Class Materials, Tony Hoagland Poetry Workshop, 2001
In which I wait for something interesting to happen to me
For a brief period in my twenties I thought I might become a poet. I’d taken a couple poetry workshops in college, and a few years after graduation, in D.C., I found myself writing poems again. I lived in a small basement apartment in Kalorama, and in the evenings, after work, I’d take long, looping walks around the neighborhood, looking at the houses of rich people and trying out lines in my head. I didn’t have a cellphone, and I never got into the habit of carrying a notebook, so if I stumbled upon a couple good lines I’d have to repeat them as I walked and hope they’d still be there when I got home.
My college friends lived in the Virginia suburbs, and my job was in Maryland, but I’d been hard-headed about finding a place downtown. I had romantic notions of city life: going to lots of shows and art events and dinner parties, meeting people who did cool, interesting things with their free time, the way I wanted to do cool, interesting things with my free time. But on weekends I usually took the Metro across the river to Arlington, where I’d meet up with those college friends at Whitlows or Clarendon Ballroom or Car Pool, bars that felt to me like frat parties for grownups. At my job, in a corporate office park across from a mall, I wore khakis and button-downs and wrote articles about Medicare billing and coding.
It was during this period that I took a poetry class at George Washington University with Tony Hoagland. He was there on a fellowship that required him to teach a community-based workshop. It was free, but you had to apply. One evening a week in the front room of a townhouse that doubled as his residence, workshopping each others’ poems and reading whatever published pieces Tony had photocopied for us.
I probably spent more time studying Tony than the poems, looking for clues about what it meant to be a “real” writer. I could never pin down his age, and I was surprised to learn, when he died of cancer in 2018, that he was only a couple years younger than my father. He had thinning hair that stuck out from his head at odd, eccentric angles, and a boyish smile that could turn mischievous, as if some private joke had occurred to him and he couldn’t decide whether it was appropriate to share it out loud. Before the fellowship, he’d bounced around between visiting writer gigs, which I understand now must have been an anxious, underpaid existence, though at the time it struck me as enviably bohemian.
At work, the highlight of most days was lunch at the mall food court, where I could read quietly for an hour. Sometimes I’d join coworkers for happy hour at Chili’s or On the Border, but I tended to beg off early, pretending at plans elsewhere. Back in my neighborhood I’d go for a long walk and then drink a couple Negro Modelos in bed, either reading a book or watching whatever sitcom reruns I could pick up through rabbit ears.
I liked my college friends, and I had fun with them on those Arlington nights. But I worried my life was falling into a boring narrative trajectory: college, then a few years partying on the weekends and suffering through a soulless job, before leveling up to management, getting married, buying a house several Metro stops from the city. Your friends would come over for the occasional barbecue, where you’d all complain about how busy you were, and the expense of your kids’ travel sports leagues, and after a couple beers you’d start reminiscing about how much fun you used to have, before life got in the way.
I don’t remember much about the poems I was writing back then. I don’t remember much about my classmates, either, which is a shame, but they were all older than I was, and I think I dismissed them as hobbyists. As if I had anything to be snobby about! In my little apartment I had a Gateway computer and floppy discs filled with half-finished poems and stories. A couple years before, I’d applied to a few MFA programs in fiction and I’d been rejected by all of them. That rejection had something to do with my turn toward poetry. I was ambitious, more than I ever let on to anyone, but my ambition had a directionless quality to it. If some magical genie had told me I could find success as a playwright, or an oil painter, or by starting my own music blog, I probably would have tried it.
I’m reminded of the time my high school Latin teacher, Mr. Holly, broke down for us the classical roots of the word “sophomore.” Sophos, he explained, meant wise or clever, while moros meant foolish. Those might seem at odds, but they added up to a particular phase in one’s education. You’d learned some things, enough to feel smart, and a bit full of yourself, but not enough to understand how much you didn’t know. “No offense to the actual sophomores among us,” Mr. Holly said, “but one hopes it’s a phase you don’t linger in too long.”
Looking back, my day job wasn’t all that bad. I got paid to write, even if I didn’t care about the subject matter. And I liked my editor, a middle-aged guy named Vince who’d spent his twenties and thirties working for progressive media outlets, including The Afro-American in D.C. and KPFA in Berkeley. He’d bring me jazz CDs to listen to, and school me on D.C. history, and if he saw me reading a book of poems he’d ask about the author. His wife worked in local politics, and they had a young son, which was why he’d taken the job: a solid paycheck; predictable hours. In hindsight I can see that Vince was another model for how to live, but at that age I wasn’t ready to think about the necessary compromises of adulthood.
I still have the poems Tony handed out in class. I still have the personalized reading list he gave me, along with a typed note laying out my strengths and weaknesses. In the former category he included “a natural generativeness” and “ability to associate.” Though this was counterbalanced by “a shortage of selective instinct,” which came, he supposed, from “a reluctance to impose a direction/point of view.”
Maybe all writing advice, in your twenties, feels like life advice.
It’s funny, when I was living inside that version of my life, it felt a bit like a way station, a liminal space: biding my time until something interesting happened to me. But now, looking back, I have a fondness for those years. Really what I was learning, though I didn’t realize it until much later, was how to be alone. On Saturdays I’d walk to the Hirshorn or the National Gallery of Art to look at some favorite paintings. If there was a weeknight show at the 9:30 Club or the Black Cat, and my friends weren’t interested, I’d go by myself, and if I got bored I’d leave and go home. I learned how to eat at restaurants alone, and how to be comfortable sitting in movie theaters alone. Even those evening walks, making up poetry in my head, the point wasn’t the poems so much as the act of writing them, learning to listen to the things that bubbled up inside that stillness.