“The Wild Iris” by Louise Glück (1992)

No poet was more formidable in shaping Hoagland’s development as a poet than his mentor at the University of Iowa, Louise Glück. The influence, however, was one of evolution from rather than imitation of. Here, the poem, at once bleak and unsettling in excavating the pain of the poet’s emotional suffering over the contemplation of the absolute experience of death, reveals Glück’s existential take on the implications of mortality, a typical ignition experience for Confessional poets. For Hoagland, such Confessional poets represented a critical starting off place for his own evolution as a poet—for Hoagland fixating on the individual angst of the poet inevitably locked poetry into self-defeating pessimism. It would be Hoagland’s work to place such a sensitive, feeling, contemplative poet within the larger culture.

“A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg (1956)

Hoagland often read bits of this poem to his audiences at his readings, finding in Ginsberg’s rollicking, broad vision a complement to his own sense that a poet takes the measure of a culture. In addition, Hoagland studied the subtle ways that Ginsberg’s apparently reckless free verse in fact created the kind of sonic interplay typical of the jazz music Ginsberg’s generation engaged.