Allen Hoey’s first collection of poems, A Fire in the Cold House of Being, was chosen by Galway Kinnell for the 1985 Camden Poetry Award; subsequent volumes of poetry include What Persists, Provençal Light, The Precincts of Paradise, and Country Music (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His first novel, Chasing the Dragon, was published in 2006, followed the next year by Voices Beyond the Dead. On the Demon's Trail, a mystery, will be published in 2009.In 1993 he received the precepts as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist. The poems in Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s grow out of the fifth and final section of Country Music. In Once Upon a Time, Hoey builds a larger community around the customers at a run-down dive bar in the North Country of New York State in the early- to mid-1970s.He currently teaches at Bucks County Community College and makes his home with his wife and dogs outside New Hope, Pennsylvania. He also serves as Director of the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program, the oldest such program in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and was a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts fellowship in 2002. For more information, please visit www.allenhoey.com.
Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s creates a microcosm in a small bar that caters to middle-aged farmers and mill workers. In dialogues that consist, as Nathalie Anderson noted, of “half scatology, half philosophy,” the young observer of the poems records a swath of rural concerns that spill into and reflect the larger social and political concerns of the mid-1970s—concerns that remain relevant to the world today.
Available to the trade from Ingram or Baker and Taylor.
ISBN:
978-0-9796684-1-8
Life, death, longing, loss, devotion, abandonment, meanness and mercy—it’s all here in Hoey’s Bar-as-Church, complete with High Priestess Blanche and a novitiate listener in this shrine where men gather for community, confession, redemption, and refuge.
Hoey’s book, pitch-perfect even when heart-heavy, lifts a voice so colossal you can’t quite believe he’s pulling it off: the voice of a whole community when it tips back its hat at the end of the day and cuts loose. And pull it off he does, speaking the unspoken and for the many who haven’t the time, the drive, the training, or the confidence to write, but oh, they have stories to tell. The book seems halfway to prose, but the rhythm’s too driving, the craft too careful to be merely narrative. Supercharged, syncopated, colloquial, simultaneously lush and blunt, these poems lash you to a gallop and keep you there—loving it.
This is that rare creature in the world of poetry: a book you stay up late to finish, a book you can’t put down. It’s a rowdy book, a tragic book, a down-and-dirty redemption of a book, about the agonies we suffer, the hilarities and kindnesses that keep us going, the escapes we seek, the silence that can trap us, and the listeners who make that shadow of difference between despair and meaning. Really, I have to insist: read this book.
—Nancy White
A man walks into a bar and says—such is the premise of Allen Hoey’s Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s. What Hoey delivers in poem after poem is a compound of down-home American wit and woe, the insight of those who have lost the game but whose brooding powers of analysis and narrative, abetted as they are by shots and beers, remain keen. Nothing is hopeless if it can be spoken about much less turned into art. The words of the various speakers are now torrential and now terse but always illustrative of the fulcrum between oblivion and awareness that many a barstool is perched on.
—Baron Wormser, Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems and Subject Matter
You have found the language you need, the movement of rhythm and syntax, the phrasing: you have found your style…mature, supple, functional, poetic, and memorable, all that a poetic style should be. The same hard-won maturity shows in your choice of topics and how you handle them. I see a very experienced dramatic and narrative sense at work in the poems.
—Hayden Carruth, winner of the National Book Award and National Book Critics Award
Hear Allen Hoey read two poems from Once Upon a Time at Blanche's:
“I was going fishing,” he said, “nah, don’t you give me none of your shit, Donny Jock, cause not everybody wants to drop a bread ball off a hook and pull up catfish, I don’t care how well you say you like the taste, broiled, pan-fried, however you cook ’em up, I told you once I told you a thousand times, and you don’t need to go on about feathers and fur, everybody arready heard enough about that, I’d like to see you try it, you think you’re such hot shit.” He tipped a shot into his mouth and shook his head. “Besides,” he said, “it ain’t the fishing’s the point, though the trout were running good and I made some good calls on the dry-flies. Brought home a nice creel of rainbow, yessir, if you want to know. But the point’s not the fishing,” he took a long pull on his mug and cast his eyes to each side, “it’s when I’m driving there. Just minding my own business, the usual route I take, Bangor Road out past the old quarry, you know the run, when I drive past this pasture and it takes a minute, you know, for it to sink in, then I put the damn truck into reverse and, sure enough, there’s these big damn woolly cows, ain’t like nothing I’ve ever seen before. So I stop and get out and walk over to the fence, and they stop chewing on grass and sort of sidle up to the fence, and they got them big stupid cow eyes but they got like fur all over them, ain’t seen nothing like it in all my damn days.” “You sure you ain’t had a few beers arready that morning,” Donny Jock joshed him, an elbow in the ribs. “I ain’t had nothing to drink but some coffee. I don’t fish like you do, nothing more’n an excuse to down a six-pack or two, like you even needed one.” Donny looked like he might have something to say but couldn’t completely decide whether he was insulted or complimented, so he let it go with a shrug and then he downed a shot and backed it with a beer. “I mean, I’m wanting to get to the stream, hit it before the sun comes too high up over the hills, drive them trout deep or back into the roots along the bank, no chance I’ll take none home, but I just got to, you know, know, so I hump it down to the end of the fence and pull in where there’s a barn and just sit there letting her idle, feeling a damn fool, when this guy comes outen the barn and gives me a look, tips back his cap then walks on over to the car. Help you, he says when I roll down the window. Yessir, I tell him, I hope you can. Them—I don’t know, I say, what’s them up in the pasture? Oh, he says and leans his elbow against the door, they’re beefalo.” “Beefalo,” Donny Jock guffawed, “whose leg you trying to pull?” “No shit,” he said, “beefalo. What’s that, I ask him. They breed cows with bison, he tells me.” “Bison,” asks Donny Jock. “Yeah,” he said, “bison. Like buffalo.” Donny asked, “Buffalo?” “Yeah, like what’s- his-name, Buffalo Bill Cody.” “Buffalo,” Donny said like it’s a surprise ending to a long joke. “Buffalo,” he affirmed, and Donny Jock shook his head and took another pull of his beer, his forehead furrowed, “I’ll be damned.”
Dark
It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting. —Ecclesiastes 7:2
Nights grow longer, on the drive home, the window cranked open, the air seems dark, freighted with winter’s impending weight, but leaves rustle their October songs and mist curls in ropes across asphalt. Deer cross the road, grey blurs looming in the headlights too late almost to avoid hitting them. On the side of the road I see one lying, pull over and walk back. She’s alive, barely, just over the ditch and only a few yards short of where the woods begin. So close, almost there, a second, a simple second, one way or the other she would’ve made it, woods, freedom, the chance to browse more leaves, whatever—I’m lost in the deer’s life as I can only imagine it—her forelegs kick desperately, weakly among the grass and weeds, her neck arched, eyes glowing fear, but she’s completely broken, dead except for her beating heart and crackling brain, under the cold roof of stars, among the wisps of ground fog, her sides still heaving, I go back to the car and get the tire iron from the trunk and I do what, in praise, in glory, in all abiding, has to be done.
Henny Penny: A Scientific Inquiry
“You ever wonder,” Millard says, “what
keeps the sky up?”“It’s air,” Everett says,
“it’s all just air, straight up from where your
feet are till you can’t see any further.”“But what’s
up where the clouds are, that don’t look
the same as what’s down here where we’re
breathing.” “Didn’t you go to school,” Everett asks,
“didn’t they teach you about this kind
of stuff, it’s air, what we breathe, just the same
down here as it is up there except if you go
high enough it gets so thin that you can’t
breathe it, not enough oxygen, that’s why those men who landed on the moon had to wear those helmets and the big packs they
lugged around on their backs, only they didn’t feel so heavy cause the moon’s gravity ain’t as strong as ours.” Millard just
shakes his head and takes another swallow of
beer, he hasn’t really been the same since
that time his chickens blew up, and I don’t figure
you’d be all that ok if you had a load
of buried chickens blow up and cover you with
rotted bits of chicken flesh, but he doesn’t
talk about that much, just wonders about the kind
of thing most of us gave up wondering about about
the time we discovered girls. “I been up
to the mountains,” Millard says, “around
near Lake Ozonia, park the car and there’s trails you can take up the side, gets steep
some places, you have to scrabble over rocks, sometimes
slip away under your feet, but the sky
still seems the same distance away, and I stand
there at the top, a few trees around but mostly rocks, and
I look up and wonder what the hell keeps the sky
up.” Everett snorts, shakes his head and raises a finger
and Blanche brings him another beer, he looks over
at me, cups his hand around his mouth and whispers,
Retard, shakes his head and takes a pull,
“Millard, you gotta get over reading Henny Penny, that
was when you were a boy, now we got science,
men walking in space, walking on the moon,
you can’t walk around wondering what keeps the
damn sky up, it ain’t scientific.” He looks
to me to back him up on this but I’m busy packing
tobacco in my pipe and I just keep
myself busy, I don’t want no part of this
debate, I can tell there’s no winning, the way when I’d talk politics with my father,
there was no winning, not for either one of us,
and I can see this is shaping up about the same.
“Science,” Everett says once more and swallows some more
beer. Millard’s nursing his, picks it up and
looks at the light behind the bar through the
lens of the mug, seems satisfied and takes another sip.
“Science or no science,” Millard says, “you can see
the difference from down here where we breathe and up
there where the clouds are, at night you see
the stars, I just want to know and if you can’t
tell me, well, that’s ok, but what in hell keeps the
sky up?”
Allen Hoey’s first collection of poems, A Fire in the Cold House of Being, was chosen by Galway Kinnell for the 1985 Camden Poetry Award; subsequent volumes of poetry include What Persists, Provençal Light, The Precincts of Paradise, and Country Music (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His first novel, Chasing the Dragon, was published in 2006, followed the next year by Voices Beyond the Dead. On the Demon's Trail, a mystery, will be published in 2009.In 1993 he received the precepts as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist. The poems in Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s grow out of the fifth and final section of Country Music. In Once Upon a Time, Hoey builds a larger community around the customers at a run-down dive bar in the North Country of New York State in the early- to mid-1970s.He currently teaches at Bucks County Community College and makes his home with his wife and dogs outside New Hope, Pennsylvania. He also serves as Director of the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program, the oldest such program in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and was a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts fellowship in 2002. For more information, please visit 
Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s creates a microcosm in a small bar that caters to middle-aged farmers and mill workers. In dialogues that consist, as Nathalie Anderson noted, of “half scatology, half philosophy,” the young observer of the poems records a swath of rural concerns that spill into and reflect the larger social and political concerns of the mid-1970s—concerns that remain relevant to the world today.
