There’s an excellent review by Mark Halliday of Tony Hoagland’s latest book, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, in the most recent issue of Pleiades (31.1 (2011)).
There are numerous highlights in this review, among them:
–the development of a hilarious new acronym: ICFU, which stands for those who have “Instant Contempt For the Understandable”;
–an amazing, in-depth challenge to certain ways that the criterion of musicality is applied to the assessment of poetry; and, most relevant to the concerns of this blog:
–an admiration of the ways Hoagland’s poems turn.
Here is a key paragraph:
In Unincorporated Persons the sensation of painfully half-voluntary complicity in political and cultural harm comes across in many good poems, though what the poems express is not simply limited to that sensation. Such poems include “Food Court,” “Big Grab,” “Hard Rain,” “Confinement,” “Poor Britney Spears,” “Expensive Hotel,” “Complicit With Everything,” “Hinge,” “Foghorn,” “Disaster Movie,” “The Allegory of the Temp Agency,” “Snowglobe.” There is plenty say about those, and critics should write about them carefully enough to move past categorizing them as “political poems.” A long article waits to be written about their endings and how, in a poem’s closing lines, Hoagland twists the knife, to make the poem disturb you after you felt sure you knew where he was going. An example is “The Allegory of the Temp Agency” which, thanks to the machete-slash of its last lines, manages to become both a satirical critique of banal polemical art and a startling reminder that banal political protests against global capitalism arise from horrible inequities that suave mockery cannot remove.
The only online version of “The Allegory of the Temp Agency” I could find is here. (Sorry.) But do read it; there is a nice turn in this poem, one that delivers an interesting, insightful moral (one that helps explain why the (admittedly, very beautiful) mural at Goldman Sachs looks like this). It’s also a self-reflexive turn, signaling its turn with the words “in turn.”
Halliday is right: it does indeed seem “a long article waits to be written” about these turns… Someone’s got their work cut out for them.
Structure & Surprise 