Turn Up the Ocean

Tony Hoagland

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781780376318
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780376325
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

America's Tony Hoagland (1953-2018) was known for provocative poems which interrogate human nature and contemporary culture with an intimate and wild urgency, located somewhere between outrage, stand-up comedy, and grief. The poems in his final collection Turn Up the Ocean examine with an unflinching eye and mordant humour the reality of living and dying in a time and culture that conspire to erase our inner lives. Hoagland's signature wit and unparalleled observations take in long-standing injustices, the atrocities of American empire and consumerism, and our continuing habit of looking away. In these poems, perseverance depends on a gymnastics of scepticism and comedy, a dogged quest for authentic connection, and the consolations of the natural world. Turn Up the Ocean is a remarkable and moving collection, a fitting testament to Hoagland's devotion to the capaciousness and art of poetry. Tony Hoagland's poems poke and provoke at the same time as they entertain and delight. He was American poetry's hilarious 'high priest of irony', a wisecracker and a risk-taker whose disarming humour, self-scathing and tenderness are all fuelled by an aggressive moral intelligence. He pushed the poem not just to its limits but over the edge.

28

“On a Scale of 1–10,” Said the Nurse, “How Would You Rate Your Pain Today?”

If 1 is the name of your best friend from sixth grade,

which, for no reason, you remember right now,

standing in your socks on the cold tile of the examination room

—and 2 is how you will find your car in the parking lot later

and notice how dirty it has become—the back seat littered

with plastic wrappers and sales receipts—

and how it seems like a statement of how you have lived your life.

If 4 is the ache you feel in your left jaw

from clenching your teeth for the last ten years,

much in the manner of your father,

and 5 is what you felt at midnight last week

when you saw the flashing red lights of a police car

rolled up on your next-door neighbor’s lawn,

splashing the whole street the sickening

color of strawberry jello

as their son was handcuffed, locked in the back, and driven away.

If 6 is the quiet discomfort you feel about being

a citizen of the richest country on earth

—which seems to be dragging you along for the ride,

a ride to which you do not seem to be objecting

as you enter the all-natural grocery store.

If 8 is the absence of a parent or brother or child

whom you might call at this moment

to explain where you are.29

If 9 is your loss of belief in sense-making itself

combined with the slight nausea you get

when you try to arrange things in ascending order,

then how do you measure that?

What is its numerical value?

30

Bandage

Down in the pocket of this old green pair of pants

I find a dirty, wadded-up bandage

with a rusty coin-size stain in the cotton pad,

hidden where I shoved it during one of those days

when I was going to the clinic every few weeks

getting a bag of steroids and gemcitabine

pumped through the tip of a needle—

like a bombing mission aimed at a town

in a foreign country—

call it Kidneystan or West Pancreas—

I haven’t worn these pants since, I guess,

having lost enough weight that they no longer fit

and it’s strange to find this little memoir

of the harrowing winter

so pure in its intensity

—driving downtown in the rainy dawn,

everything crumbling, nothing fixed or solid anymore—

half breaking down

while singing along to the radio.

It wasn’t hard to see the weeping itself

as a kind of mercy,

as it is mercy now to hold up this scrap

between my forefinger and thumb,

and to look at the spot of rusty old blood31

on the rubberized cloth

like a little sunset, reddish and smudg...

Table of contents

• Description
• Title Page
• Contents
• Bible All Out of Order
• Gorgon
• Immersion
• Disclosure Agreement
• Botany
• Why I Like the Hospital
• Squad Car Light
• Turn Up the Ocean
• The Reason He Brought His Gun to School: A Blues
• Butter
• Diagnosis
• Nature Is Strong
• Illness and Literature
• “On a Scale of 1–10,” Said the Nurse, “How Would You Rate Your Pain Today?”
• Bandage
• American Story
• Ode to the West Wind
• How the Old Poetry Happened
• I Don’t Ask What You’re Thinking
• Causes of Death
• Virginia Woolf
• Four Beginnings for an Apocalyptic Novel of Manners
• The Power of Traffic
• Weather of Pain
• Autumn
• On Why I Must Decline to Receive the Prayers You Say You Are Constantly Sending
• Mistaken Identity Librarian Syndrome
• Landscape without Jason
• Walk
• Success
• Dante’s Bar and Grill
• King of the Night
• Siberia
• Economica
• The Decline of the Roman Empire
• Cuisine
• The Interfaith Chapel Is in the South Terminal
• Homework
• Reading While Sick in the Middle of the Night
• Harbor
• Incompletion
• Sunday at the Mall
• Among the Intellectuals
• In the Beautiful Rain
• Peaceful Transition
• Afterword by Kathleen Lee
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Tony Hoagland
• Copyright