Tony Hoagland Back In My Day Analysis

For my third poem of the semester, I wrote one entitled “Back in My Day”. This poem was my manifesto about America and was inspired by the way I view American is now, how we became increasingly afraid of diversity, and the phrase “back in my day”. The one work that could be said to have influenced this piece would have to be Tony Hoagland’s “America”. I say that as it was a critical view of America and was also a product/inside look of how it was in that general time. Speaking of critical views, I see that a major strength of this particular piece would have to be the general bashing of the United States of America. It does so without adding anything positive about the subject matter and continues to enforce the first few lines, “America, an ideal tourist location/paradise turned
Stanza six contains the lines that I’m the proudest of, because it leads up into the culmination of all the points listed previously and really drives home the last two lines. “Cause this is America, conform with us or get out” is really satisfying in a dark way and in my perspective, I believe that it holds a good deal of weight to it. In the case of creating these various descriptions and images, I’d say that they came about from various conversations I would hear or I would catch glimpses of this in the news and on the television. Events that steadily began to change my view on the world and seeing how we could go from a somewhat more peaceful time to the disastrous views and actions that today now holds. The lines that these views most thoroughly shape would be stanzas one, four, and five. As the older generation, truly does blame and judge millennials for some of the numerous faults of today, people do tend to only focus on themselves now and don’t tend to help anyone else, and the American dream is somewhat dead and is now more of a nightmare than it is a