Turning Cancer Into Art

 

Tony Hoagland, pancreatic cancer

Tony Hoagland died of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer on October 23, 2018. He knew he had the cancer for only two years because this kind is hard to diagnose before it becomes terminal. Pancreatic cancer is potentially curable if the cancer is caught early, is on the head of the pancreas, and it hasn’t spread, then it can be surgically removed, followed by a course of chemotherapy.

Hoagland was a poet who also wrote a number of essays on cancer that talk about his surgery and chemotherapy. I don’t know many of his medical details because most of the essays are in print journals and not available online. I am grateful to Fourth Genre for sharing a copy of Hoagland’s magnificent essay “Socks Full of Sand.”

What thrills me about Hoagland is that he actually writes about his observations and the trauma of cancer treatments, and he writes with humility, honesty, and humor. Not many writers do all three, and even fewer men. 

Many of his cancer poems appear in his last two books, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God (2018), and Turn Up the Ocean (2022), which was published after his death. Two thirds of both books also talk about his usual topics of loneliness, love, sex, human malfunctions, and social disfunctions. 

In general, while his cancer poems express his emotions of having cancer, his essays are better at sharing the narrative details of living with cancer. In the “Socks Full of Sand” essay, he talks about such things as his doctors not mentioning every side effect that could happen to him from chemotherapy because they didn’t want to worry him, and Tony not sharing the side effects he was experiencing, like neuropathy in his fingers and losing some of his vision, because he wanted them to focus on keeping him alive. He said, “The fact is, we’re all delivering selective information. We’re all involved in a kind of performance.”

He was an astute observer. In one poem he describes a cancer waiting room - “the mother with cancer deciding how to tell her kids, / the bald girl gazing downward at the shunt / installed above her missing breast.” (13) 

He can also be biting. In “The Cure for Racism is Cancer” essay, he chucks compassion and sensitivity aside and speaks of “the crone in her pajamas,” “the withered old Jewish lefty newspaper editor,” and “the tough lesbian with the bleached-blond crew cut and the black leather jacket.” These descriptions are sharp and catch our attention, but did he know this by talking to them, or was he being flip and making judgments? So I like him, but not always.

Surprisingly, in 2007, eight years before he actually got cancer, he published his “Barton Springs” poem where he says that he hoped his allotment of cancer would be the slow-growing kind so that he would have all the time he needed to wrap up his life. Why would he say this? Throughout his earlier books, he often had a poem or two about illness, dying, erectile dysfunction, or mastectomy, his ear tuned to society’s hum of concerns, and he got to the truth of each, but it wasn’t until after he was diagnosed that the flurry of cancer poems began.

Here are a few of his many noteworthy lines:

“Bible All Out of Order” - “When my doctor asks what my symptoms are, I tell her / self-pity and a desire to apologize. / She says my insurance policy covers self-pity,/ but not, unfortunately, remorse.” (Turn 3) 

“In the Waiting Room with Leonard Cohen” — “crying is violent and weird and hard. / It is like pulling something free from something else / that doesn’t want to give it up” (Priest 23)

“Ode to the West Wind” during chemo — “hear your teeth / chatter like a Geiger counter / and see the lesions burning through your Technicolor skin” (Turn 35)

“Cuisine” — Late one night in the hospital, his skin had become so fevered that he could only find relief in the bathroom by resting his face against the cool tile. (Turn 66) 

Rather than tell us what emotion he is feeling, Hoagland paints a picture with words so that we can feel it. While he could be self-centered, he was also a beloved professor, and wrote several craft books about poetry. What he writes about cancer and his experiences are sharp and creative, and he uses the surprise of humor to loosen readers up and challenge their preconceptions of what poetry is and could be. He said, “Poetry isn’t born. It comes from the constant factor of our suffering. We constantly try to figure out why life hurts so much.”

I don’t know how Tony realized he had pancreatic cancer. Was his cancer discovered when he was being scanned for something else and this revealed a mass on his pancreas? Was something off on a blood test? When he said he had surgery, I’m assuming the entire pancreas was removed, although maybe only the tumor was taken out, and if it was, why didn’t this solve his problem? Had it already metastasized elsewhere? If the cancer was localized, did he have radiation? What kind of chemo drug did they give him? 

In “Short History of Modern Art,” referring to the sculptor’s thin burnt figures of people, Hoagland wrote – “Giacometti … had figured out a way to take the bad news and turn it into art.” (Priest 29) Hoagland did this with his cancer.

© 2026 Mark Liebenow