Real Sofistikashun

“Meanness, the very thing that is unforgivable in human social life, in poetry is thrilling and valuable. Why? Because the willingness to be offensive sets free the ruthless observer in all of us, the spiteful perceptive angel who sees and tells, unimpeded by nicety or second thoughts. There is truth-telling and more in meanness.”
—from “Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People”

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 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, which may be as pleasurable a book as it is useful.