Quotes from Tony Hoagland

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. What I thought was an injustice turned out to be a color of the sky.

Often we ask ourselves to make absolute sense out of what just happens, and in this way, what we are practicing is suffering, which everybody practices, but strangely few of us grow graceful in.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind; overflowing with blossomfoam, like a sudsy mug of beer; like a bride ripping off her clothes, dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds, so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene. It's been doing that all week: making beauty, and throwing it away, and making more.

There's Socialism and Communism and Capitalism and there's Feminism and Hedonism, and there's Catholicism and Bipedalism and Consumerism, but I think Narcissism is the system that means the most to me.

No matter how you feel you have to act like you are very popular with yourself; very relaxed and purposeful very unconfused and not like you are walking through the sunshine singing in chains.

So the avenues we walk down, full of bodies wearing faces, are full of hidden talent: enough to make pianos moan, sidewalks split, streetlights deliriously flicker.

Then there was someone else I met, whose face and voice I can't forget, and the memory of her is like a jail I'm trapped inside, or maybe she is something I just use to hold my real life at a distance.

the glory of the protagonist is always paid for by a lot of secondary characters

A poem is a heroic act of integration that binds into rough harmony the chorus of forces within and outside the soul. A poem struggles to orchestrate, prioritize, cohere, and coordinate these potentially shattering forces.

What I like about the trees is how They do not talk about the failure of their parents And what I like about the grasses is that They are not grasses in recovery And what I like about the flowers is That they are not flowers in need of empowerment or validation. They sway Upon their thorny stems As if whatever was about to happen next tonight was sure to be completely interesting

The future ours for a while to hold, with its heaviness— and hope moving from one location to another like the holy ghost that it is.

Because if marriage is a kind of womb, divorce is the being born again.

Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness. As long as there is desire, we will not be safe

Why did it take me so long to figure out that my special talent was trying?

And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely

Who would have imagined that I would have to go a million miles away from the place where I was born to find the people who love me? And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people?

But the story stays the same: some of us would rather die than change. We love what will destroy us

For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming as they go through life, silently.

Poems build our capacity for imaginative thinking, create a tolerance for ambiguity, and foster an appreciation for the role of the unknown in human life.

So I've grown up to be one of those people who gets angry at trees for behaving like trees

The dark ending does not cancel out the brightness of the middle. Your day of greatest joy cannot be dimmed by any shame.

as we clashed together and commenced our collaboration on another chapter of the famous, familiar and amusing saga of human relations—choosing heat instead of grace, possession over possibility—trading the kingdom of heaven one more time for two arms full of beautiful, confusing earth.

So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once.

poems of experience bear the scars and wounds and scorch marks, even the imperfections that damage leaves on the soul, but a good poem also testifies to the triumph of still being able to speak.