50 Book Challenge #9: Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft by Tony Hoagland.
I'll just start off by saying that I first encountered Hoagland by reading his book of poetry, What Narcissism Means to Me in my writer's workshop last Fall. I really enjoyed his poetry. There is a lot of fun and irreverence in tone in his work, which I dig.
You get a good smattering of that in here too, but usually just in essay titling. There's still some of his poetic tone present, but in many places it's subsumed by the typical serious tone of the literary critic (which makes sense when realizing these essays all had been previously published in various scholarly journals).
As for content, he does really well in discussing some matters of style, metaphor, poetic obsession, etc. but I don't feel, walking away from it, that as a student of the craft I really found it at all instructive.
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