It’s four years this month since the poet Tony Hoagland died. Turn Up the Ocean was published posthumously this year.
The blurb on the back says ‘Over the course of his celebrated career, Tony Hoagland ventured fearlessly into the unlit alleys of emotion and experience. The poems [ … ] examine with mordant wit the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives.’
The mordant wit can be found in some of the titles:
Four Beginnings for an Apocalyptic Novel of Manners
Why I Like the Hospital
On Why I Must Decline To Receive The Prayers You Say You Are Constantly Sending
The last few lines of this poem are:
And could you stop burning so many candles, please?
My god, think how many hours and hours and hours – think of how hard those bees worked to make all that wax!
Hoagland’s poems often go just over the page and here are the last few lines of Gorgon:
Your job is to stay calm. Your job is to watch and take notes, to go on looking.
It’s an immense pleasure introducing this month’s guest poet Ramona Herdman. We met a few years ago on a residential workshop and are members of a group that meets weekly online.
Ramona Herdman’s recent publications are Glut (Nine Arches Press), A warm and snouting thing (The Emma Press) and Bottle (HappenStance Press). Ramona lives in Norwich and is a committee member for Café Writers. She tweets @ramonaherdman
I have selected four poems from Glut, beautifully produced by Nine Arches Press, to give you a flavour of these darkly funny, bittersweet poems. I hope my choices also show their ‘quiet ferocity’ (Philip Gross). Below the poems you’ll find links to a blog about the cover (by Jacky Howson) and to a video with Ramona reading Blackberrying and Congratulations. Glorious is the word!
Blackberrying
Blooded young, we waded into the hooked shallows of hedges, caught up and cut in our toddler blundering, dirty with gritty juice and dotted-line scratches.
We without-ritual British, we atheists. Hippies’ children, grown up in the world they believe they changed – we have blackberrying as our sacrament.
At school, neater children wouldn’t eat the berries, said their mothers said no, said they had worms in that would eat our insides and poke out of our bumholes.
Now we go every year, like it’s Midnight Mass. We avoid the dog zone at the bottom of the bushes. Tell each other that by Michaelmas the Devil will have pissed them bitter.
We take offal-heavy carrier bags of berries to our parents, too old now for all that bother. We pick the children out of the tangled footings. We cook pies and crumbles in our own kitchens, competently. We placate the gods.
Cover design by Jacky Howson
Cuckoo and egg
It’s hard to soft-boil an egg in another woman’s kitchen – even the water is different.
It’s our first ‘family’ holiday together. She makes me a soft-boiled egg with a lot of fanfare and the whole breakfast-table gets involved in the hoo-hah.
And there’s a performance of trust in cracking it – the risk of a wet white, the opposite risk of a solid yolk. We’re on the edge
of an ovation when it turns out perfect. I eat it hot, like a heart.
It’s not me taking the minutes
It’s not me anymore escorting visitors from the front desk. I don’t fill the water jugs and make sure the glasses aren’t too dirty. I sometimes buy the biscuits, now there’s no budget. It’s not me too scared to ask a question or supply a fact, wondering if I’m allowed a view or am just a transcription machine.
A man once told me working with women had taught him not to interrupt. It’s a terrible world. I told him working with men had taught me to keep on talking, slightly louder. Try interrupting and you’ll get to see the flying-galleon belly of my argument as I lift off cathedral-high over you.
Don’t dare to talk over my people, including the young woman taking minutes, who is well on her way to wherever she wants, who could take your eye out with her wit. The meetings are my meetings now.
Two death in the afternoons, please
Dad, now you’re dead you scare me. Every time I think about stepping into traffic I think of you building your glass castle, cornershop-whisky-bottle by cornershop-whisky-bottle.
I had to do one of those questionnaires recently: How many times in the last month has your drinking stopped you doing things you needed or wanted to do? I put zero, Dad, proud nothing. They never ask
about the times the drink makes living possible. I think of your kitchen-drinking nights, how you told me you didn’t get hangovers anymore and I was too young to reply.
When I’m scared, Dad, I know a gluey-gold inch of brandy or one gin and tonic’s scouring effervescence will lift me to arm’s-length from caring, will calm me in a bubble of slight incapacity.
The old dread, Dad – I think now you carried it like a wolf in your stomach. The drink quiets it, but it doesn’t drown. I recently learned another cocktail by Hemingway –
‘Death in the afternoon’, champagne and absinthe. You’d find the name as funny as I do. He recommended three or five in slow succession. When I make them, I toast him. He’s family.
Dad, you’re nothing now. It’s only the thought of your life that scares me. But if there were an afterlife I’d meet you there, happy hour. It’d be dimlit and we’d sit low in a booth and they’d keep
bringing the drinks in fine heavy glasses and no one would interrupt to say this wasn’t actually heaven, this delicious blunting of feeling, this merciful cessation, and that there was something outside that was better –
like walking out on the seafront together, wind and water-roar and saying something risky and being understood.
Acacia Publications 