Real sofistikashun : essays on poetry and craft / Tony Hoagland.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hoagland, Tony.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poetics.

Poetry--Authorship.

Physical Description:

xiii, 201 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Saint Paul, Minn. : Graywolf Press, 2006.

Summary:

In 2005, Tony Hoagland received The Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Award, recognizing a poet's contribution to humor in American poetry, and also the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, for excellence in teaching as well as writing. Real Sofistikashun, from the title onward, displays Hoagland's signature abilities to entertain and to instruct as he forages through central questions about how poems behave and how they are made. In these taut, illuminating essays, Hoagland explores matters of poetic craft-metaphor, tone, rhetorical and compositional strategies-in a buoyant conversational style less that of the scholar than of the serious enthusiast and practitioner. Real Sofistikashun is a vigorous and provocative collection of essays, as pleasurable a book as it is useful.

Contents:

Altitudes, a Homemade Taxonomy: Image, Diction, and Rhetoric 1

"Tis Backed like a Weasel": The Slipperiness of Metaphor 21

Three Tenors: Pinsky, Hass, Gluck, and the Deployment of Talent 33

Self-Consciousness 61

Two Roads Diverged: Character, Metaphor, and Destiny in the Poems of Matthews and Levis 69

Obsession: ("Are You Still Writing About Your Father?") 81

Sad Anthropologists: The Dialectical Use of Tone 83

On Disproportion 107

Polka Dots, Stripes, and Plaids: Decorative Instincts and Compositional Strategies in Poetry 129

Fragment, Juxtaposition, and Completeness: Some Notes and Preferences 145

Thingitude and Causality: In Praise of Materialism 163

Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment 173

Fashion Victims: The Misfortunes of Aesthetic Fate 189

Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People 193.

ISBN:

1555974554

OCLC:

71801240

Publisher Number:

9781555974558