–for Tony Hoagland (1953-2018)
You were folklore in Tucson, where you graduated the year before I arrived, where I befriended Agha Shahid Ali, now also gone, whom you had befriended before me. Shahid was kind, but even he couldn’t get me to stay longer than a semester. This was decades before “#MeToo,” decades before Facebook or hash tags. Rotary phones were still making way for touch-tones—to speak to someone in customer service, press the pound key.
Shahid died in 2001, almost three months after the towers came down. I don’t remember him as a target of any malice as we laughed at the diner eating pancakes or pulled up to the Shell to fuel up his car, a Nissan Stanza he purchased because of its nod to poetry. I don’t remember, in 1984, any visceral prejudice directed our way for his skin (brown), his beliefs (Muslim), or his sexuality (gay). But I was living in my clueless, white-skin privilege and, if Shahid was having a hard time in Arizona or America, he surely didn’t tell me. I remember him bubbly, not one to complain. His first book A Walk Through the Yellow Pages is akin to the pound-key-turned-hash-tag. No one uses the yellow pages anymore—not for research nor doorstops nor booster seats for kids.
One grad student in Tucson was still in love with you, Tony, although you’d moved on. Or maybe you two had never dated and her affection was misplaced. She mentioned you often in workshop, like you were a young ghost haunting her psyche. This was before your first book or even your first chapbook. Your freckled admirer wore a straw sunhat with an oversized brim and gauzy long sleeve dresses because she so easily burned. The male professors talked about your poems, too, as though the poems they now had to read by the lot of us bored them.
When I first met you in person, maybe ten years later, you were eating oatmeal for breakfast at Yaddo and, though I usually sat at the silent table, I pulled up a chair next to you. I introduced myself as John Keats and you said you were Galway Kinnell, that oatmeal is “better for your health/if someone eats it with you.” We had fun with our nerdy poet jokes and then set off to work. We must have been in Saratoga Springs together that one day only. Otherwise I would have sought you out to tell you of Tucson’s adoration.
Before Shahid died, he and I saw each other at a reading at the 92nd Street Y. I was trying to live on adjunct wages in Alphabet City. I must have been grousing as Shahid said, “Well, then, let’s steal these books!” Before the reading started, we saddled up to the merchandise table and slid a copy of each poet’s latest into our backpacks. I wonder if Shahid, who was from a wealthy family, knew he had brain cancer then. What did taking a few books matter if it helped him feel more alive? He seemed his animated, cheerful self.
I’m sure many poets at this moment are sitting down to write their “Goodbye, Tony” poems. I’m sure there will be an AWP tribute at some point. I’m hoping this doesn’t disgust you, but I imagine it might. I’m kind of disgusted myself, but here I am adding my star or my stripe to the Hoagland flag. Amitav Ghosh wrote of Shahid “sorrow has no finer mask than a studied lightness of manner.” I think you also wore a sorrowful mask, yours made of the hilarity of rage. Or maybe I am projecting.
The day before you died, I recommended What Narcissism Means to Me to Lily, a kickass grad student who wanted to give her father his first poetry book, something that would lure him into verse. Lily’s father is a ferocious reader who, like so many ferocious readers, is leery of poetry. Even Nissan, in the end, was leery of poetry—the last Stanza was made in 1992 and the Versa model, more “vice versa” than verse, only emerged in 2007.
Four days after your death, Ntozake Shange passed away too. Donna Brazile couldn’t have known Ntozake Shange would die the same month her book For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics debuted. I stopped teaching the elegy for a couple of years when I grew superstitious. Several semesters in a row a student would suffer a personal loss (mother, husband, grandmother, best friend) the week the poem was due.
I’m not sure if you can still tune into the earth’s news—or if you’d want to. Just two days after you died, a white supremacist shot two black people in a Kroger’s in Louisville. And the day after you died, a man who lived in a van just a few miles from me sent pipe bombs to prominent democrats and CNN. None of the devices exploded, but it was scary nonetheless. My students and colleagues had seen the man’s vehicle plastered with hateful messages in, of all places, the parking lot of North Miami’s Whole Foods. The Saturday after you died, a massacre in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Eleven more dead. Your book Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America, as you predicted, hasn’t caught on.
In March of 2000 you came to give a job talk to my University of Pittsburgh workshop where I was a visiting writer. I was on my way to Florida the following fall. “This is the beating heart of the poem,” you said at the conference table. Students adored you, and you were promptly hired. Later we had a group dinner at a Thai restaurant in Squirrel Hill. Dippy, the fiberglass dinosaur, had been recently unveiled on the grounds of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. You said you were becoming a dinosaur. You were tired, just getting over the flu.
Then you came to read at FIU. This is where I finally spoke to you about Tucson, how you were so beloved there. When you asked why I didn’t stay, I told you what happened to me. Because I knew those professors were your friends, I made the preamble to my story longer than it needed to be—explaining this was before the testimony of Anita Hill, before there was even the language for sexual harassment. Part of me, even then, blamed myself. Was my scoop neck too low? Did my bra strap show? I didn’t name the harasser, but you knew exactly who it was. You said you weren’t surprised, then “I’m so sorry that happened,” and most importantly, “I believe you.”
The tile-covered bench upon which you and Kath sat, waiting for me to pick you up, split in half during a hurricane shortly thereafter. And that hotel where you stayed, the 1940’s Driftwood, is gone as you are gone. In its place, million dollar condos. In your place, your poems. After my divorce, I sold the apartment where you and Kath stayed the following Christmas, where you fixed the leaky toilet several repairmen had failed to fix. Now I live in a one-bedroom next door, my footprint smaller though I can’t stop Florida from sinking.
When I used to assign the elegy, a student would inevitably say of a classmate’s poem, “This is more about the speaker than the person being memorialized.” And so be it. This is about me missing your folklore, your eloquence, your humanity, Tony, rather than your physical pure-essence Tony-self. What is the impact of one poet on another? Those who correspond by letter, then email, but only speak face-to-face a dozen or so times? I feel like Roethke writing of his departed student Jane. You too had a “pickerel smile,” and though not tendril curls, your hair was a wild grass. Roethke dubs Jane a “skittery pigeon” and you wrote an essay about contemporary “skittery” poems deliberately eschewing narrative impulse. My skittery pigeon, I know deep down I have “no rights in this matter, / Neither father nor lover.”
Our last exchange, two weeks before you died, was about Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God. I told you how each poem is an authentic end-of-life tearjerker, though the poem that sticks with me most is “Playboy,” as you imagine your young mother finding your father’s stash. “Housework Times Fornication/ Divided by Taken for Granted / Equals Decades of Burnt Meatloaf.” I gave you an “A+ in Empathy” for those lines, though you didn’t need a grade from me. You still linger in my gmail, where I won’t erase you, where I’ll keep you stored like an electronic urn. Kath, of course, has the real ashes, the memories, the unbearable grief. When you wrote back to thank me, you ended your email “it’s been a trip.” I thought you meant the trip was writing your book, but now I know you meant your life.
— Denise Duhamel. [Tony is pictured above left; Agha Shahid Ali, middle left; Denise, right]