Tony Hoaglund​

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Born on November 19, 1953, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Tony Hoagland authored witty, poignant poems that comment on contemporary American life and culture.

His books of poetry include Unincorporated Personas in the Late Honda Dynasty (Graywolf Press, 2010); What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel (1998), which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin (1992), chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College.

Hoagland's other honors and awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the O. B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the 2008 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers magazine, as well as the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry.

In 2002, the American Academy of Arts and Letters praised the poet's work with a citation stating, "Tony Hoagland's imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, kinds of speech both lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild."

He taught at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College. He died of pancreatic cancer on October 23, 2018. 

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​​Short Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSDh01zwed0

https://youtu.be/YkDzLHsn48I?si=pBqYrA7PRm7FFYMZ

https://youtu.be/hqantlF-FgY?si=JG_0507JmsE_tLKy​​

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History of Desire

from Sweet Ruin (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992)

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When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

 

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

 

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

 

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

 

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

 

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

 

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

 

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

 

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

 

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

 

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

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