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  #61  
Unread 02-14-2021, 01:52 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
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Maybe you’re right, Conny, about the lack of irony. But doesn’t this passage (at the end) at least hint at some degree of irony?

And the little pink judge
had to climb up on a box
to put the ribbon on her neck,
still managing to smile into the camera flash,
even though everything was changing

and in fact, everything had already changed—

Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,

we were there,

and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.

Added in: Perhaps it's because of the N's crude and vile thoughts that I find Hoagland's poem painful to read. And since I'm not a masochist, I'm not interested in reading the poem anymore, unless for the purpose of studying his poetic techniques.

PS - The more I think about it, the topic of Hoagland's poem and how he treats it just not very interesting. How many people in America nowadays think about "race" while watching a sport on TV? Hardly anyone. (In fact, most people don't go about their day thinking about it.) So the subject is old. Another thing that bothers me: his use of "we" near the end. "and when we went to put it back where it belonged." Who is "we"? (I guess it's the N and his friend, but could supposedly also mean society). And what does he mean by putting the twentieth century back "where it belonged"? Who is the "we" that "went to put it back"? And where does the N think it belonged? It sounds ambiguous. Does it mean that he and his friend were reluctant to part with the 20th century, or that they are glad it's "past us"?

Last edited by Martin Elster; 02-14-2021 at 02:43 PM.
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  #62  
Unread 02-14-2021, 02:22 PM
conny conny is offline
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Yes, exactly.


I went looking pretty hard for satire and just couldn’t find any,
but I maybe wrong. I’ve no idea about any of his other poems
but after reading this it makes me less, not more, likely to seek
out his work.
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  #63  
Unread 02-14-2021, 02:53 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
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I guess what it amounts to, Conny, is that Hoagland's poem is rather ugly in terms of the N's thoughts, and not all that interesting, since it's old news:

There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank,

and I don't watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre,
but I could feel the end of an era there

in front of those bleachers full of people
in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes


Yes, an era has ended and a new one has begun. Is that something we don't know?

I do, however, enjoy the metaphor of history being like an animal whose breath "you can smell" and whose flank you can touch.
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  #64  
Unread 02-14-2021, 03:22 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Julie Steiner View Post
Given how insulting Hoagland's response to Claudia Rankine was, it's very hard for me to see this poem as simply a persona poem.
But I haven't read either what Rankine said or what Hoagland wrote in response, so I have to take the poem at face value, and to me it comes across as a persona poem. It's quite possible that Hoagland himself is such an asshole that I will no longer be able to enjoy any of his poems in the future, no matter how good they would strike me were his character deficiencies concealed from me. But whether to start disliking an artist upon learning he is a bad person is a different question from whether a given poem is itself offensive.
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  #65  
Unread 02-14-2021, 03:39 PM
conny conny is offline
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Well, if only to contradict myself, I just spent a couple of hours looking
into Mr.Hoagland. The consensus seems to be that this poem is an
aberration. generally agreed to be a bit of a gruesome mistake. It’s
meant to be satirical. I think he just forgot to add anything to give
anyone any idea of that intention.
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  #66  
Unread 02-14-2021, 03:49 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Roger, my less-than-enthusiastic opinion of this one poem has absolutely no effect on how wholeheartedly I admire the two other Hoagland poems ("Don't Tell Anyone" and "Romantic Moment') that I've posted in this thread, one of which I also posted at Eratosphere when he died a few years ago.

If poets aren't allowed to be assholes occasionally, I'm in deep, deep trouble.
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  #67  
Unread 02-14-2021, 04:08 PM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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Hey, thanks for earlier Julie. And happy Valentine's day from another occasional asshole. Or arsehole as my tribe would have it.
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  #68  
Unread 02-14-2021, 06:28 PM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
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I just found this poet’s take on “The Change.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/har...nds-the-change

Quote:
Tony Hoagland's "The Change"
BY DAISY FRIED

Tony Hoagland's "The Change"

Since Tony Hoagland wrote “The Change” about a decade ago, the poem (from What Narcissism Means to Me, Graywolf 2003) has been praised by African-Americans and whites, and attacked as racist by almost as many—or maybe more. That readers find the poem painful is understandable. Hoagland probably intended the poem to cause pain. But “The Change” (read it at the end of this post; due to formatting problems some lines that should be indented are not) is a narrative poem about the inevitability of political change. It is also is a poem which believes that white liberals’ relationship to race is more complicated than our consciously held and universally agreed-upon opinion that Racism is Bad. “The Change” is no exaggerated satire of racist America: The speaker is not white, working class, uneducated, reactionary and ignorant. On the contrary, Hoagland’s unnamed speaker is by affect moderate, cultured and middle-class. He uses racial stereotype as if having a “what, me racist? I’m only an observer” chat at the office. Because the poem obscures the boundary between poet and persona, it’s a deeply uncomfortable poem.
The white speaker recounts watching a black female tennis player defeat a white female tennis player on TV, and admits he’s on the side of the white player because she’s the same race as him (“my tribe”). At the time the poem was written, Serena and Venus Williams were just beginning to dominate women’s tennis. “The Change” half-admires and half-satirizes their flamboyant style, their physical stature and strength, and conflates them into a character named “Vondella Aphrodite.” The trouble begins when the speaker begins to describe the black tennis player:
Right before our eyes
some tough little European blonde
pitted against that big black girl from Alabama,
cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms,
some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite—
We were just walking past the lounge
and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won,
putting ourselves into each whacked return
as the volleys went back and forth and back
like some contest between
the old world and the new,
and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
I couldn't help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
with her pale eyes and thin lips
and because the black girl was so big
and so black,
so unintimidated...
Notice how the speaker works himself up in the first stanza of racially-charged physical description, then breaks off without completing the sentence to cool things down into exposition (“We were just walking past the lounge…”)—as if he knows he’s begun revealing things he shouldn’t feel, let alone say. Then he works himself up again, as if he just can’t help himself, speaking to a “you” whose admiration for the black tennis player he characterizes as no less racially and physically-inflected than his own more negative reaction. This is a white liberal speaking to his own kind. Except that the poet has let the world in on the “secret” of white liberal racism.
Describing the tennis players in purely physical terms, Hoagland uses language which taken bit by bit could (mostly) be defended as factual (they are girls, they are big, etc., etc.). But put all together it skates into stereotype, the kind which has historically and does still support racist oppression. By the time we get to the pale eyes and thin lips of the white girl, which is supposed to make us imagine the eyes and lips of the black girl, we’re cringing. Not because eye-color or lip-size holds any inherent attractiveness, but because of the way such physical description has been used to exclude black Americans from opportunity.
In fact, the cringe comes not only from the content of what’s said, but from the fact that it is actually being said, and by Hoagland—a poet, one of our tribe. (There are several tribes in that statement: tribe of poets, and tribe of white left-liberals, a rather dominant subset of poets. There’s also a tribe to which I don’t belong, tribe of males looking at female bodies.)
It’s true that the speaker of this poem sounds pretty much like the speaker of Hoagland’s other poems: Supple-voiced, mostly-plainspoken; witty, attentive and virtuoso in its casually extravagant figurative leaps; simultaneously outward- and inward-looking; whose glibness generally turns out to be a subtle performance; who swerves from the serious to the comic to the serious, half-clowning, half-sensitive, not a little pissed off and never perfectly trustworthy. So this seems to be a poem in Hoagland’s own persona.
The poem lays down bits of evidence that we need not trust this speaker—that is, that there’s some ironic distance between speaker and poet. In the first line, what’s natural is refigured as something absolutely constructed and falsifying: “The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.” The speaker’s focus on tennis player bodies transfers into a sensualized, self-consciously arty, view of history:
There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank…
Such moments, however, are set close to jeering doggerel:
The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
and the new president proves that he's a dummy.
And Hoagland relies, in this poem, on speech lazy enough to verge on cliché: “Right before our eyes” and “Poof” and in mock-media-commentator-speak, “I could feel the end of an era there.” He’s ventriloquizing the language of the unextraordinary, the lazy articulator of half-examined ideas. The poet repeatedly insists on his presence, behind the poem, as manipulator of diction and metaphor.
All this works simultaneously to undercut and reinforce the cringe. But what if Hoagland had created a speaker who stopped his stereotyping to say “Wait, let me stop messing around, I’m being racist and racism is bad.” What a relief? Well, no: what a dodge. We could all then nod our heads, fold our hands and repeat, “Yes, racism is bad.” We’ve all read poems like that, and know what insignificant pieties they amount to.
What if, on the other hand, Hoagland’s speaker were a clownishly reactionary bigot spewing racial slurs, someone clearly not the poet. How easy it would be to put that character where he belonged: not me. Nothing to do with me.
No, this poem is about a much more prevalent, more insidious sort of racism—white, liberal, emotional, infrastructural—mostly hidden—racism. That’s not news in the world, but it is pretty new news in poems, and made especially potent by the problematic relationship of speaker to poet. Just as Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” can’t be about extremity of emotion and mental state without making us wonder just how much the poem’s lunacy is performed, Hoagland’s “The Change” can’t be about liberal white racism without making us wonder just how much of this poem is performed. I cringe reading this poem because I’m forced to wonder how much I’m looking in a mirror when I read it.
Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,
and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.
We can try to put this poem back where it belongs, too, but it too is past us, and we’re changed. Unless of course you’re the kind of reader who only wants to read poems that tell you what you want to hear—about the world, but even more, and particularly for white readers, about yourself. "The Change” is an uncivil—no, ugly—poem. It’s also a poem of nuance, necessity and urgency.

Last edited by Martin Elster; 02-14-2021 at 06:30 PM.
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  #69  
Unread 03-01-2021, 01:17 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Yesterday the New Verse News published Earl Wilcox's tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto."

Cheerful references to race and ethnicity and pluralism in both.

The Golden State Warriors' poetry-loving Tom Meschery often remarked on sports' ability to give immigrants like himself a sense of acceptance and belonging in American society. Here's a bit from a feature that WBUR's Only a Game show titled "Tom Meschery: The Most Interesting Man In The NBA":

Quote:
Meschery was born in Manchuria, after his parents fled the Bolshevik Revolution. He arrived in San Francisco after spending World War II in an internment camp in Tokyo.

"I hated being a foreigner," Meschery says. "My mother sent me off to elementary school the first day in short pants, came home crying because the kids were mean towards me. I had a very thick accent and I didn't speak English very well. There was a lot of, you know, 'Commie' and 'Better dead than red.' And I just thought — I needed to be an American."

It took Meschery until the sixth grade to find a solution to his problem.

"I remember — this is a very clear image in my mind — playing kickball. And I was up at the plate. And I kicked the ball so damn far that it went over the elementary school fence and out onto Pacific Avenue. That was a good, long kick. You know, I ran the bases, I ran along the bases. I came home, and some of the kids were slapping me on the back. All of the sudden, I realized everything had changed. And it had changed because of athletics. It had changed because I had done something that they respected. And from that point on, I worked very hard to be an athlete."
Here are some snippets from an interview at nba.com:

Quote:
DotCom: Your parents were in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. Is that correct?
TM: Correct, they were what were called “White Russians.” San Francisco is still full of the descendants of White Russians. My mother and father were both there in Russia and had to flee the Bolsheviks and settled in Northern China in what was called Manchuria, and that’s where my sister and I were born.

DotCom: Would it be correct to assume that your parents immigrated to the United States from Manchuria?
TM: My father came ahead of us prior to World War II and then he sent for us after he got visas for us. But the Second World War broke out and my sister, mother and I were interned in a Japanese concentration camp in Tokyo for the duration of the war. After the war ended, we were brought, via the Red Cross, to San Francisco. My sister and I were very young, but we remember the last years of the war. We’re old enough to remember the bombing and being in bomb shelters and surviving what were nightly raids. It was a terrible time for my mother and I’m sure the rest of the people in the camp.

[...]

DotCom: During your NBA career, you were an avid reader of poetry. How did that come about?
TM: We’re Russians, and for Russians, poetry is an important part of our heritage. On my mother’s side, we have a very strong literary heritage. My maternal grandmother’s family are Tolstoys, related to Leo Tolstoy and Aleksey Tolstoy. So I have those literary genes in me and they came out at a young age. I love poetry and I started working on poetry when I was in college a little bit, but I never really got into it much until I was with Seattle, and there I met a guy named Mark Strand. He was teaching at the University of Washington, and he convinced me that after I retired I should apply to the University of Iowa’s writer’s workshop, and that’s exactly what I did. From then on, I’ve never stopped writing poetry.

DotCom: Did the fact that your dad enjoyed reciting poetry have anything to do with the oral tradition that Russia has?
TM: I think one of the things about my father reciting poetry is I never once believed the mythology in grammar school and high school that poetry was feminine, that you weren’t manly if you loved poetry. My father was about 6-foot-2 and as big as a bear, and probably stronger than most bears, and when he recited poetry and it brought tears to his eyes, his son didn’t dare call him feminine. I never grew up with that notion of it.
He usually includes a poem--his own or someone else's--in his blog posts. Meschery's best-known poem is probably one he wrote about his father. It's quoted in this article, but I've re-lineated the poem the way I think I've seen it in his blog:

Quote:
Tom and his father had a strained relationship and, after Tom was drafted in the first round by the Warriors, “he just said to me, ‘What kind of work is this for a man?’” His father died while Tom was serving a stint in the Army and he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. “That always stayed with me. I always carried my father around in me, so I wasn’t surprised that when I started to write about myself as a basketball player that it translated very quickly into a poem about my father.”

Working Man

I admit sleeping in late at the Hilton,
ordering room service, handing out
big tips while your kind of men
were opening their lunch buckets.

You would have scolded me:
"Что это за работа для человека?"
“What kind of work is this for a man?"

Old immigrant, I admit all of this
too late. You died before I could explain
sportswriters call me a journeyman.
They write I roll up my sleeves
and go to work. They use words
like hammer and muscle to describe me.

For three straight years on the job
my nose collapsed. My knees ached
and I could never talk myself out of less
than two injuries at a time. Father,
you would have been proud of me:

I labored in the company of large men.


An earlier version of the poem ends with “I labored in the company of tall men,” but Tom changed it because “When you think of Chamberlain and Moses Malone, they weren’t just tall they were really large,” as was his father.

Tom didn’t let his father impede his basketball career, and he gives him credit for instilling in him a love of poetry. “In my childhood I learned many verses by heart. My father liked the old poetry which had to be beautiful, with rhythm and rhyme. He did not accept either Mayakovski or Esenin. For us, the Russians, poetry is a part of our soul. My father, a huge and strong soldier, recited verses for me and there were tears in his eyes.”

There’s no way of knowing if Tom’s father would have come to appreciate his son laboring in the company of large men, but Tom is certain he’d be impressed with Tom’s induction into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. “He'd be pleased with his son.”

Full article

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 03-01-2021 at 02:00 PM.
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