“A Message From Tony Hoagland”: Eight Questions for Jeffrey Harrison
Jeffrey Harrison was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1957. After graduating from Columbia University- during which he worked with various poets including Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro, Harrison went on to teach at many educational institutions like George Washington University and Phillips Academy where he was a Writer-in-Residence. Currently, he resides in Massachusetts with his family. Among many works, Harrison has written six books of poetry as well as had poems featured in various magazines and anthologies. Harrison has also received numerous honors such as the NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and Lavan Younger Poets Award, all which have recognized his poetic talent and contribution to the world of poetry.
“A Message From Tony Hoagland” is one of Jeffrey Harrions poems that appears in The Best of American Poetry 2024. After reading this poem, it was clear that Harrison was who I wanted to interview. Even from the beginning when I saw the title, I knew that this poem- and the poet, were going to be interesting. I had never seen a title that included someone else’s name and seemed so untraditional for a poem. As I began to research, I found that Tony Hoagland was actually another well-known poet who became a friend of Harrison’s throughout his life. In the poem, Harrison talks about receiving an email (which he later deems as spam) that looks as if it is from Tony who he acknowledges has been dead for over a year and a half. He discusses the spiral of emotions that he feels, ranging from excitement to frustration and what he should do about it. This description of emotional depth as well as how he focused on such a specific moment is something that I found shows up in other poems by the author. His ability to focus on complex emotions that often center on grief, humor, and reflection that entertains us readers but also leads us to think more about loss, memory, and human connection. At the end of the poem, the poet references yet another poet and his work. This got me thinking about how poets use one another as inspiration and influence in their work, but also how this small detail can bring so much more depth to the entire poem. Between a mix of curiosity and excitement from reading Harrison’s work, I was eager to reach out and begin my interview.
In “A Message from Tony Hoagland”, you mention and refer to the poet Tony Hoagland quite frequently. What do you like best about the work of Mr. Hoagland?
I don’t know if you read the note that accompanied my poem in Best American Poetry 2024, but I met Tony in 1984, when we were in our twenties, before either of us had published a book of poems, so we knew each other for over three decades. Though we weren’t always in close touch, I always felt a strong affection for him, and I had tremendous respect for his work. I love his poems for their combination of passion and irony (two things that don’t always go together), for their gutsiness in taking on difficult subjects, for their sometimes outrageous humor, and for the way they are written out of personal experience but explore something much larger: how to live with intensely human authenticity in a society that does not seem to value the inner life.
You mention D.H. Lawrence and his “snake” in the last three lines of your poem which I researched was a reference to another poem. What caused you to draw this connection and ultimately end the poem this way?
You’re right that the end of my poem refers to Lawrence’s iconic poem “Snake.” What you may not know is that Tony’s second book, Donkey Gospel (published in 1998), contains a poem called “Lawrence,” which is an impassioned defense of Lawrence and an extremely entertaining excoriation of those who dismiss him. That may be the reason Lawrence’s snake slithered into the end of the poem.
When reading your poem, it seems very conversational and almost as if you’re having a conversation and just speaking your mind, especially when you write : “I paused a moment and thought about what those poems would be like, but my imagination failed me. Then I clicked “delete,”’ because it seems as if you’re just describing your thoughts as if you were talking to yourself. Was this sort of “voice” intentional or did it seem to just come out that way as you were writing?
To some extent all my poems are conversational, to different degrees, because I tend to write in a voice that comes naturally to me. My poems generally go through a lot of revision, but I try to preserve that naturalness in the process. This particular poem may seem even more conversational than some of the others because of the way it came into being. A lot of my poems, though certainly not all of them, look back on an experience in the recent or distant past—something like Wordsworth’s idea of emotion recollected in tranquility. In this case, however, I started writing the poem right after receiving a message from Tony’s email address over a year after he had died. My almost-in-real-time response to this startling occurrence may give the poem more of a sense of immediacy.
In a few of the other poems I read like “Last Advice” and “Higher Education”, you talk about your father and kind of who he seemed to be as a person. Would you say that he has been an influence in your writing in any way?
My relationship with my father was too complex and multi-faceted to explain in the space of an interview answer. Half of my most recent book, Between Lakes (including the two poems you list above), is about my father, my relationship with him, and his death. He was a businessman and not exactly happy that I wanted to be a poet. He did eventually come around, and even liked some of my poems (particularly some of the funny ones). I wouldn’t say he was a direct influence on my writing, but he was certainly a huge influence in my life, and therefore an indirect influence on my poetry.
I noticed that in your poem “Morning Row” you describe your mother rowing and how later, you picked up the sport yourself. Has rowing had any sort of larger impact on your writing or your creative process?
I have spent part of every summer of my life in the Adirondacks, on a lake about a mile long, and I’ve always loved to row on that lake in the old guideboats that region is known for. When something like that remains part of your life over a long period of time, it does tend to take on more significance and also lend itself to metaphors. “Morning Row” is just as much about life and death as it is about rowing. I have another poem in which rowing becomes a metaphor for sex (though it has sometimes been mistaken for a poem about having sex in a rowboat). In a more general sense, rowing (like walking) can open one’s mind to contemplation, and the rhythmic aspect of it may lend itself to writing poems.
I see that your poetry tends to reflect ideas of dark humor but also emotional depth. Would you say this causes you to resonate more with more contemporary styles of poetry?
That’s a difficult question to answer, since there are so many styles of contemporary poetry. But I will say that, although my tastes are broad, the poems I like best tend to be the ones that feel as though they were written out of a life, in response to experiences in that life… which is not to say that the poem can’t go well beyond the experience that triggered it. And yes, some of those experiences are dark or emotionally powerful. It’s a bit of a mystery as to what exactly happens when all of that is filtered through one’s sensibility in the process of writing a poem.
If you could receive one final piece of advice or insight from Tony Hoagland, knowing he is no longer alive, what would you hope it would be and how might it change the way you write or view poetry?
I’m not sure. I guess I might ask him: Is there an afterlife?
Your poem made me think about what it feels like to want to talk to people who aren’t here anymore. Do you think poetry symbolizes or serves as a way to connect with people who you maybe can’t with anymore?
Yes, this is one of the many things that poetry can do. Poetry is, one hopes, a form of communication with the reader, as well as with oneself, but more than that, it can be a way of connecting with those who are no longer alive. I have poems about (and sometimes addressed to) my brother who died, my dead father, friends who have died, and poets who are no longer with us, like Tony Hoagland. Dwelling on them, or interacting with their memory, is a way of honoring them. Even just thinking, when something happens during the course of my day, “This is something my brother would have liked” brings him a little closer. Poetry can do that too, though there is always the poignance that you can’t connect completely… but that can actually add to the power of the poem.