I remembers...

Continuing my tribute to my students during my internship with the Writers Center, here are some "I remembers." Yesterday, we had the final celebration for one of the sites, and it was fantastic. Layne ruled the books the students created (hopefully a picture soon) and the kids were really enthusiastic about seeing the book and reading from it. Very cool.

I remember Bailey and her boobs and hours watching crappy TV and couch sitting.
I remember learning to love couch sitting and porch sitting and roof sitting with Cody.
I remember debating whether or not to drive to Indy for Cody's birthday party.
I remember getting lost with Sara on the way there and one of my happiest memories being when she led us home in a rainstorm.
I remember Sara asking me how the NBA Draft works.
I remember loving the NBA Draft and my high school friends watching it to please me and how I didn't understand why they did that.
I remember chicken subs with Sara by the duck pond.
I remember the different between sleeping in a twin bed alone and sleeping in a twin bed with someone else.
I remember the glow of left behind stars on the ceiling of my freshman dorm room and the odd surprise it gave me.
I remember ping pong with Zach and Mickey and Haven.
I remember that lame-o tennis player that lived below me.
I remember freshman year tennis club.
I remember late night walks down the cowpath with Sara.

I remember when I only wrote about my dad.

For the past six weeks, I've been working with the Writers' Center of Indiana for their Memoir Project, going to two summer camps in Indy a couple days a week to help students write about their lives. We focus on strong memories, new or old, often using the famous "I remember" exercise to get thoughts stirring. As I often write alongside the students, I am becoming aware of my aesthetic's lack of narrative appreciation. In all genres of my writing, I tend to be distant from more traditional means of storytelling, instead relying on associative or discursion to move my piece along. I think this style comes from my tendency to get bored with narrative. To me, a narrative story/poem has to be really excellent to keep my interest while something that relies less on story and more imagination has a better chance of being interesting, even if I don't deem it as "good." So, I wouldn't want to inflict my possibly boring narrative on others. Of course, there are other reasons I write in my style, which is another post in itself. Anyways, point is, I still appreciate narrative as one of the core values of writing (and LIVING). Working with these students, who have written some awesome short pieces, has made me feel a little guilty. So in an effort to flex the narrative side of my writing brain, I'm gonna post narrative-driven pieces here throughout this month, ones more reflective of my actual experience as a tribute to thee kids and a record of my life.

I remember dad’s story of playing “pocketbook.” As a child, my dad was limited in play options, stuck out in the middle of the woods, the only house at the end of a dirt road. Left to his own imagination by less-than-concerned parents, he told stories of running through the narrow paths created by deer, diving into unknown rivers, and playing pranks on the passersby at the end of their road. There, him and a random assortment of siblings, cousins, and friends played with an old pocketbook with toy money and jewelry glued around the edge and tie the pocketbook to the a long piece of fishing line. Where their dirt road met a city street that led into town, they hid in the night behind a row of bushes and tossed the pocketbook into the middle of the closest lane. Some cars swerved, some ran it over, while others slammed on the brakes or pulled to the side. As the driver approached the pocket book, my dad and the others yanked the finishing line and ran down the unlit dirt road.

I remember my childhood best friend, Ryan, and I becoming fascinated with this story. My father told it again and again with equal nostalgic enthusiasm of his trickery each time. The trick seemed remarkable to us as seven year-olds: kids tricking adults, fooling those fancy people in their cars. Determined to be cool like my Dad, we set out to trick some of Elwood’s finest motorists. Except Mom wouldn’t let us borrow a pocketbook and the fishing line was locked in the shed while Dad was at work. And we lived in the middle of town, rows of houses and driveways on each side, four houses from the entry to my town’s hospital. And we only had a single tall oak tree in our front yard, the boundaries of which were our boundaries of play. Oh and Ryan had to go home before dark.

I remember Ryan and I carrying my Spiderman backpack with Monopoly money stapled to the top with my red and white striped jumprope tied trough the arm loops. We pressed our bodies against the bark of the oak tree and hurled the backpack into the road. At four in the afternoon, cars left the hospital and people returned home from work, and just like Dad had said, cars swerved around it or turned before they got to us or even stopped, muttering WHERE ARE YOUR PARENTS?, our signal to run into our screened-in porch. We snuck back out to our post as Dad drove up, smiling through the windshield of his pick-up truck. He said, I think it’s time for Ryan to go home. As we walked him home, Dad told us another story and Ryan and I made plans to try backflips off the swingset.

by now you were beginning to suspect/that everyone/lived a secret life of acts/they never advertised/and you were right.

The first time I read Tony Hoagland’s first book, Sweet Ruin, last spring, borrowed copy from Todd, mainly on the bus, I remember being fairly disappointed. Re-reading it this second time, my own copy, still mostly on the bus, now for my independent study, I wonder what in the world I was thinking. Sure, the middle gets a little tedious and sometimes off-putting, but Part I, the first 8 poems, including the title poem, strike with the associative narrative beauty that I love about Hoagland while having the raw charm expected in a debut collection. Really, these first poems, re-reading them now, astound me for the path their openness and voice carve.

The opening poem “Perpetual Motion,” a meditation about driving, twists as Hoagland often does into emotion. The most striking part of this poem is where Hoagland goes, the movement of the car matching the movement of the piece. Each stanza is a step, first details of the driving, tuning the radio, etc. Then, he takes off into thoughts of “the traveling disease,” “perceptual confusion that make your loved ones into strangers,” the romanticism of driving, and finally to the admittance of that place “where the desire to vanish/is stronger than the desire to appear.” This is the type of poem to start a collection, it seems, because of the themes, both in content and in style, that it introduces, letting the reader know what kind of poet he/she is dealing with.

Following the second poem “Poem for Men Only,” Hoagland’s introduction of his social and political leanings, areas he goes deeper into in later books, the third poem “Oh, Mercy” might be my favorite of the collection. The retrospective energy it builds in the beginning is incredible:

Only the billionth person
to glance up at the moon tonight
which looks bald, high-browed and professorial to me,

the kind of face I always shook my fist at
when I was seventeen
and every stopsign was a figure of authority

that had it in for me
and every bottle of cold beer
had a little picture of my father on the label

for smashing down in parking lots
at 2 AM, when things devolved
into the dance of who was craziest.

But the shift of pace and perspective it takes in the second half, pulling away from that young self, becoming more reflective, acknowledging the change, “how we come around in time,” illustrates the complete control, through his associations and meditations, that Hoagland possesses:

That year, if we could have reached the moon,
if we could have shoplifted the paint and telescoping ladders,
we would have scribbled FUCK YOU

on its massive yellow cheek,
thrilled about the opportunity
to offend three billion people

in a single night.
But the moon stayed out of reach,
imperturbable, polite.

It kept on varnishing the seas,
overseeing the development of grapes in Italy,
putting the midwest to bed

in white pajamas.
It's seen my kind
a million times before

upon this parapet of loneliness and fear
and how we come around in time
to lifting up our heads,

looking for the kindness
that would make revenge unnecessary.

The very next poem “My Country” seems both well-placed and well-done for the way it narrows the scope, taking it to later years, viewing just Hoagland and his best friend’s wife and an adulterous kiss that takes place outside of a zoo. Hoagland works through the situation, bouncing between the narrative story, and thoughtful meditation, seeing the kiss as “a patriotic act.” In the fifth and sixth stanzas, when Hoagland thinks of his friend, “who always tries to see the good in situations,” the humanity shakes itself free of the narrative and takes us to the end for further reflection. The end of this poem is a great example of one of my biggest (sometimes) complaints and (often) questions about Hoagland. He has a way of taking poems that seem done, narratively completewith a point made, further, often onto a second page, often with questions. This poem is a great example, where I wonder if it’s too much, wonder the effect:

I slipped my hand inside her skirt and felt
my principles blinking out behind me
like streetlights in a town where I had never

lived, to which I never intended to return.
And who was left to speak of what had happened?
And who would ever be brave, or lonely,

or free enough to ask?

In the seventh poem, “Sweet Ruin,” Hoagland moves the camera to his father, recalling the way his father willingly got caught cheating on his mother. A poet like Hoagland, one whose art is so indebted to his personal history, makes a smart move here. The poem, one of the longer in the collection at two and a half pages, provides such keen insight to the poet we are getting to know. Re-reading this poem just now, I’m struck by this passage, in the middle of Hoagland’s recollection of his father’s explanation:

he reclined in his black chair,
divorced from the people in his story
by ten years and a heavy cloud of smoke.
Trying to explain how a man could come
to a place where he has nothing else to gain

unless he loses everything.

As the title poem, but also as an early poem, “Sweet Ruin” has a sense of irony and brutal honesty that seems to introduce Hoagland in a brilliant way. As this passage hopefully illustrates, this, the story he got from his father, is the same thing he himself is doing in the pages of this book.

I’m so thankful to have read this book again, in a circumstance that forced me to evaluate it deeper and with more care. As the first book for this study, it lends excellent examples of a variety of topics that I’ve never had to contemplate: poem order, epigraphs, even acknowledgements. Each time I thought of this book, Part I stuck in my head for it’s ability to introduce, as well as it’s ability to push forward into Hoagland’s style and career.