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A review by robertlashley
What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland
2.0
Hoagland is the MFA system's answer to Amiri Baraka; a passive aggressive bomb thrower more interested in racial and sexual "getback" than the aesthetics of a poem. Structure, language, and the unique individual music one looks for in a free verse poem are sacrificed to an array of reactionary statements on race and gender that range from genteel ( " The change") to violent ("adam and eve"). Like Baraka, Hoagland wants the outside reader to not engage but submit to him; to give him kudos for "honesty" when he "want(s) to punch a woman in the face", to think him a liberal for his ironic country club musings on the "animal" nature of black women tennis players; and to bow to his courage when he declares his poems are "for white people."
Though Hoagland's gender politics have a moral basis that exist only in the windmills of his mind, his racial ones, however, are a little more complicated. Given the history of Black nationalism and bad( not all) slam poetry: and the fact that Baraka have never been fully called on the carpet for the horror core he spewed in the name of literature; it is natural that someone would be a racial response writer ; a foot soldier to give right back the violent agit prop rhetoric that too many poets forced upon American Literature. Fair enough, but that doesn't make Hoagland right. Or a poet.
Though Hoagland's gender politics have a moral basis that exist only in the windmills of his mind, his racial ones, however, are a little more complicated. Given the history of Black nationalism and bad( not all) slam poetry: and the fact that Baraka have never been fully called on the carpet for the horror core he spewed in the name of literature; it is natural that someone would be a racial response writer ; a foot soldier to give right back the violent agit prop rhetoric that too many poets forced upon American Literature. Fair enough, but that doesn't make Hoagland right. Or a poet.