America by Tony Hoagland

America

by Tony Hoagland

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud   

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes   

Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,   

He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them   

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds   

Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,   

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,   

It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills   

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were   

Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad   

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

I could easily post poems titled "America" for the entire month but I won't. This one, however, is such a favorite of mine that I thought I would start the month off with it. It also references Benjamin Franklin, a Founding Father and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, so it seems fitting for the first poem of July.

I have been heavily into couplets of late, so visually this poem is attractive to me. The lack of end punctuation creates a speed I also enjoy; even with fairly long lines this poem moves along at a great clip.

As someone who has been a teacher, the first 6 stanzas speak to me. That kid who you aren't sure about--is s/he really getting what the class is about, or is s/he just telling you what they think you want to hear? It doesn't happen often--most students are not that duplicitous and you know who is enjoying the class or hating you--but when it does, it is a bit unnerving.

Then this line:

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night

Thankfully, the speed of the line gets us to the dream admission quickly! And we can all relate to a very odd dream (whether this one is actual or made-up does not matter--poetry is not non-fiction!), and a father bleeding $100 bills is odd. A little more humor--the speaker knows it was a dream because,

my dad/Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

This combination of the student and the dream father leads the speaker to something else, and he shares his own trepidations with us. And there's a Marx quotation, which is not always a good thing, but here it is very good and quite relevant to the poem and to life.

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

Marx then leads the speaker to question Marx's reaction to our current society, at least as far as capitalism, our consumer lives, their connection to mass media, and the noise they all create which allows us to tune out everything else. The poem loses any humorous perspective as we move along, tying all of the parts together.

The poet also changes from a first-person to the seciond: you. And what are we, the readers, doing? First, this fantastic image:

watch rivers of bright merchandise run past

and this dream-like description continues. We are on a pleasure boat, enjoying our buy-it-all lives while in the water, others are drowning. As if this were not enough to end the poem--and I firmly believe it is--we get the actual ending, the final, devastating couplet:

And yet it seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

The speaker has pulled all of these things together and while indicting himself, also points the finger at us. Unless you are one who is drowning, you are on that boat, listening to music, playing on your phone, ordering things online.

The poem also ends with a question mark, one of only two pieces of end punctuation; the other is at the end of the Marx quotation. It truly stops us--we are being blamed and then forced to stop and think about it.

In the poem, Hoagland wonders what Marx would make of our over-consumption of media and things. I also wonder about Franklin, who certainly enjoyed material things. However, he also valued intellect and living an ethical life. I cannot speak for Marx, but I am quite sure Franklin would have loved this poem, and not just because he is in it.

Read some Franklin quotes at The Franklin Institute.

Read some more Karl Marx quotations on Wikiquote.

This poem appeared in Hoagland's 2003 book, What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press).