I Have News for You
by Tony Hoagland
There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood
and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.
There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures unrecoverable
and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings
do not send their sinuous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others’ emotional lives
as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;
and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.
Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,
who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;
thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.
Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.
I have news for you—
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room
and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies
I was sitting in Costco’s concrete food court with my husband as he ate lunch.
“Look around,” I said, sighing dramatically. “Here’s the crowning glory of our consumer culture: obesity, obesity, and more obesity.”
He glared at me. “Can I please finish my hot dog in peace?”
Clearly I can relate to the over-thinkers poet Tony Hoagland playfully roasts in “ I Have News For You.” It’s not always a group I want to belong to, especially after reading this poem. We over-thinkers can be such silly creatures—blocking sidewalks as we ponder our existence, scouring life for symbols and irony the way other people look for bargains and good parking spaces. If only we could stop thinking so much and simply feel the breeze at the window, swat the fly in the motel room, and gaze at the lemon-yellow moon.
I really like this poem. I love how the title rolls right into the first line. The title, which is repeated towards the end, sounds faintly aggressive (just add “buddy” or “pal” to the end and you’ll hear it), but also humorous, a quality lacking in the over-thinkers of the poem. So despite of the fact that the poem’s speaker includes himself in this group of kill-joys (“there are people unlike me and you”), his drollery makes him a member of the other camp as well.*
The person addressed in the poem, and by extension the speaker of the poem, is the type of person who invents symbols, interprets behavior, cannibalizes friends and family for material, yearns for fame, and is tortured by failure. Sure sounds like a writer to me.
In other words, here again Hoagland (or the poem’s speaker) straddles the opposing camps of thinkers and feelers. Hoagland pokes fun at the very condition which allows him to poke fun. To write a poem about people who spend too much time making metaphors and analyzing behavior, he has to create metaphors and examine his own and his friend’s life. He uses elevated, academic language to sharpen the humor of his judgments, and the humor provides a lightness that keeps him from becoming that which he ridicules. (And he does have a delightful sense of humor which you can enjoy here.)
In the last section, the humor fades and the poem’s mood turns wistful. In creating an image that is purely physical, the speaker seems to yearn for release from the burdens of abstract thought:
I have news for you—
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room
and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies
Notice the lack of end punctuation. (Hoagland wants you to notice it.) The phrase drifts off, very like the breeze it describes, unweighted by periods or semi-colons or intense rumination. Or perhaps the phrase is a visual representation of the speaker’s voice trailing off, as he wanders back in his own head. (Oh dear. Have I fallen into a trap here? Am I “sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through the noisy straw”?)
Not for any particular reason, on a warm September weekend I taped “I Have News For You” to the deck of a beach house where I was staying for a girls’ weekend. I’d rather have posted a poem celebrating friendship, but I didn’t bring one with me. Nothing else I packed spoke to me. (Unfortunately I felt same way about my wardrobe choices.) The very urban Grace Paley didn’t belong in the salty air; old Walt Whitman’s free spirit belonged, but no one with me would have enjoyed reading him; and the haiku I brought about gray hairs on a pillow was a downer. Hoagland earned his space by default.
But I have succeeded in fashioning a good reason for this poem-elfing because, like those tortured souls in the poem, I can wrangle connective tissue out of sand. Some background first: the women at the beach house have been friends since high school, some even longer than that, and for twenty-one years have reunited annually.
Not one of us is quite the same as we were as teenagers—life has tossed some around more than others—and as the years go by, the differences between us are more marked. Some have eight children and others two; some have high-powered careers, others are at home; some are passionately religious and others more secular; some are Democrats, some Republican. These differences and those in marital status, income, and temperament might divide other friends, but they don’t matter to us. We all treasure our friendship and our time together. We hang. We sun ourselves. We talk and advise and gossip and remember wild times. There’s a lot of beach time, a lot of beer, some good greasy food, music and late-night dancing. And lots of laughing. For this weekend we leave behind worry over health issues and home life. We’re together, we’re in the sun, baby, and it feels warm and wonderful. No over-thinking allowed.
That weekend the girls played a lot of cornhole. For the uninitiated, cornhole is a mindless beanbag tossing game. Two teams compete to throw the bags into holes on plywood ramps. Hoagland might have observed that there were the people who played cornhole and others (okay, maybe just one person) who found it a communal evocation of scatological activity.
Someone asked me to play. “No thanks,” I said. “I don’t like games of accuracy.”
But I had second thoughts and tossed a few beanbags just to get over myself. And sat back down on a lawnchair with the sun on my back and a cold, cold beer
*The dichotomy Hoagland sets up between people who live in their heads and those who live in their bodies reminds me of the old story about former Redskin John Riggins sitting next to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at a black tie dinner. “Come on, Sandy baby, loosen up!” he said, shortly before passing out on the floor.
Lucky folks in the Washington area: Tony Hoagland is giving a reading November 12 at the Library of Congress. Look here for details.
