Poetic Reframing in Tony Hoagland's Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (analysis)

Tony Hoagland often takes an event and flips our understanding of it as he writes in "Big Grab":

We live in that time that he predicted.
Nothing means what it says,
and it says it all the time.

One of my favorites, "Confinement", presents a series of reframings. The first is a turbaned dictator replaced by a suited dictator, which talking heads claim as better. Presented here are not only the confinement of the dictator's people, but also our own culture's perspective.

Then we follow the speaker to a brother-in-law's funeral where the speaker is still attached to his wife--at least enough that he attends her brother's funeral and there's a wonderful line that shows the emotional complexity/confinement:

a man I would like to call
her future second ex-husband.

Why he says this isn't exactly clear. He has a "ridiculous urge" to "tell her again that it wasn't [his] fault." Does he still long for her then, confined by his longing to be with her again? Or is he wishing this other husband free of his confinement? Or the ex-wife to free from the confinement of husbands?

The poem ends with watching protesters TV:

I thought that I could understand

what they were protesting about,
what had made them so angry:

they wanted to be let out of the TV set;
they had been trapped in there, and they wanted out.

This isn't just a superficial reframing of people on TV as if they were literally trapped inside the TV, but also the confinement of one's own perspective as well as the speaker on the page who is also protesting.

Another favorite is "The Story of the Father" where a father gets home from the funeral of his son who committed suicide. The father burns the son's pictures to the sadness and anger of his wife and daughter. The reframing takes the poem into unexpected territory:

it is the old intelligence of pain
that I admire:

how it moves around inside him like smoke;

how it knows exactly what to do with human beings
to stay inside them forever.

"I Have News for You" and "Dialectical Materialism" both reframe poems to take intellectualism to absurd lengths. Respectively: "There are people who do not see a broken playground swing / as a symbol of ruined childhood" and "I was thinking about dialectical materialism at the supermarket."

However, the same kind of over-intellectualizing occurs in "At the Galleria" where commercialism leads to Americans loneliness. There might be a case to be made, but the poem has left the logic chasm too wide to leap (which isn't to say that some might be predisposed to agreeing and loving the leap, nonetheless).

Two rather moving reframings are "My Father's Vocabulary" and "Rhythm and Blues". The first follows some shifts in vocabulary over time ("I was conceived in the decade / between 'Far out' and 'Whatever' ") to talk about the startlingly effective demonstration of how our parents can go intellectually retrograde in time.

The set up in "Rhythm and Blues" is the strangeness of "sitting in [Rolf Jordahl's] backyard / after his funeral last year." They are dividing his belongings and the speaker gets a shirt to remind himself of his friend. Hoagland makes the unfortunate use of "touch myself" which I don't think is meant to be sexual. In fact, I think this final moment suggests that he switches from thinking of his friend's to his own mortality--however, I'm not sure the poem fully sets this up.

Two poems treat class and poverty, but only one was effective. "The Allegory of the Temp Agency" may have truth, but it stands at too far of a remove. The natural question is "well, what do you know of it?" "Sentimental Education", however, grounds the speaker immediately in his father's showing how to eat worms found under the bark of a tree. This takes off into the unexpected direction of the working world:

you were right! I ate a lot of stuff
far worse than bug."

And I was eaten, I was eaten,
I was picked up
and chewed
and swallowed

This may not be the most effective ending, but it works.

Note: this final section discusses poems that deal with"the birds and the bees" in rather generic, PG terms. 

In "Not Renouncing" Hoagland's speaker does not renounce his urge to imagine himself in procreative encounters:

I am not bragging
and I'm not renouncing....

I thought I had to change my life or give up,
but I didn't.

Lucky for Hoagland, he has passed away as he might be convicted for thought-crimes.

In "Romantic Moment" the obvious contrast is what animals and insects do to attract mates and engage in the procreative urge, which has little to no bearing on how humans go about it, yet it inspires them to do just that, but that's not the only reframing here although it's certainly the obvious one.

she remarks that in the relative context or tortoises and iguana, 

human males seem to be actually rather expressive.

This seems to suggest the female lover thinks men rather unexpressive, but maybe viewing them through the lens of other species, they are. The speaker's response is almost a non-sequitur and represents a mini-reframing all by itself:

And I say that female crocodiles really don't receive 

enough credit for their gentleness.

Of course, we'd see a crocodile as violent and the speaker asks us to see their violence as gentle. That this generates the response it does--her invitation to the bedroom--suggests she does find his gentle violence as a pique, perhaps a challenge and compliment.

But the final lines suggest the final reframing is not quite what either claimed: It is "personal, hidden, and human."