“Poof”: Now You See You, Now He Don’t

I'd like to consider here how Tony Hoagland’s poem, “The Change”, is written in second person. The poem is, in fact, a poem of address.

The “you” seems to be a companion, a buddy. And on first meeting, this companion is subsumed into the identity of the speaker:

We were just walking past the lounge
and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won

At first instance, the “you” implied in this first person plural could be specifically (and is likely) just the speaker’s companion, but there is some room to imagine “you” the reader. It may even mean “you” America. Perhaps the poem defines the “you” here:

and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
I couldn't help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe

So those of us who, in effect, will take the side of the black tennis player in the poem, might identify with the “you”. Whoever the "you" is, it is not the "I", that is, the one who wants "the white girl to come out on top."

I’ll return to some reflection on the implications of the identity of the “you” later, but I want to point out how peculiar this passage is to me—that a speaker should have to remind the “you” what they did together and of what they saw, that the match was between a white player and a black player. The speaker (for some reason) has to remind the companion of all of this. Why doesn’t the “you” remember what was on TV? This is not just a reminder but an imposition of memory : “This is what you don’t remember; this is what we did.”

Even more strange is that the speaker should tell his companion: “you loved her complicated hair”, as if to say, "This is what you don’t remember; this is what we did; and this what you love.” Should we take the speaker’s word for it? (Let’s not forget that the “you, throughout the poem, is speechless. How does the you feel about being told what he/she loves?) At what point does this become an egregious exercise of power?

Then the “you” reappears in a digression. The poem shifts from the speaker's narrative description to a discursive mode:

There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank

While the poem, by now, has clearly established that it is an address, for argument’s sake, let’s say the “you” in this passage momentarily becomes something else, a general rhetorical “you”, a “you” removed or expanded from the companion to include something collective. The question is Why? Why deflect and/or abstract? Why shouldn’t history pass the speaker with the same proximity as it does a nation, or even just his companion? Is this another confession of ignorance by the speaker, that he simply doesn’t have the same relationship to history as “you”, whether "you companion" or "you collective/abstract" or "you (approximately) specifically who love her complicated hair"? If so, what’s the speaker's human responsibility to establish a proximity and distance to history? Why doesn’t he get down into it?

If the speaker means to include himself in this rhetorical, collective “you”, if he meant to implicate himself, why couldn’t the speaker just do so: “There are moments when history/passes me so close…” he might say. Why, instead, is history distanced, pushed away? Why does the subject of the poem suddenly switch from “I” to “you” at this moment in the text? What happens here to the first person, the agent of thought (but, ostensibly, not of action; that is the tennis players’ agency—action; they are bodies; they are objects and their action is not meant to do much; it is meant to be watched), what happens to the speaker, the I, when this grand proclamation about history is being made? Who is the speaker to make the proclamation for his companion or anyone else? Just then, where do his eyes go?

By the end of the poem, some fusion has happened, though, as readers, we’re not witness to it. The “you” and “I” become, again, a “We”.

Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,

and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.

If there is an offense to this poem (and there are several), it’s that we—as readers and as a culture—are corralled into the speaker’s racist epiphany. It is a union—but it’s a union made without consent. (I've seen on a number of blogs some comments who thank Tony Hoagland, for we wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't for him; and another commenter who claimed that black people don't know what racist white people say when they feel their guard is down. It's hilarious and ironic that white people think that people of color don't know the offenses made against them in private, that to say those offenses publicly should be news to us. And as far as I know, we talk about race all the time. White people do too, even when they don't think they are.)

In the end, the “we’ is ambiguous and coercive. Is it the speaker and his companion (and is his companion me? or you? or all of us? is it white people who admire complicated hair)? Who, by god, is the speaker? Is he pure thought, for his body hardly appears in the poem. His companion’s hand appears in the poem (it’s how he touches history’s flank). Their eyes, the speaker’s and his companion’s, appear early on (“Right before our eyes “), but only as joined vision—“our eyes”.

And if the speaker seems to imply what’s at stake in this poem by placing before us, in language, exactly what’s at stake, then it’s clear, the speaker’s body is somewhere outside the poem (his eyes, his tools for sight, safely abstracted into some first person plural). For all that is exalted, ironized, and placed in jeopardy here, for all that is risked in this poem, it is not the body of the speaker. Its location, we might presume, is in safety, comfort, out of range or risk of being transformed or ever changed.