Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Tony Hoagland won the Poetry Foundation's 2005 Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution to humor in American poetry. Humor and poetry? Now that's a winning combo. (Source.)
In his book Donkey Gospel, the opening lines of the poem before "Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet" are, "I thought I saw my mother / in the lesbian bar, / with a salt gray crew cut, a nose stud / and a tattoo of a parrot on her arm." The poem is called "Mistaken Identity" and we think those lines are a pretty good example of how skilled Hoagland is at drawing his reader in, and a good illustration of why he won that award we just mentioned. (Source.)
In case you're feeling studious, we thought we'd tell you that Tony Hoagland teaches at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. program. (Source.)