I don't really see the point of bashing Tony Hoagland for something he is not or for something he doesn't do. Granted, Tony was my teacher for a long time. And no, we don't agree on everything. If anything, Tony has been nothing but a marvelous and encouraging teacher, even if what I wanted to do was in the opposite direction of where he was going. Lately, accusations of Tony being a racist, a homophobe, a misogynist, ... has resurfaced. Obviously, many of his former students would say he is anything but. If anything, without Tony, I wouldn't have read August Kleinzahler, the Objectivists, Robert Duncan, Mina Loy (well, Michael Dumanis also played a part here), Michael Palmer, Anne-Marie Albiach (whom I had never heard of while living in France. Tony basically encouraged me to reconsider my stance on contemporary French poetry), Jean Follain, Tomas Tranströmer, ... and I would still be writing bad imitations of Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch.
Here is something Tony and I both agree on. We are all prejudiced, including and especially ourselves. Political correctness is only a band-aid. Tony cannot rail against those prejudices without confronting his own, which he does in What Narcissism Means to Me. He started as a confessionalist, after all.
Here is something Tony and I both agree on. We are all prejudiced, including and especially ourselves. Political correctness is only a band-aid. Tony cannot rail against those prejudices without confronting his own, which he does in What Narcissism Means to Me. He started as a confessionalist, after all.
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I have disagreed with TH in the past, but I have renewed respect for him because he admitted one of Lara Glenum's amazingly strange students into the Houston program.
As for Lara Glenum's student, I hope he/she does get Tony as a mentor. While he will be a bit turned off by his/her weirdness, he will encourage him/her to be more precise and consistent. For all that matters, he/she might get weirder after studying with Tony, like I did.
But after much thought (and much talk with Tony about it), I think this turn is a lot of more subversive than it seems. Tony is striving for his own sense of realism in a context of political correctness. Yes, that turn is uncomfortable and it should feel uncomfortable, because it is too common.
Another thing about Tony is that he is not one to give you lessons. I remember him telling me he was quite into the Objectivists when he was writing this book, especially Zuk's dictum to "describe things as they are without interference from the narrator." In this context and in the context of his essay on meanness, I'm not in position to agree with Rich's simplistic narrative of white guilt or the well-meaning utopianism of Mark Doty (whose aesthetics, even though both stem from a confessionalist tradition, are quite different from Tony's).
That being said, do I believe that WNMTM is the best thing ever written or, as Rich puts it, "a pile of horseshit"? Obviously, I don't like clean-cut positions.