At the Galleria Shopping Mall

Few contemporary American poets have been as open about their influences, or as grateful. Hoagland often charted his own literary context. He acknowledges that in college and the graduate school in the late 1970s, he (as all fledgling poets of his generation) came under the immense influence of the Confessional poets, among them his creative poetry professor at Iowa Louise Glück. These Confessional poets, who had emerged after World War Two, had created a genre of poems driven by elaborate honesty and sincerity that positioned the agonies and ironies of the poet at the center of a poem. For Hoagland, however, after nearly 50 years of such poems, such self-indulgent poetry had significantly narrowed any audience for poetry. Sincerity itself did not seem to justify so much harrowing “claustrophobic” poetry. After a half century, Confessional poetry itself seemed to be on autopilot. Such poems could come off as contrived, honest for the sake of honesty, mistaking irony for insight. When Hoagland himself began drafting his earliest poems, for him, such poems could be too easily parodied and, in turn, alienate any wide audience for poetry.

Hoagland suggested that he found a balance to such self-absorbed poetry in the public verse of the iconic British poets W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin. Auden particularly, with wry irony and bold uncompromising honesty, sought to understand his way into the culture, politics, religion, and the arts of post-war England, poetry in which the poet, as deeply feeling and as sensitive as any of the Confessional poets, nevertheless saw the function of the poet as a kind of cultural psychology. In Auden (and in Larkin) the poet is positioned in a real-time world shared with the reader rather than in the weird ether of the Confessional poet’s private world. Like Hoagland, both Auden and Larkin found themselves in a confusing, constantly changing, and often unsettling culture that, again much like Hoagland’s, seemed to demand anatomizing.