Tony Hoagland: Altitudes and Rhetoric (January 1997)

“Let us say,” Tony Hoagland proposes, “poems come from different parts of the body.” Outlining a set of poetic chakras, Hoagland suggests that diction—which he argues comes from personality and mind—and image—which he argues comes from the unconscious—combine to produce that elusive aspect of a poem, its rhetoric; he looks at poems by Olds, Stern, Kinnell, Hayden, Stevens, Ruefle, Ashbery, Hall and Glück for examples of how rhetoric can achieve poetic “altitude” with its expansive view.