Mike Schneider Remembers Tony Hoagland

At Literary Hub, Schneider shares his memories of Tony Hoagland, who passed away last year at the age of 65. They first met in November 2002: "though I remember the day as spring-like, a couple weeks after a Dylan concert that happened a few days after the first George W. Bush mid-term, when the US firmly set course to make a war that re-routed history," Schneider writes. From there: 

By poetry carbon dating, it was post-Donkey Gospel and during the gestation of Tony’s next book, the one with the marvelously loopy title that got me started on this essay.

On the strength of Donkey Gospel, Tony had joined the University of Pittsburgh’s creative writing faculty for the 2001-02 academic year. While his first book, Sweet Ruin (1992), gained attention, Donkey Gospel (1998), tossed a comic firecracker into the relatively grown-up domain of American poetry. Notoriously, there was “Dickhead”—reflecting on crude talk as rite of passage for a boy coming into the cultural space where “wild jockstraps flew across the skies of steamy locker rooms”:

But dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a hammer, an object
you could pick up in your hand,
and swing,

saying dickhead this and dickhead that,
a song that meant the world
was yours enough at least
to bang on like a garbage can . . . .

I venture that few men, American or otherwise, can’t recall their own version of this moment. With “Dickhead” Tony recognized collision with raw language as a station along the pathway of the Jungian hero’s journey, one that hadn’t before been assayed, at least in poetry, though nearly everyone has been there, done that. He wrote about it with wit, alert to the innocence-lost sadness and necessity of this transition.

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