RIP Tony Hoagland, 1953–2018

This morning we heard the sad news of the death of Tony Hoagland. The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to his wife, Kathleen Lee. An award-winning poet and frequent contributor to Poetry magazine, Hoagland taught at the University of Houston where he was a mentor to many aspiring poets.  The New York Times's Neil Genzlinger remembers Hoagland in this obituary, writing:

In seven poetry collections, the most recent, “Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God,” published this year, Mr. Hoagland found insights and imagery in the everyday: a pool in an Austin, Tex., park; a spaghetti strap on a woman’s dress that won’t stay put; an old man dying awash in paranoia from too much Fox News.

He liked jarring juxtapositions, and he wasn’t afraid to throw pop-culture references into his poems or go for a laugh-out-loud response. One poem he read often — including on the “PBS NewsHour” in 2012 for Valentine’s Day — was “Romantic Moment” (2007), about a couple who has just watched a nature documentary:

It is just our second date, and we sit down on a rock,

holding hands, not looking at each other,

and if I were a bull penguin right now I would lean over

and vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved

and if I were a peacock I’d flex my gluteal muscles to

erect and spread the quills of my cinemax tail.

“I’m proud to be a funny poet,” Mr. Hoagland, who taught at the University of Houston, told The Houston Chronicle in 2008. “Humor in poetry is even better than beauty. If you could have it all, you would, but humor is better than beauty because it doesn’t put people to sleep. It wakes them up and relaxes them at the same time.”

But others of his poems were indeed quite beautiful, and even the funny ones were hardly inconsequential.

Continue at the NYT, and head here to read Hoagland's poetry and celebrate his life.