What Narcissism Means to Me, by Tony Hoagland

What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland

The last time I touched poetry was ten years ago when I re-read Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. And before that, high school. This Hoagland fellow though, has a way with words and thoughts. I've read the whole book twice already, and have left it next to the bed to read again later. Here are a few verses from "Rap Music":

Twenty-six men trapped in a submarine
are pounding on the walls with a metal pipe,
shouting what they'll do when they get out.
Or they are rolled up in a rug in the back
of a rug truck that has wrecked.

No, it's the car pulled up next to mine in traffic
with the windows rolled down and the sound turned up
so loud it puts everything in italics: enough to make the asphalt thump
and the little leaves of shrubbery
in front of the nice brick houses quake.

I don't know what's going on inside that portable torture chamber,
but I have a bad suspicion
there's a lot of dead white people in there

...

But that's what art is for, isn't it?
It's about giving expression to the indignation---
it's for taking the in out of inhibitchin;
so maybe my ears are just a little hysterical
or maybe my fear is a little historical

...

and there's this pounding noise
like a heartbeat full of steroids,
like a thousand schizophrenic Shakespeares
killing themselves at high volume---

this tangled roar
that has to be shut up or blown away or sealed off
or actually mentioned and entered.