It wasn't until I hunkered down in a screening room one weekday morning in the summer of 2013 that I finally found out about Tony Hoagland. I was there in my then-capacity as movie critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, watching the new Joe Swanberg pic, a walk-y, talky, beery study of two couples and their intersecting lives. Drinking Buddies, it's called, with Olivia Wilde, Ron Livingston, Anna Kendrick and Jake Johnson. It's a smart, shambling affair about friendship, fidelity (and infidelity), temptation and temperament, set in Chicago, where Wilde's Kate works at a craft brewery, and sleeps with Livingston's Chris, a somewhat older, somewhat insufferable record producer. One night he gives Kate a hardcover edition of John Updike's Rabbit, Run to read, because, he says, "you kind of remind me a little bit of the hero."
Really, he's just calling out a book that reminds him of himself.
Later on, as Kate and Chris' relationship fractures and he drifts towards Kendrick's Jill (and Kate towards her beer business best bud, Johnson's Luke), the self-appointed literary mentor has another book at the ready as a gift: it's the perfectly titled 2003 collection of Hoagland poems, What Narcissism Means to Me.
There in the darkened theater I chuckled to myself, and quickly jotted down the title. Afterwards, back at my desk, I read a few Hoagland poems online, and then ordered the book (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award that year), and then ordered every other Hoagland collection published to date. How did I not know about these finely tuned, keen and insightful, deadpan, heartbreaking poems? Thank you, I mumbled to filmmaker Swanberg, for the recommendation! Thank you Tony Hoagland for being Tony Hoagland!
Sadly, Hoagland — who taught creative writing at the University of Houston — died last year in his adopted hometown, Santa Fe: pancreatic cancer, age 64.
Happily, his words survive — continuing to resonate, reverberate, digging into those places that only a good poem can go. And showing up in Drinking Buddies, of course — and Judd Apatow's I Found This Funny anthology– too.