Quotes from Tony Hoagland

What humanizes the speaker's rage, what keeps the poem a poem, is the grief which colors it—we understand that the speaker's immoderation and anger come from deep personal injury. We recognize that the rage comes out of an experience of empathy, and that forcefield between love and denunciation moves us as much as Lear's rage on the mountainside. It amounts to the difference between poetic terrorism and poetic tragedy.

Bombing that city was a terrible mistake," the four-star general says on television, "but it taught me a lot about myself." Maybe he should give a medal to his therapist.

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.