This City and Other Poems - Softcover

Hoagland, Everett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932027423 ISBN 13: 9780932027429

Publisher: Spinner Pubns Inc, 1997

Synopsis

Book by Hoagland, Everett

About this title

About the Author

Everett Hoagland was born and raised in Philadelphia, PA. In 1973 he joined the English Department of the University of Massachusetts in North Dartmouth, MA (formerly Southeastern Massachusetts University), Professor Hoagland has since then taught poetry writing and the literatures of the African Diaspora.

Hoagland has won numerous honors and awards, including The Gwendolyn Brooks Fiction Award. He has twice been a winner in the statewide annual poetry competition for Massachusetts Artist Fellowships. In 1994 the Mayor of New Bedford officially designated Hoagland Poet Laureate of that city.

Over the years Hoagland's poetry has been published in many prominent periodicals: THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, BLACK WORLD, CALIBAN, COMMUNICATIONS EDUCATION, ESSENCE, THE IOWA REVIEW, THE JOURNAL OF BLACK POETRY, FIRST WORLD, THE MASSACHUSEETS REVIEW, THE PROGRESSIVE and WORLD: The Journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Anthologies containing Hoagland's work include: "Patterns," "The New Black Poetry," "The Black Poets," "New Black Voices," "Significance: The Struggle We Share," "Giant Talk," "The Jazz Poetry Anthology," and Clarence Major's anthology "The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African American Poetry."

Since 1984 the poet has been a contributing editor for "The American Poetry Review."

Everett Hoagland has read his work to audiences all over the United States, at colleges and universities, political rallies, churches, museums, public high schools, and at community clubs and organizations.

Critical commentary about his work (through 1985) can be found in "The Oxford Companion to African American Literature," Oxford University Press, 1997.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From the poem This City

At the Hurricane Barrier

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall..."
- Robert Frost, The Mending Wall

Something in us all loves a wall, a fence
partition, boundary, closed form, fixed space,
borders, territory. Something in each and all
of us gives a dam majesty, meaning, power.
Something within every western one likes to view
The Acushnet, Nile and unspent, dusky
Amazon pent-up and aching.

But something else in all of us wants it
breached, busted, broke. Something in us all
wants clothes off, ruled and roles lifted, class down,
hookeyed, races mixed, religion rent asunder
and loves an outlaw. Something in there
where its dark first feels better about it-
self when it sees others without, down and
dirty, and then ashamed of or for him or her,
itself and all of us. Something deep in
our keep knows why some cages things return free-
will to their opened cages - or never leave.
Something in us all fears a storm surge, love

A wall and keep it up and needs caging.
Other things inside us build battlements, erect
Steep castles, locked temples, palatial places

To secure protection from the rhythm
Of the river's rising
Tides of change
Without,
With-
In.

Edition details

• Publisher: Spinner Pubns Inc
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0932027423
• ISBN 13: 9780932027429
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 67