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Editor’s note: This column was originally published by The New Bedford Light on Nov. 19, 2024. We are republishing it today as a tribute to Everett Hoagland, who passed away on Saturday, July 5.
Of the many local artists of the early 21st century that New Bedford can take pride in, none is more important than the poet Everett Hoagland.
His collection “The Ways: Poems of Affirmation, Remembrance, Reflection and Wonder” has been named a 2023 American Book Award winner.
Unlike some awards that seem largely marketing enterprises, the American Book Award is “a writers’ award given by other writers” and “there are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers,” according to the Before Columbus Foundation that administers it.
That’s a kind of recognition one might pay attention to.
Anyone making their way through “The Ways” will be humbled by Hoagland’s ability to sculpt words into meditative, actually spiritual edifices. This is a collection of verse wrapped around everyday thoughts on nature, family, aging and political history — everything that makes up an American life, especially an African American one. Its genius is that it is a transformative achievement on all those subjects.
Take “Through The Window,” from a series of poems grouped under the heading Perspective. Hoagland writes about peripherally glimpsing, through a window, the flutter of either a butterfly or small bird. He’s not sure which. He uses the experience to ponder the beauty of a natural world even though it is barely seen for a few seconds.
its beauty was in its being
free to fly at will. And we do not
have to capture, photo, cage,
collect or otherwise “own” such.
Hoagland moves so effortlessly in his poems from the mundane to the deep that encountering his wisdom almost makes you do a double take if you happen to be reading casually. “What?! What was that!” you’ll find yourself asking often as you walk through the lines in this book.
Since 1978, the American Book Award has aimed to be a recognition “without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background or genre.” Previous winners include Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, bell hooks and Edward Said. That is the caliber of national figure that Everett Hoagland is.
It might seem odd to think of a collection of poetry as spiritual ministry, but that is exactly the way “The Ways” reads.
Dan Harper, a Unitarian minister who knew Hoagland from when he worked at the poet’s church in New Bedford, writes, in the introduction to the book, of this quality. (Hoagland is a member of the New Bedford Unitarian church.)
“These poems are a kind of mindfulness practice that draws us into closer communion with the beauty and interdependence of all existence,” Harper says. “As you read these poems, let them heal your spirit.”
Many of the poems in “The Ways” were written during the pandemic and they have a tone of quiet contemplation, of almost removed but required observation.
“Storm Walls” was originally published in “This City and other Poems” in 1997. Hoagland brought it back in “The Ways” under a Remember the Future group of poems.
It starts off playing off the classic line in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”
Hoagland at first turns Frost’s opening conceit on its head by stating,
Something in us all, loves a wall, a fence,
partition, boundary, closed form, fixed space
borders, territory.
Then he quickly acknowledges:
But something else in all of us wants it
breached, busted, broken …
Next he plumbs the sometimes evil, fright, and desperation of our beings. He explores the irony of those who are made to, or otherwise come to, willingly live behind walls:
… Something deep in
our keep knows why some caged things return free-
will to their opened cages — or never leave.
Because I lived through the circumstances in New Bedford surrounding it, one of my favorite poems in “The Ways” is the one written for the local protest group BREATHE! in the wake of the killing of George Floyd: “For BREATHE.”
The demonstrators in the city, unexpectedly both Black and white, that summer of 2020 were often echoed by blaring horns at the city’s downtown intersections. The outpouring took place just months after COVID had shut down almost all physical interaction with those outside our homes. The demonstrations were nonetheless large and loud.
Hoagland plants the protesters’ chant of “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!!” in opposition to American history, calling out its hypocrisy.
The Declaration,
has variously been, yes,
a slave work song, yes
a “negro” spiritual, prison
labor song, strangely fruited
jazz tree song, Lift Every Voice,
yes, We Shall
Overcome, yes,
and righteous rage-freighted
rap …
Many of the poems in “The Ways,” however, are more quietly reflective, a requiem by this lion of a poet as he ages. Hoagland is 81 now and “As I Ebb Toward the End of Life” captures the wisdom of one looking back on life.
The poem explores the experience of a child holding a conch shell to his ear and being assured by “the grownups” that he would hear the sea. It then traces Hoagland telling his own children to listen to “the ocean’s roar” through the seashells.
Later, however, on the “east shore of the middle passage” the poet held “hand-sized cowries” to his ear,
and heard sand-ground groaned prayers,
curses, cries, screams, pleas of several
centuries’ many thousand-thousands gone
by slave ships into the bottomless blues
But then time seems to have mellowed him, and toward the end of his life when he places a part of a conch shell to his “good ear,” as he watches his grandsons frolic in the tide pools, he writes “I hear nothing but their healthy, joyful laughter.”
Everett Hoagland’s papers are collected at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
In the excerpt about his work, he is described as “one of the most significant African American poets of the late twentieth century and a significant contributor and supporter of the Black Arts Movement.” Writer Maya Angelou described Hoagland as “someone who cares and someone who comprehends.”
According to the introduction to the papers, “his work is included in ‘The Best American Poetry’ and ‘What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump.’” Among Hoagland’s many awards are The Gwendolyn Brooks Award and The Langston Hughes Society Award.
Everett Hoagland was the first poet laureate of New Bedford, from 1994 to 1998. He spent 30-plus years teaching poetry at UMass Dartmouth and has been a courageous voice for both the American and African American experience for decades.
His poems are astonishingly thoughtful, skillfully crafted homages to both the English language and America’s struggle with its original sin of racism.
“The Ways” is just one of Hoagland’s many collections of poetry. He is, without doubt, an important figure in both American and New Bedford artistic history.
Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org
