Perhaps you have heard of him.
Perhaps you have seen him on
campus. You may have even had
him as a professor. But did you
know that Allen Hoey is a published
author and poet? If you
were not aware, check out his new
offering “Once Upon a Time at
Blanche’s.”
Hoey’s career as a published
poet began in 1986 with his first
poetry collection, “A Cold Fire in
the House of Being,” which was
selected by Galway Kinnell for
the 1985 Camden Poetry Prize.
This was followed by four more
collections, one of which was
2008’s “Country Music,” which
gained him even greater recognition
when it was nominated for a
Pulitzer Prize.
Hoey’s latest collection was
published just this spring, and
continues the colloquial theme
carried over from “Country
Music.”
“Once Upon a Time at
Blanche’s” is a collection of
poems set in the mid 1970s in a
northern New York state dive bar
named Blanche’s. In the poems,
Hoey populates the bar with
roughnecks discussing local matters,
at times in a rather crude
manner.
As Hoey describes: “Most of
the poems are dialogue, and the
characters have ‘colorful’ ways of
speaking. The book would get an
R rating for language because I’ve
tried to present men talking in the
way that men talk to each other
when there aren’t any women
around.”
The topics discussed by the customers
at Blanche’s are of local
and national importance, as the
politics of the day have influenced
their small working-class world.
The politics of the mid-1970s are
meant to hold truth and meaning
for our national politics today.
As Hoey puts it, “It’s… interesting
to note how the concerns of
those days reflect the problems we
have today. In 1974, Richard
Nixon resigned as president because
of his violations of the Constitution.
While I was writing the
poems, we had a president who
was, if anything, violating the
Constitution with even greater
malice; one of the poems in the
collection, ‘Politics,’while speaking
directly about Nixon, should
evoke a sense of W.”
The bar is based upon a real bar,
and the characters are based upon
real types of characters one would
encounter in such a place. According
to Hoey, “The most ‘real’
character in [the] book is the
young narrator, an undergrad student
who’s strayed into this millworker’s
and working-man’s bar.”
Given that Hoey attended college
in northern New York as an
undergraduate, it should be no
surprise that this narrator is based
upon himself: “He’s sharper than I
was at that age, but he’s derived
from me.”
The book draws on his experience
as a young man in college,
but the genesis of “Once Upon a
Time at Blanche’s” begins almost
as far back
Several decades ago, Hoey
wrote several poems taking place
there and in the local dialect of
northern New York.Years later the
poems were lost, but while writing
“Country Music,” he returned
to the subject of those earlier
poems, writing a poem that took
place in Blanche’s Bar & Grill.
“This got me started on more
poems set in the bar, stories told
by the various patrons. As I continued,
I found myself remembering
the earlier North Country
poems, and, though those poems
no longer exist… I remembered a
little bit about some of them and
completely recreated them as bar
stories.”
“Once Upon a Time At
Blanche’s” came forth from his
youth and experience as a New
Yorker, but Hoey hopes that his
latest collection will appeal to a
wide audience.
Hoey summarizes the appeal of
his poems as, “…the characters
and the stories, and the language
in which the stories are told…
[they] have a strong measure of
humor, though underlying the
humor there’s always a sense of
suffering and loss. You laugh, not
entirely sure why you’re laughing
since the story is so sad.”
More information about Allen
Hoey and his published works can
be found at:
http://www.allenhoey.com/.