writer that takes advantage of the tools of rhetoric, and some of the best lines in poetry are written rhetorically, a sly wink and a nod to the fact that they’re poets, we’re readers, and the link between to two is just a poem. He cites Eliot’s “The roses/ Had the look of flowers that are looked at….” among several examples of what he means, and he has a point. Thomas Gray really said, of course, “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”

Besides, I’d trade the nuanced reading of a good poem for the writing of a mediocre one any day. Maybe I have.

____________________

* Don’t ask.

Sometimes I take pride in my own ignorance about poetry; other times I feel like a fool. I’ve read millions of poems (and I’m not sure if that’s hyperbole), thousands of books, but I’ve read very little prose on poetry, and my understanding remains intuitive. It’s the poems that are interesting to me, not people writing about them, and since it was never my goal to become a poetry scholar, I’ve never bothered with what I don’t naturally enjoy. But I do love this stuff, and I’m sure that love would become more attuned if I listened to other people who love it, too.

To that end, I’m going to start reading books on poetry, blogging as I go. It’ll be my own little homework assignment.

I’m going to start with Tony Hoagland’s Real Sofistikashun, which was given as a gift from a friend almost two years ago. It’s about time. Hoagland has long been one of my favorite poets, What Narcissism Means to Me one of my favorite books, and “America” one of my favorite poems:

America
by Tony Hoagland

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

As you can see, Tony Hoagland is a master at using humor like a knife, and this bodes well for a collection of essays on poetic craft. If he can dissect the elements of poetry in the same way he dissects our world, it will be illuminating, and his wit should keep it entertaining.

The first essay, and the only one I’ve read so far, breaks poetry down into three chakras, which he also describes as “altitudes”: image, diction, and rhetoric. It’s actually very similar to my Three Features pie chart in content, though not necessarily in structure. As we move up from the loins, through the gut, then the heart, then the mind, we become less base and more cerebral — though, as Hoagland reminds us repeatedly, this isn’t a hierarchy, but simply a physicality. A poem written from the gut can be just as powerful as one written from the mind, if not more so, it’s merely less self-conscious. Of the three chakras he describes, image is the lowest, and rhetoric the highest — images “embody the intuitive and unmediated knowledge of the unconscious,” whereas rhetorical interjections from the poet, “the willful shaping of a poem,” are the most overtly conscious.

Honestly, I don’t understand his taxonomy. The metaphor of chakras as poetic centers makes sense, but the way he applies them to certain stylistic conceits really doesn’t. Images do often appear spontaneously from the inner depths of our minds, but they can also be used very overtly, as in Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” or a lot of Wallace Stevens’s work. Similarly, rhetorical devices can be used just as effectively to plumb the depths of the unconscious — a certain voice or a certain cadence can lead the poet to startling revelations. The power of poems do come from different “altitudes”, but they don’t have anything do do with the poetic tools the poet chooses to employ.

Though I disagree with his arrangement, I did enjoy the essay — the examples he brings us, from Sharon Olds to Mary Ruefle, are illuminative, and fun to read. We’ll see if Hoagland and I can find a bit more common ground in the next installment.