MAY 19 - JUNE 8, 2008

Application Deadline: February 15, 2008

TONY HOAGLAND, poet

Tony Hoagland is the author of three volumes of poetry: Sweet Ruin, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and What Narcissism Means to Me, all by Graywolf Press. His poems and critical essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Ploughshares. Hoagland currently teaches in the poetry program at the University of Houston. He is the winner of the 2005 O.B. Hardison Jr. Prize. Awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is the only national prize to recognize a poet's teaching as well as his art. Hoagland also received the 2005 Mark Twain Award, given by the Poetry Foundation in recognition of a poet’s contribution to humor in American poetry. Graywolf Press published a collection of Hoagland's essays about poetry, Real Sofistakashun, in 2006.

Tony Hoagland's poems have been described as moving unerringly with wit and irony, like an arrow through its target—we, the readers—with exhilarating results. His poems sprint across the page and unexpectedly blow apart a single moment, exposing its contradictory nature—and often our folly. Hoagland explores the spiritual bereftness of American satisfaction, creating poetry that is scathing, funny, rich, and refreshingly intelligent. Steven Cramer writes of Hoagland's poems, "[they] grapple with selfhood and manhood, but they also consider the mysteries of the national identity—how the social and the personal mutually impinge."

“There is nothing escapist or diversionary about Tony Hoagland’s poetry. Here’s misery, death, envy, hypocrisy, and vanity. But the still sad music of humanity is played with such a light touch on an instrument so sympathetically tuned that one can’t help but laugh. Wit and morality rarely consort these days; it’s good to see them happily, often hilariously reunited in the winner’s poetry.” Stephen Young, The Poetry Foundation

 “Tony Hoagland's imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, kinds of speech both lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild. His is the poetry of an adult capable of engaging the wonder and torments of childhood. In his volumes, he reminds us that a book of poems can offer the thrills of discovery: purposeful, swift, agile, ambitious and irreverent: fresh.”   American Academy of Arts and Letters citation 2002

* For more information on poet Tony Hoagland, please visit www.blueflowerarts.com/thoagland.html

RESIDENCY STATEMENT

I like to think about poems as if they belonged to some big taxonomical tree: Phylum, Family, Species, Subspecies -- I have always found this process of analysis and classification fun and profitable – in the sense that it shows me new possibilities and gives me the courage to reach in a new direction. So, in this residency I think it might be profitable for the members of the group to set about inventing for themselves a new species of poem, one which their former poetic self has been unable or unwilling or unqualified or un-courageous enough to attempt.  The prelude to this leap of craft would be group discussions of the biological diversity of poetry.

APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

Applicants should submit 10 poems, a resume and letter of intent.