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Book Title

Real Sofistikashun

Subtitle
Essays on Poetry and Craft
Author 1
Tony Hoagland
Body
Tony Hoagland recently won 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, the only major award that honors a poet's excellence in teaching as well as writing. Real Sofistikashun, from the title onward, uses Hoagland's signature and complementary abilities to entertain and to instruct while he examines and exposes how poems behave and how they are made.

In these taut, illuminating essays, Hoagland explores aspects of poetic craft--metaphor, tone, rhetorical and compositional strategies--with the vigorous, conversational style less of the scholar than of the serious enthusiast and practitioner. Poets such as Louise Gluck, Robert Hass, Larry Levis, William Matthews, and Robert Pinsky are studied for their examples, and essays on fragmentation and the uses of experimental methods describe innovative modes in the contemporary period style. Throughout, Hoagland points out the winning complexities of the poetic art, which connects us with verve and economy to experience--to our internal understanding, to the templates of human nature, and to the facts of the world at large.

Hoagland is the rare poet who is as readable and enjoyable in critical prose as he is in poetry. Real Sofistikashun is an exciting, humorous, and provocative collection of essays, as pleasurable a book as it is useful.

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List Price
$17.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-455-8
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Pages
Pages
224
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
The anticipated first collection of essays by celebrated poet Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me

About the Author

Tony  Hoagland
Credit: Elizabeth Jacobson
Tony Hoagland was the author of seven collections of poetry, including Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. He was also the author of two collections of essays, Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays and Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft. He received the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He taught for many years at the University of Houston. Hoagland died in October 2018.
 
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Praise

  • “Generous, humane, and inoffensively learned.”—American Book Review
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