Tony Hoagland: Structure – Housing and Transmission (July 2011)

Comparing a poem to an automotive engine, Tony Hoagland argues that poems stay alive on the page by shifting gears; at such moments, Hoagland suggests, a poem can be enlarged or intensified within a single sentence.  Through close readings of work by Jean Follain, Philip Larkin, Eavan Boland, Joseph Millar, and Anne Carson, Hoagland examines the organizational strategies that make such “gear-shifts” possible.