Reasons to Be Happy Tony Hoagland Some birds are people-watchers. The worms can hear us walking over them. The loaves and fishes multiplied the Christians. We were wrong about so many things. We thought the world was mute, or just disinterested, or dead. Yet the sunrise liked being looked at by sleepy cabdrivers. The billboard…
Tag: Tony Hoagland
It is hard to drop from the self into the soul
From “The Edge of the Frame”, by Tony Hoagland (an excerpt) Joseph Cornell collected souvenirs of places he was miserable in, which pretty much was everywhere he went. Churchill felt afraid on stairs. Terrible migraines of Virginia Woolf entered her skull and would not be evicted. I read biographies because I want to…
Consecrating ones life to an imbecility
I suppose, as a poet, amongst my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility (to something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous – and thereby unintentionally cruel). In an intriguing essay called “On Fear”, Mary Ruefle touch upon a problem I have been…
Perfect Reader
A week ago I made a post on Mary Ruefle – here she is again: I spend all day in my office, reading a poem by Stevens, pretending I wrote it myself, which is what happens when someone is lonely and decides to go shopping and meets another customer and they buy the same thing. But I come to…
sub rosa 