Lawrence

By Tony Hoagland

On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,



a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder



to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name



the way pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
“O Elephant,” they say,
“you are not so big and brave today!”



It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven’t earned,
and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people



don’t defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,



I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say, “I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,”
or, “You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life



as to deserve to lift
just one of D. H. Lawrence’s urine samples
to your arid psychobiographic
theory-tainted lips.”



Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven’t come that far



in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more



than fight, and fuck, and crow,
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.


Comments : I loved the loyal, spirited, sarcastic way Hoagland defends Lawrence in this poem and rips apart his critics – ‘those individuals, whose relationship to literature, is approximately that of a tree shredder to stands of old growth forest’ – now that’s cutting opponents down to size ! – Zen

This poem, incidentally, appeared in the literary journal ‘Ploughshares’ during ’97-’98 (http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleID=4357)

p.s. One of Tony Hoagland’s books of poems is called Donkey Gospel– just the title makes me want to run out and buy it.

About the poet :
Tony Hoagland’s first book, Sweet Ruin, won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and the Zacharis Award from Ploughshares at Emerson College. Donkey Gospel was the recipient of the 1997 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets.

He also won the 2005 Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, for humor in American poetry. His books of poems include What Narcissism Means to Me and Hard Rain, and he’s also the author of Real Sofitikashun, a book of essays on craft (2006).