"Dickhead", Tony Hoagland

Bio: Tony Hoagland (1953) was born in North Carolina, dropped out of several different colleges, and lived in several communes. He currently teaches at the University of Houston in their creative writing department. Hoagland has received many awards for his work and has received many positive criticisms for journals such as Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, and Harvard Review.


Dickhead


To whomever taught me the word dickhead,
I owe a debt of thanks.
It gave me a way of being in the world of men
when I most needed one,

when I was pale and scrawny,
naked, goosefleshed
as a plucked chicken
in a supermarket cooler, a poor

forked thing stranded in the savage
universe of puberty, where wild
jockstraps flew across the steamy

skies of locker rooms,
and everybody fell down laughing
at jokes I didn't understand.

But dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a hammer, an object
you could pick up in your hand,
and swing,

saying dickhead this and dickhead that,
a song that meant the world
was yours enough at least
to band on like a garbage can,

and knowing it, and having that
beautiful ugliness always
cocked and loaded in my mind,
protected me and calmed me like a psalm.

Now I have myself become
a beautiful ugliness,
and my weakness is a fact
so well established that
it makes me calm,

and I am calm enough
to be grateful for the lives I
never have to live again;

but I remember all the bad old days
back in the world of men,
when everything was serious, mysterious, scary,
hairier and bigger than I was;

I recall when flesh
was what I hated, feared
and was excluded from:

Hardly knowing what I did,
or what would come of it,
I made a word my friend.



In this piece, the speaker could be one of two people: it could be the author, reminiscing about when he was in his teens and young adulthood (because by the time he wrote this poem, he was in his mid 50s); or it could be from the point of view of someone who is just getting out of his adolescence and hitting young adulthood. To the speaker, the word "dickhead" was the one thing that made him feel like he was included in what everyone else was doing; his choice of diction allows us to see how he was as he was going through puberty: "when I was pale and scrawny, naked, goosefleshed as a plucked chicken.... a poor forked thing stranded in the savage universe of puberty....everybody fell down laughing at jokes I didn't understand.....when everything was serious, mysterious, scary, hairier and bigger than I was" (lines 5-10, 13-14, 37-38). The speaker gives us a peek into his life as a teenager, describing that he was an awkward boy who was smaller and less known than his more popular peers, and did not know how to fit in to the world of "men" around him. He therefore found solace in the word "dickhead", as a way to not only defend himself from bullies who would otherwise pick him out of a crowd to bully him, but also as a way to fit in to that crowd, because most pubescent boys find it "cool" and "manly" to use vulgar insults. The speaker reflects on how he is grateful to have learned the term, regardless of whether or not he knew exactly what it meant or how it would affect those upon whom he would use the term.