Tony Hoagland has written a very nice poem here. It is a great admittance of that guilt you feel when you offend someone close but aren’t ready to admit it to them and apologize.
Instead, he admits it to us. Right at the beginning he writes, “Maybe I overdid it/when I called my father an enemy of humanity.” With these lines he sets up the entire emotion conflict for the poem. we know what he did, who he did it to, and that he isn’t quite sure how he feels about what he did or, maybe, even why he did it.
Then, the next stanza gives us a great deal of information is just a few good lines. we learn that they live miles away from each other, that the speaker has been through therapy when he was younger, and that this conversation just took place on the phone. each of these points puts added distance between the speaker and his father.
The next two stanza are my favorite. he explains that there are two parts to his father. the part he is angry at/the part he also recognizes in himself, is described as some disembodied spirit that crushes and destroys. Hoagland gives us tons of action. The second part, the part which he feels sorry for treating the way he has, is described is simple descriptive terms: “standing...in Wyoming/with bad knees and white hair...”
The way Hoagland chose to describe each part of his father shows how he sees him. As a human who can’t always control what consequences his actions have, nor can he control what other project on to him. I think that Hoagland know that the second father is much closer to the real thing, and is therefore described in completely concrete terms.
I would give anything to be able to develop relationships btw characters that well.
-wes edmond
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