Tony Hoagland died too young at the age of 64 in October, 2018. His last collection, Turn Up the Ocean, was published in 2022. A book by a man thinking about “these final few months of my life” (“Siberia”), Turn Up the Ocean was written with an awareness of hospitals, funeral homes, pain, a diagnosis of a probably fatal disease, ongoing extinctions, nurses, bandages, ambulances, waiting rooms, more pain, people praying for the ill, insurance forms, the inevitable spring-break fatality, the wonder about who will die next and when.

Being mortal for Hoagland means finding oneself in ludicrous situations—trying to come up with reasons why one might like hospitals, wondering whom to tell about a diagnosis, being asked to put a number on the pain one is feeling.  One may find  himself peculiarly tempted to walk into an interfaith chapel in an airport.  Somewhat oddly, dying people read escapist fiction while in a waiting room or suffering from insomnia.  Dying can make one feel one is authoring a story without knowing the end.  One may wonder if he will avoid the silliness of dying in, of all places, a shopping mall.

If memory serves (the Hoagland poems I have remained most familiar with are “Romantic Moment” and “Wild,” both collected in the anthology Ecopoetry), “The Power of Traffic” is one of the poems in Turn Up the Ocean that acts like a typical Hoagland found poem in earlier volumes.  At least it does so until the end, where it makes a turn that fits into the concerns of Turn Up the Ocean.  The laughable situation the poem addresses is one familiar to millions of people—wanting to live in a city even though one must tolerate the noise of traffic.   One has to make adjustments; “you have to” do this and “you have to” do this” and “you have to . . .”:

            If you want to live in the city,

            you have to understand the beauty of heavy traffic.

            You have to love the thunketa thunketa of trucks at 4 a.m,

            bringing meat and flowers into the markets and stores.

Traffic, it turns out, has to be taken,as a chance to witness a “confrontation” at a blocked intersection, as a “rhinestoned” “enormous squid,” as seemingly natural to us, and, finally—the poem turning to a focus on death—as “music”:

            You have to lie in your bed at night with the window open

            and listen to the music of the traffic;

            the lonely howl of the ambulance siren

            rushing toward  the worst day in somebody’s life.

“Causes of Death” suggests something of Hoagland’s tonal range.  The poem opens with the ludicrous—a bit of a joke:

            In the records we can find

            not one fatality

            from the novels of Charles Dickens.

“[I] intuition” does not kill people,” nor do “grammatical errors.”  The poem then turns more serious:

            No one—though it seems strange—

            dead from “outrage and pity

            at the mistreatment of nature.”

Then the poem turns to “frank” social commentary:

            So many gone down

            from color of skin,

            from lack of fair chances,

            from lifelong deficiency of love.

After noting a death caused by “fame and money,” the poem turns bitter.  The poet who just expressed his compassion is going to die too early while less deserving people will live on:

            Make it publicly known that Mr. Johanson

            died after eighty-five years

            of refusing all treatment

            for his progressive condition of hate.

The poem concludes with a lyrical expression of grief, of grief in the stage of denial:

            And then there is my sister,

            that good-hearted woman,

            who I like to tell people

            relocated to Canada.

            No need to mention death.

            If we don’t hear from her much,

            it is because

            she is very busy . . . .

Turn Up the Ocean is a brave, good-hearted collection of poems.

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One more thing:

Tony Hoagland had a father—or so his poem “How the Old Poetry Starts” reports—who “said he hated literary stuff / because it never directly says what it means.”

Do you have friends and acquaintances who tell you they don’t like poetry?  People who discuss novels or biographies or investigative journalism with you with intelligence—but still insist that poetry is not from them?  People who love art or will urge you to attend a concert but who will dismiss poetry as if remembering a high school teacher who was overly fond of poetry and her intensity made them suspicious? Or New Yorker readers who, when they give the poems a try, cannot fathom them? Do you hear a hint of superiority in their voices—as if it’s clear to most people with any sense that poetry is a waste of time?