Hugo's Selected Poems

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Permalink Reply by Frances McCue on June 30, 2010 at 4:04pm

To write a poem, Richard Hugo suggests that the poet think of a "triggering subject." "For me," Hugo goes on to say, "a small town that has seen better days often works." He documents this process, taking a place he has only "glimpsed while passing through," and drafts a poem. "It's a speculative form," as Bill Kittredge once told me. I imagine a textile mill turning out raw yards of poems. It's Hugo's industry for manufacturing verse. And it works. Think of the poems that Hugo wrote about towns: "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg," "Letter to Oberg from Pony" and "White Center." There are many more, stretching from the Duwamish River south of Seattle all the way to Italy and the Isle of Skye in Scotland. What was it about towns that Hugo found so inspiring? How do places that are both real and imagined converge to make such provocative poems? That's why I went back to some of the places he wrote about. And I want to hear other peoples' stories and speculations on Hugo's towns and poems. Tell your own. I'd love to hear it.

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Permalink Reply by Oliver Alan Weltzien on July 1, 2010 at 9:58am

Frances, I look forward to buying and studying your new Hugo book and, I hope, meeting you in person. I've taught Hugo over the years and written a little about him, and I share Hugo's split WA state-Montana identity. I personally know most of the WA state towns or drainages he wrote about, and I know places like Pony, MT firsthand. I certainly concur that Hugo captured states of disjunction and dispossession as do few other writers in our area. Clearly he loved small towns even as his poetic response to them strips away, shall we say, their pretensions. Or to put it another way, I deeply respect his versions of tough love.
--Alan Weltzien, Dillon (UMW)

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Permalink Reply by Frances McCue on July 2, 2010 at 11:58am

Alan, Thank you so much. it is so interesting to think of the "split" identity between Washington and Montana. I think you are on to something. There are different versions of his "tough" kind of love and I wonder if the places have as much to do with it as the state of his particular loneliness at the time. Does Washington have a version of the poem "Second Chances" or any hints of redemptive looks at towns?

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Permalink Reply by Jason Walz on July 5, 2010 at 8:28pm

A few years ago, while vacationing with a friend who introduced me to Hugo two decades ago, we set out to find many of Hugo's Montana places, and my favorite by far was The Ballpark at Moiese. It was obviously derelict when Hugo wrote the poem ("the last score died on the scoreboard"), but it was very little more than a field when I found it in '01. There was, indeed, a great view east to the bison reserve, and the scoreboard had, against spectacular odds, not fallen, yet. And Hugo even helps underline your point wonderfully here: "What we want to save grinds down finally/to the place it happened, dim charm/of four worn spots we used for bases." Hugo grasps, again and again, how fluid (and indeed, riverlike) most places of memories are, which helps explain why he was always delighted with moving geography to make his points. It's not the geography itself, it's what we can make it mean, for us.

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Permalink Reply by Frances McCue on July 5, 2010 at 11:02pm

Wow. That's so beautiful Jason. I love that idea of the "dim charm" of "worn spots." There are beautiful trees around that baseball diamond now, and the ghost of where the baselines were. It's so haunted and alive at the same time. That's how a Hugo poem really works for me: it's the alchemy of place, with all of its implied past, with someone who seeks it out now, years later.

I think it's a romantic impulse only Hugo shows you such real stuff. Know what I mean?

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Simon on July 8, 2010 at 3:59pm

I've had the poem Silver Star in my head for a few days (thanks to Marc Gibbons pointing me there). It seems to be one of those poems that gives off a strong felt sense, but I've also been thinking how that "place" is not one based totally in Realism.

Some of the references are so specific (suggesting a realism) "Think evil of the cop you found you starving and returned you, siren open, to the house you cannot find today..." Yet somehow we seem to be in an imaginative realm where the road ahead is still open, the future unwritten. And even though the title suggests it's specifically written "for Bill Kittredge," I don't really believe it. These towns seem like symbolic "everytowns" (of shared pain), but painted with a few specific and vivid props.

When I read about Hugo's poems, there is so much emphasis on what's real, what exists, but I often feel the most powerful lines happen when those realistic features tip over into the imagined and mix with wisps of our own memories of places we've been.

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Permalink Reply by Jason Walz on July 8, 2010 at 4:48pm

Silver Star always reminds me of William Matthews introduction to The Real West Marginal Way, saying that Hugo believed that "the continuous reclamation of a hometown... is the lifelong imaginative project to any adult." It's telling that Hugo once also commented that "In a way, all towns you look at could be your hometown."

Hugo often dwells in real places - places many of us (especially Frances!) have been, and even sought out. But Hugo likes using different places in different ways. Sometimes the places Hugo takes us are very definite - see Bear Paw, for example. Others, sometimes the definite place is used as a nice place to explore people, more so than the place - The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field, or O-Mok-See at Nine Mile, for example. Of most interest to me - and I think this is what Lisa is referring to - are poems that ostensibly are grounded, yet trigger in us our own connotations to paint Hugo's shades of grey. There are many, many of these, like Glen Uig, Montgomery Hollow, and Again, Kapowsin.

While Hugo often dwells in dispossession and redemption, many of these place poems also seem to be trying to redeem and save the reader as well. Although not a place poem, the best example I can think of is in Places and Ways to Live, where Hugo comments, "May you never be dispossessed, forced to wander/a world the color of salt with no young music in it."

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Permalink Reply by Frances McCue on July 12, 2010 at 11:09am

Imagine this: you write a draft of a poem about your own loneliness and then you choose a town to attach it to. You re-write the poem to accommodate the loneliness and the town. It's worth trying. A person could end up with a poem not about the town or the poet but instead about something else-- like a prayer with dreamscape images.

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Permalink Reply by Jason Walz on July 16, 2010 at 5:03pm

Had to go back and find this. In Kicking the Loose Gravel Home, before the reading of Degrees of Grey in PBurg, Hugo sums this up very well: "What seems to happen is I internalize the town, convert it to the town the poem needs, and then simply appropriate it to the poem. It may help to not know much about the town, because the less you know about the town, the more you can add. The more you know about the town, the more you may have to subtract, and subtraction is always more difficult than addition... The thing is, to make it the town the poem needs, then you can fill."

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Permalink Reply by Frances McCue on July 23, 2010 at 5:03pm

Hey y'all. Check this out. Hugo influence. The world is buzzing Hugo lately.

see: www.NYTimes.com/2010/07/18/books/review/Lehane-t.html


. . . “You’re here because it’s somewhere. Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won’t stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.” That passage, with its echoes of Richard Hugo’s poem “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” and James Crumley’s novel “The Last Good Kiss,” underscores a hallmark of American noir: the search for a past and a home less remembered than desired. . . .

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Simon on July 23, 2010 at 5:37pm

What a nice mention...it almost seemed like a thoughtful citation on the part of the critic.

Permalink Reply by Mike Anderson on August 23, 2010 at 11:48am

... the town is upright in my line of vision
like a page in a pop-up book...
the...way a poem comes off the page and goes
three-dimensional in the mind.
-Frances McCue


Nobody should think at 2:00 o’clock in the morning. But there it was, slapping my consciousness in a way I had not expected, and possibly, in a way you may not have intended. Thank you, anyway.

Pardon me if I speak too soon - I’ve only made it to Dixon so far. There are detours - teaching an 8-year old grandson, the son of tattoo artist, that he may find safe harbor in the pages of a book. We all need a guide to show us a path to the Duwamish or Ohio; he will learn soon enough to light out for the territories by himself.

Your book is full of triggers. What if (and I know not of which I speak), Hugo is just writing to Gary Gildner in the way poets write - packing thoughts and emotions into the smallest suitcase possible? Letting the reader wonder whether 31 Letters and 13 Dreams is a clever juxtapositioning of the numerology of the 1313 Club?

I have such a letter, a post-card, actually. Written by my grandfather to my grandmother during their courtship. Addressed to her in Wallace, Idaho. She was 15 years his junior. He was the son of an Irish homesteader who chose the gold of the wheatfields of the Gallatin Valley rather than the glitter of Bannack or Confederate Gulch. My grandfather was 33 when he married, having first acquired a status which assured him that he could take on the responsibility of a wife and a family.

Wallace, Idaho could well be the center of my universe, like everywhere else. Your "hookers-with-a-heart-of-gold" were, in my mind (today, at least), engaged in the same extractive process as their customers. Far easier than doing that bit of dirty work themselves. Not to mention that I am unaware of any female miners in the settlement of our towns - we left that to the Chinese. As it has ever been. Today’s K-Street lobbyists are just 21st century sutlers, following the path of the economic railroads being laid by the moneyed classes. "The cynical lean with the wind, whatever one’s blowing..."

As a recently-returned Vietnam veteran in 1973, I came to Missoula to attend law school, thinking that I’d use the three years and my G.I. Bill to recover and discover a life’s calling. In those days, Wallace was an Oasis and a mirage - a place where a young kid might get married without his parents’ permission, or a way station for a college kid’s need to get outa town for whatever reason.

Hugo may have been three-dimensional, sharing a letter to a friend knowing there would be readers looking over his shoulder. Such may have been his gift. I find my writing starts out one- or two-dimensionally. A flat, white screen. Brian Andreas reveals that "often, I write all day long with white ink on white paper." Sometimes, it’s just a word ("spindrift") or a combination ("... may the bluebird of happiness...)," which I remember as tossed with "fly up your nose" on the 1960's Laugh-In show. Surely, Mr. Hugo would not have stooped to that level of revulsion in writing his friend Gildner ... or would he?

My pop-up book pops down, rather than up. I mine the depths of my emotions, my recollections, my limited stash of words when I engage in the "act of naming." If I have the courage, I’ll turn on my red light so that it might catch the eye of a passer-by. If I’m lucky, they’ll nod in recognition.

The good poem illuminates its subject so that we
can see it as the poet wished and in ways he could
not have anticipated. It follows that such illumination
is twofold: the light of the mind, which the poet
employs like a miner’s beam, and that other light
which emanates from the words on the page in
conjunction with themselves, a radiance the poet
cause but never can fully control.

- Stephen Dunn, "The Good and the Not So Good"
in Walking Light

Mike Anderson

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