Algemene kennis

Geboortedatum: 1943-07-14
Geslacht: male
Nationaliteit: USA
Geboorteplaats: Newport, Rhode Island, USA
Woonplaatsen: Guadalajara, Mexico
Opleiding: Boston College
University of Arizona
Relaties: Mayo, Lucinda (wife)
Korte biografie: Michael Hogan was born in Newport, Rhode Island, of Irish parentage. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals including The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, The Harvard Review, and the American Poetry Review and in many anthologies: among them Sound and Sense (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and An Introduction to Literature (Little, Brown, 1987).
Hogan is recipient of numerous awards including: the Alden Dow Creativity Fellowship, the Colorado Humanities Fellowship, the Grace Stoddard Literary Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
Hogan has worked with Poets In The Schools programs in Arizona, California, Utah, Montana and New Mexico, and has been a consultant on various National Endowment for the Arts programs.
For the past ten years Hogan has headed the English Department at the American School of Guadalajara, and has served as faculty advisor to the school's internationally recognized literary magazine, Sin Fronteras.
As the critic Sam Hamill notes, "Hogan is knowledgeable, yet, he wears his literacy lightly. He does what a great poet should do-- he does his homework. He brings poetry and literature within until it becomes a part of himself as he becomes a part of the culture around him. His work is remarkable for its restraint, for its even tone (an indelible Hogan trait), and for its surface simplicity combined with bite and depth."
Hogan lives in Colonia Providencia, Guadalajara, with the textile artist/translator Lucinda Mayo.

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Besprekingen

SAVAGE CAPITALISM AND THE MYTH OF DEMOCRACY: Latin… door Michael Hogan

Deze bespreking is geschreven door de auteur.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R10RWILHO06YM0/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Gemarkeerd

lulaa | Nov 13, 2009 |

Imperfect Geographies door Michael F.X. Hogan

Deze bespreking is geschreven door de auteur.

Perfect Guide across Poetic Borders

This eighth of Hogan's poetry volumes encompasses his beautifully-crafted responses to places as far afield as Rhode Island and California, the American Midwest, Southwest and Mexico; traveling through time to offer persona poems such as "Hair Broker, 1861" and "In the Garden of Leon Trotsky." As Sam Hamill wrote in the American Poetry Review, Hogan undertakes each poem as if undertaking "the possibility of radical transformation", and gripping examples are here, in his own journies through emotional landscapes.

"I wanted you to escape the cold silences/ expect little from stiff affections.../But even in small doses/the mad Irish hurt you out of poetry,"

Hogan writes in an elegy titled "Dear One", poignantly interwoven with the music of the Mexican song "Querida". For readers who've traveled with Hogan's poetry before, taken joy in his compassion and calm skill as a poet-guide, part of the new delight of IMPERFECT GEOGRAPHIES will be his exquisite mapping of language and light "sin fronteras" (without barriers), as in his "On Translating a Mexican Poet".

"...Outside the hummingbird blinks/among blossoming jasmine/to leap a stucco wall/ sparkling (from broken glass)/in the always vertical sun/ below Cancer. Cerrada.//

North, ice is a silver ornament/intricate as quartz./In fair weather Windex gleam and slant rays/panicked wrens/to break their necks on. Closed.,"

one of poetry's loveliest answers ever, to "bilingual" buzz.

And throughout IMPERFECT GEOGRAPHIES, Hogan writes his ever-humble cartography for human frailty-become-strength. From "Winter Solstice":

"...so that when we sometimes feel/little or mean or ugly/a reservoir is there./And how the soul is no fiction:/there is a celestial chaperon/who leads us if we let her/ to enchanted places;/that the same breath/ which allows us to disfigure our lives/ can metabolize joy."… (meer)