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Unincorporated Persons In The Late Honda Dynasty (2010)

by Tony Hoagland(Favorite Author)

3.99 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1555975496 (ISBN13: 9781555975494)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Graywolf Press

review 1: Is it just me, or is Hoagland starting to sound more like Billy Collins? I don't mean that in a bad way, I really like his writing style. And overall, I think his poems often have more uncomfortability in them and more emotional impact than Collins' do. This is a wonderful book, with more of Hoagland's sympathizing and skewering the American way of life at the same time. My only issue here (why it doesn't get 5 stars) is that some of his work feels fairly inconsequential or even patronizing (the same issues I have with Collins, as it happens). I liked his poem "The Loneliest Job in the World" so much that I taped it onto the wall by my desk at work. I also really liked "Plastic", "Hard Rain", "The Story of the Father", "Address to the Beloved" (hilarious), "Nature", "The A... morellegory of the Temp Agency", and "Jazz".
review 2: I often wonder about "subjective units of pleasure" (SUP!) which like subjective units of distress might have nothing to do with the poetic craft of a collection but the state of mind of the reader. I must have been in a mood where I wanted a combination of humor, compassion, and a bit of philosophy to address observations of daily American life.Enter the title and ponder why a person might be "unincorporated" and why a Late Honda Dynasty. Just last week, many of Hoagland's poems from his 1998 "The Donkey Gospel" appeared in Writer's Almanac and other internet poem sources, one of which was "Honda Pavarotti". Ah... the opening stanza is made possible by driving, although the poem is about the opera on the radio and true to Hoagland's genius, "the whole car plunges down the canyon of his throat.". No more car after that... but can you imagine America without car, without instant radio?What is this modern era filled with cell phones, corn chips and food courts, broken swings and a Starbucks Golgotha ? Hoagland allows us a look, using components of everyday life from ads, dear Abby letters, material stuff; intimate insights about love, pain, loneliness; America as a "jumbo jet" in a dream (in a poem called "Disaster Movie". To give you an example of my "SUP" reading, I will use "Plastic" as example. It is the title of one of my favorite poems which I heard him read in January, 2013 at the Palm Beach Festival. It becomes a study of the conditional -- one could explain the world through it... one could talk about "how the big molecules were bound up in chains/ by chemical reactions, then liquefied and poured like soupinto intricate factory moldsfor toy soldiers and backscratchers , airsick bags and high-tech Teflonroof racks;you could mull over the ethics of enslaving matter even while feeling admiration for the genius it takesto persuade a molecule to become part of a casserole container."At first amused by the speaker of the poem, seduced by his wit, I absolutely lose my heart to him as he starts in on personal plastic, then goes into relationships and how much easier plastic is to "stretch than /human nature" and then, just like a rubber band, comes a term "Interpersonal Adhesive/Malfunction" and on the poem gallops through another tercet and 5 more irregular couplets and a final tercet which shows how "indifferent silence" stretches with the final 9 syllables which start mid-line on the final line.Poem after poem, I nodded, oh yes, what a novel way to think, oh yes, I know that feeling, oh yes, oh yes. Clever, but not trite, provocative but set with brilliancethat shines with empathy. I end with the last two stanza of "Muchness""And the narrative then, having done its work,it vanished too,leaving just its affectionate cousin description behind.-- Description,which lingers,and loves for no reason.""Description", which is the opening poem. Read this book, you will understand why he calls it "sign of our acceptance" .(The epigraphs, one by Oppen from "the Building of the Skyscraper", the other by Rumi, prepare a theshhold that announced to me: "you are about to enter 46 poems that blend modern life to age old wisdom, the difficulty of meaning, solace of nature." I'd love to hear other readers' takes! ) less

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