19 Quotes by Tony Hoagland

We’re all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy, we’ve all tried to start a fire, and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own. In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty...

These poems possess intelligence, erudition, gravitas and urgency. Serious and moving in voice and ambition, this passionately lyrical and articulate work reminds me very much of the capacious, fierce and intelligent work of Adrienne Rich.

There’s Socialism and Communism and Capitalism and there’s Feminism and Hedonism, and there’s Catholicism and Bipedalism and Consumerism, but I think Narcissism is the system that means the most to me.

What we know for sure is that metaphor is the raw uranium of poetry, and that an urge to say that one thing is like something else is one of the earliest markers of the poetic spirit, the nascent poet.

The most prevalent poetic representation of contemporary experience is the mimesis of disorientation by non sequitor.

No matter how you feel you have to act like you are very popular with yourself; very relaxed and purposeful very unconfused and not like you are walking through the sunshine singing in chains.

When you’re a student of poetry, you’re lucky if you don’t realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.

Why did it take me so long to figure out that my special talent was trying?

Who would have imagined that I would have to go a million miles away from the place where I was born to find the people who love me? And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people?