Quotes from Tony Hoagland

When I get hopeless about human life, which, to be frank, is far too difficult for me, I try to remember that in the desert there is a little butterfly that lives by drinking urine.

They say, "Listen to your body," but I have found that pain doesn't speak in complete sentences; its grasp of grammar is weak. Its pronunciation is unclear.

and I am grateful for my heart, that turned out to be good, after all

The idea that writerly originality appears from nowhere, or exists as something in isolation, a thing to be guarded and protected from influence, is lunacy. Anyone who doesn't school themselves by deep, wide, and idiosyncratic reading is choosing aesthetic poverty. Such aesthetic cloistering is like protecting your virginity in the belief that it will make you better at sex.

The truth is, a writer's voice is made from other writers' voices. Pieced together, picked and chosen, stumbled into, uninformed: influence seems like an involuntary series of contagions that eventually turns into a sort of vessel, or transportation system. As we acquire a sense of taste, and perhaps a sense of vocation, our reading becomes more directed and targeted, but we are bent and shaped and destined to be changed by the genius of others.

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend, smiles like a big cat and says that she's a conjugated verb. She's been doing the direct object with a second person pronoun named Phil

and when she walks into the room, everybody turns: some kind of light is coming from her head. Even the geraniums look curious, and the bees, if they were here, would buzz suspiciously around her hair, looking for the door in her corona. We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy

In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty, and when we see it, what we do is natural: we take our burned hands out of our pockets, and clap.

We look almost happy out in the sun, while we bleed to death from wounds we know nothing about.

Maybe every talk about poetry is a defense of poetry...

Taking the car out of the rental parking lot, almost getting fender-bendered by the guy in the BMW speaking capitalist Cro-Magnon into his cell phone; wondering whether the time has come to get a gun; already starting to look forward to my lethal injection—

This hour of the evening with a little infinity inside, like an amnesty from the interminable condition of being oneself.

In many poems voice is the mysterious atmosphere that makes it memorable, that holds it together and aloft like the womb around an embryo.

Alternatively, we could say that voice embodies, not any set of particular facts, but the presence of a self, a personality or a sensibility.

We like to say "I changed my mind," but the human mind alters its direction so rapidly and constantly, we might as well say "My mind changed me.

Poets are wounded like all other human beings, but they have somehow not been wounded into the condition of speechlessness. Not quite.

The goal of the poem is not to conceal uncertainty and to deliver an airtight argument, or proclamation, or insight, not to arrive at some truth, but rather to display the nature of the speaker's "real-time" sensibility, including its tendency toward indecisiveness and self-contradiction.

This speaker may turn out to be a "confidence man" with a trick up his sleeve, but we are attracted by such familiar flavors of speech, the way that bees are attracted to the blue juice of a melting popsicle.

In a world where, as one poet says, "people speak to each other mostly for profit," it is exhilarating to listen to a voice that is practicing disclosure without seeking advantage. That is intimate.

O'Hara famously said that a poem was something one wrote instead of making a phone call to a friend, and his poems are indeed as conversational and friendly as phone calls.

As Zen practitioners might say. two people looking at the same mountain are not seeing the same mountain, and so poetic "worldliness" can take an infinite number of versions: the sensibility of an individual artist is as distinct as a fingerprint.

Our dialogue about race is complex, unresolved, and will probably be endless; a thing to be enacted forever on our shaky, shattered, and traumatized national ground. It requires of us a belief in the willingness of others, and a trust that even our misunderstandings will not be intentionally misunderstood.

You speak differently to your four-year-old daughter than you do to the bank manager.

And sometimes, sitting in my chair I can feel the absence stretching out in all directions– like the deaf, defoliated silence just after a train has thundered past the platform, just before the mindless birds begin to chirp again –and the wildflowers that grow beside the tracks wobble wildly on their little stems, then gradually grow still and stand motherless and vertical in the middle of everything.