Reprise: When you’re in a bad mood you should write."
"Ernest Hemingway, 1961," a poem by Michael Hogan
Originally published on How to Grow a Poem October 7, 2023.
Michael Hogan found some of the images on the street. In the gutter, no less: ". . . brown cigarette butts,/orange peels, used condoms;” “. . . stale beer and bad whiskey;” “. . . a weed-choked yard.” Even “. . . this dazzling pellet rain.”
The images matched his mood, after all, some 45 or so years ago when he wrote “Ernest Hemingway, 1961,” a persona poem set on the day of Hemingway’s suicide.
At the time, Hogan had completed his MFA from the prestigious poetry program at the University of Arizona and was having some success in his career as a poet—racking up impressive publication credits and finding ”a couple of gigs that paid well” here and there. But he also faced every writer’s uncertainty about when the next opportunities would come along, and how to manage the financial roller coaster.
In the years since, he has had remarkable and successful careers as both a poet and a historian (see his bio below), but things weren’t so clear back then. His personal life was in disarray. He was recently divorced, drinking too much, depressed. And it was Tucson’s rainy season, when monsoon-like downpours (“dazzling pellet rain”) did little to lift his spirits.
But he also remembered some important advice from a mentor, and that did clear the way for a burst of creativity.
"When you’re in a bad mood you should write, and it doesn’t matter what you write.”
“He said, when you’re in a bad mood you should write, and it doesn’t matter what you write,” Hogan says now.
With that advice in mind, Hogan went about collecting “all those bits” and fragmentary images, although he was still not sure how the pieces might come together to make a poem. The answer, he decided, was “to escape into a persona poem,” with the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist as an apt subject.
“I put my personal problems on him,” Hogan said. “They were the same problems. . . . I ended up ‘killing’ Hemingway instead of myself.”
Writing the poem brought another benefit, too, and one that further bore out his mentor’s advice.
“After two hours of fussing with the poem, I was no longer depressed,” Hogan said.
But neither was the poem that emerged a purely therapeutic exercise. “Ernest Hemingway, 1961” is a compelling and fully realized poem that offers readers a convincing (if necessarily speculative) look into the mind of a writer who has reached the end of his powers, “now hunter and animal.”
Some would say that the poem also captures much of Hemingway’s distinctive and ever-influential diction (“We make our own rules and lose by them”).
Well, I would say that, at any rate, although Hogan says now that, if that’s the case, it wasn’t intentional, and that at least one editor would argue the point with me.
What do you think? Here is the poem.
Ernest Hemingway, 1961 When the sun comes early through Eastern windows and a single horsefly buzzsaws the air it is then I rise from bed my dreams of amputation, of teeth lost, cloaked in the amnesia of another day overwhelmed with trivia. We make our own rules and lose by them. This morning after a breakfast of coffee and ice water I walk to the corner feeling my liver dissolve in a cacophony of stale beer and bad whiskey. June drips a melody sweet as rose water and the town wakes slowly. These things are substance, Mary, not prelude. Only what moves us has meaning. The rest is lost in a weed-choked yard or the gutter with brown cigarette butts, orange peels, used condoms. When words fail, the hammer drops. Living can never be its own excuse. I have carried this gun in dreams: quiet ones in which a wounded animal is given peace by the hunter’s grace. Now hunter and animal, I find myself precipitating an act gentle as June rain, and in this dazzling pellet rain I’ll sing the best of all men’s songs. Take care, Mary, of the cats. Smile at those who call me coward. These last weeks so free of conflict are quit also of energy and force. I am become abstract as a moveable feast, my life arbitrary, capricious as a poem of Pound’s. Only the gun gives me substance this trigger my clearest, most careful line. Copyright by Michael Hogan 1978, 1988 Reprinted from Making Our Own Rules (Greenfield Review Press, 1989)
Listen here to Michael Hogan reading his poem, "Ernest Hemingway, 1961."
Michael Hogan (born 1943 in Newport, Rhode Island) is an American author of twenty-eight books, including two collections of short stories, eight books of poetry, selected essays on teaching in Latin America, two novels, the critically acclaimed Abraham Lincoln and Mexico, and the best-selling Irish Soldiers of Mexico, a history of the Irish battalion in Mexico which formed the basis for an MGM movie starring Tom Berenger. He received his B.A. and MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona and holds a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from the University of Guadalajara and the Institute of Advanced Studies.
Dr. Hogan was the recipient of a PEN Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Benjamin Franklin Award and the gold medal of the Mexican Geographical Society. His work has appeared in many journals such as The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, Z-Magazine, Political Affairs and the Monthly Review.
Besides being a writer, poet and historian, Dr. Hogan is also the former director of Latin American initiatives for the College Board, and a special consultant to the U.S. Department of State's Office of Overseas Schools. Hogan has worked as a Humanities Department Head for fourteen years in American schools abroad and as a professor of international relations at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. He has given workshops and presentations at conferences in the United States, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. He currently lives in Guadalajara, Mexico with the textile artist Lucinda Mayo, and their dog, Molly Malone.
Writing for The American Poetry Review, Sam Hamill noted: "Hogan's poems are virtually free of the ego and fake emotion, the public posturing and self-regard that infect so much recent poetry. For Hogan, to undertake the poem is to undertake the possibility of radical transformation. The humility and compassion of his poems warm me when others leave me chilled to the bone. He rewards the reader with intelligence and warmth and a wide sweep of understanding.”
You can find Michael Hogan’s most recent book of poetry, In the Time of the Jacarandas, here.
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