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Recovering Richard Hugo: Confessionalism, the Authority of
Experience, Trout Fishing, and Politics in 31
Letters and 13 Dreams
“Why not say what
happened?” –Robert Lowell
I’ll
admit it—I like confessional poetry. Unfortunately this is taboo these days,
with popular poetry journals like Conduit and Jubilat publishing abstract,
intuitive verse that can be seen in the vein of, or descendant to, the Language
poets. Poet Stephen Burt describes in his 2004 article “Close Calls With
Nonsense: How to Read, and Perhaps Enjoy, Very New Poetry” as “sharing a
surface difficulty, [they] tease or demand or frustrate; they’re hard or
impossible to paraphrase; and they try not to tell stories” (Burt 17). Poets
like Mark Levine and C.D. Wright and Karen Volkman; poets Burt defines as
belonging to the Elliptical School, and who “seek the authority of the
rebellious…[sound] desperately extravagant…or defiantly childish…break up
syntax, but then reassemble it…and try to adapt Language Poets’ disruptions for
traditional lyric goals (expressing a self and its feelings)” (Burt 20). In
other words, poets for whom plot, meaning, and communication are not the point.
I have a theory as to why Elliptical
poems are so popular in contemporary North American literature, and it goes a
little something like this—Bill Clinton killed confessional poetry. Well, not
Clinton directly, but the economic boom of the Roaring ’90s allowed people of
my generation, for the first time, to have the economic stability, societal
security, and bourgeoisie luxury to play with words. Who needs poems about
human suffering when half the country is dropping Ecstasy and listening to
Intelligent Dance Music every other night? Grunge was dead, Kurt Cobain’s
suicide a memory we put in a box and hid under the bed, and for a few years
life was amazing.
I’m no sociologist but it makes sense
that the best art is born out of struggle, during times of despair (this, of course, suggests that the Aughts
will produce an enormous amount of stunning art and literature). Granted this
despair is most frequently of a personal, not communal nature, but often the
two are symbiotic. Consider many of the greatest poets of the mid-to-late 20th Century, men and women who lived through the Great Depression, World War II,
and Vietnam as well as enduring painful private lives. Men and women like
Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Ann Sexton. The Confessional
poets.
Few
authors like to be placed in the genre box, and few academics seem to want to
talk about texts in this fashion (can we blame the New Critics for that?). But
how else do you talk about art? In his famous review of Robert Lowell’s 1959
book, Life Studies, M.L. Rosenthal
coined the term “confessional” to describe the poems found within. “Because of
the way Lowell brought his private humiliations, sufferings, and psychological
problems into the poems of Life Studies,
the word ‘confessional’ seemed appropriate enough” (Rosenthal 26). Rosenthal
goes on to explain that Lowell “removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally
himself, and it is hard not to think of Life
Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is
honor-bound not to reveal” (Rosenthal). After all Lowell himself, in his poem
“Epilogue” from 1977’s Day by Day,
not-so-quietly asked, “Why not say what happened?”
Let
me back up for a moment and examine Rosenthal’s lexicon: “Private
humiliations.” “Sufferings.” “Psychological problems.” “Personal confidences.”
What do these phrases mean? Is the tone of his analyses pejorative or apt? If
pejorative, has Confessional literature been frowned-upon since its inception,
or did the Language poets, and their Elliptical descendants, bias us toward
syntactical experimentation and against personal revelation? How is
Confessional poetry defined today? Consider this description:
“A confessional poet traffics in intimate,
and perhaps derogatory, information about him or herself…one point worth noting
that is specific to confessional poetry is that the ‘I’ used in the poem
directly represents the poet…confessional poetry explores personal details
about the authors’ life without meekness, modesty, or discretion…[confessional
poets] use writing as an outlet for their demons” (en.wikipedia.org).
More juicy terms to
ponder. What I find fascinating about this quote is that, on one hand, the
language is predictably stereotypical (i.e. one traffics in drugs not feelings;
the “I” is always autobiographical
and never persona?; and, excising
personal demons is what toilets are for). Yet, on the other hand, isn’t there
some value to art that is without “meekness, modesty, or discretion”? For as
anyone who’s ever picked up a pen knows, it’s not easy “saying what happened.”
In fact, it’s very difficult.
But why is it so difficult? For
starters—New Critics be damned—an audience’s impulse to conflate the author
with the poem’s speaker is difficult to overcome. Furthermore, Lowell, Plath,
Berryman, and Sexton had terrible lives replete with addiction, anguish,
depression, and suicide. Thus, despite Lowell’s instance on communicating one’s
personal experience, being a Confessional poet can mean a lifetime of defending
whether or not the plot of the poem really
happened. John Berryman admitted as much response to questions about the
protagonist of his 1964 collection 77
Dream Songs: “Henry does resemble
me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay
income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my
hair—and fuck them, I’m not Henry. Henry doesn’t have any bats” (Plotz 1).
Bats and taxes, the two universal
signifiers of modern mortality. However, what’s crucial about Berryman’s quote
is his admission that Henry does resemble him. What does this dichotomy create? The notion that the poem is not about
the author but of him? The acknowledgment that truth and fiction are
blurred—no, combined—to yield better poetry.
Aside
from fearing speaker/author conflation, and feelings of inadequacy regarding
our pedestrian personal experiences, writing with absolute candor is most
difficult because it does place an author in a genre. And many writers, or
perhaps many young writers, are worried about being dismissed as melodramatic
or sentimental or crazy. This is balderdash. What is important is not what we
write, or how we write, but why we write.
In her 1998 essay “That Story: The Changes of Anne Sexton,” Alicia Ostriker
suggests that “Although Lowell and Berryman, Plath and
Sexton have been misread as merely personal, merely self-indulgent, merely
sick, what these poets in fact sing, orate, or shriek is the individual and
society with choke-holds on each other” (Ostriker 1). It’s significant that
Ostriker argues these poets are misread, but what I appreciate most about this
quote is the thought that the individual and society are simultaneously in
conflict—forget about innocuous terms like dovetail and symbiotic, they are
constantly squeezing life from each other. In other words, surviving in this
world can be a nasty business. That’s what art is for, isn’t it?
Poet
Richard Hugo gets this. Perhaps best known for his poems about the Pacific
Northwest, Hugo spent a career struggling to articulate his own experiences as
a man not-quite-at-home in the world. In “Stray Thoughts on Roethke and
Teaching” he writes:
“Quest for self is
fundamental to poetry. What passes for experimentation is often an elaborate
method of avoiding one’s feelings at all costs…The good poems say: ‘This is how
I feel.’ With luck that’s true, but usually it’s not. More often the poem is
the way the
poet
says he feels when he can’t find out what his real feelings are” (Hugo 33-34).
It’s a tricky
business, this writing of poetry. How do I feel? How do I explain it to a reader, to someone I’ve never met? I have a
sneaking suspicion that many poets write as a means to figure out what they
think about what they feel—is this what Hugo means? Literary theorist and
philosopher Kenneth Burke might agree. In his 1941 essay “Literature as
Equipment for Living,” Burke argues that texts function as proverbs, and that these
“proverbs are strategies for dealing
with situations” (Burke 297). So, do
successful Confessional poems operate as strategies? Can Richard Hugo’s poems,
particularly his work from 31 Letters and
13 Dreams, be viewed as strategies for living in this mucked up world?
I
like genres. I think they help critics (and audiences) establish a lexicon that
facilitates the analysis of an artist’s oeuvre, because while you can’t argue
about taste, you can argue about labels and context and meaning. Thus, despite
what you’ve heard, Richard Hugo was a Confessional poet. Yes, he crafted
beautiful pieces about bass and buffalo throughout his prolific career, but he
was also a complicated man who struggled and turned to words as a means to
assuage this pain. 31 Letters and 13
Dreams is a chronicle of one of the hardest years of Hugo’s life. By using
letters and dreams as a form of composition, Hugo was able to write about his
private life for a public sphere, to take very personal thoughts and offer them
up for our consumption. I can think of no more noble and honest approach to
art.
The Authority of Experience
Richard Hugo was
born on December 21, 1923 in Seattle, Washington. His father shortly thereafter
abandoned his (teenage) mother, and his mother shortly thereafter abandoned
him, resulting in his grandparents’ assuming custody before he was two years
old. In Three Pacific Northwest Poets:
William Stafford, Richard Hugo, and David Wagoner, Sanford Pinsker explains
that as a sibling-less boy living in the Far West during the Great Depression,
Hugo later traced “his abiding sense of isolation, of alienation, to childhood
feelings that the Pacific Northwest was ‘near the edge of civilization, almost
out of it’”(Pinsker 55). Furthermore, Hugo’s grandparents worked untraditional
shifts that left him forced to be quiet much of the day, and in an age when
computers, videogames, and other solitary forms of entertainment did not exist,
he turned to words and images to occupy his time:
“My grandfather’s
job at the Seattle Gas Plant was a menial one and his hours fit the schedule he
and grandmother had out of necessity assumed for themselves over a lifetime.
And there I’d be, alone, not daring to play the radio for fear it would keep
them awake in the small house, nothing to do to amuse myself but to either draw
pictures, which I did, or put words on paper, which is, if your definitions are
fairly fluid, called writing. My art work showed no promise, so I kept on with
the words. It was a good world in many ways, about as good as a writer could
hope for” (Pinsker 58).
In many ways Hugo’s
upbringing prepared him for the life of a writer, but it can also be argued
that growing up blue-collar and parentless during the worst decade,
economically, of U.S. history prepared him to be a Confessional poet. After
all, as he once declared, “If a poet is supposed to suffer for his art, I felt
I deserved at least the Nobel Prize” (Hugo 146).
At the age of 19, Hugo volunteered for
the U.S. Army and served as a bombardier in the Mediterranean theater. His
accounts of these experiences “suggest that he was a reluctant warrior and an
inept bombardier, but his Air Medal and Distinguished Flying Cross suggest
otherwise” (Pinsker 55). Hugo would occasionally write poems and prose about
this experience, one of his most famous pieces being “Mission to Linz” from his
1965 collection Death of the Kapowsin
Tavern. Most certainly a war poem, the strength of the piece exists in how
it also functions as a pilot(’s) poem, placing the reader not only in the cockpit
but in the ether, out of this world:
And the moment
when the sky split
open, allowed
the lazy tons of
yellow-banded children
to fall in
forty-second wonder, converge
in a giant funnel.
Now you
who, so high, can
only see
the puff like a
penny dropped in dust
at your toe on a
country road…
………………………………………..
Of all this, this,
and only it:
you can forget, and
will, the degrading prayer
and when the sound
is gone, only this:
you feel good to
your own touch,
you
remain. (Hugo 83)
I’ve never been in
war, never shot at anyone or been shot at by anyone. Still, by reading these
few lines I can get a glimpse of Hugo’s experience—the utter terror implicit in
the opening two lines (“And the moment / when the sky split open…”); the
condemnation of the second-person pronoun, Hugo directly addressing the reader
but mostly himself (“so high” being both figurative and literal, connoting
superiority as well as safety); and the final confession of what’s most
important, having survived (“you feel good to your own touch” eliciting
onanistic imagery).
There’s
a phrase that I’ve been tossing around, playing with, for a few months now, a
way to describe art that’s predicated upon, and received, as legitimate, real,
true. I call it the authority of experience. Perhaps this impulse, this need,
has led me to the Confessional poets. Perhaps it stems from examining my role
as a writer during a time of great political and national turmoil. See,
authority of experience means that—while every pilot flying over Linz that day
may have a different recollection or perspective of the events—Hugo’s
recollection, his poem, is valuable, undeniable, and important because he was really there.
I realize this line of thinking is
problematic when it comes to art, particularly writing, because great authors
are so because they create worlds, lives, and experiences out of their
imaginations. In other words, whether
it’s through intelligence or empathy, there are more people who can envision
bombing a village than have actually done so. Yet, the $64,000 question always
lingers—while such a fictive poem may succeed in terms of voice and craft, what
is lost when we find out the author never served in the military? What is
gained if we find out he did? Or, as Hugo relates:
“A young recent
Ph.D. asked me to attend his class to discuss some of my poems with his
students…one student asked how I’d come to write ‘The Lady in Kicking Horse
Reservoir,’ one of the poems they were studying. My answer was straightforward.
I’d had a love affair. The woman dumped me for someone else. I was
brokenhearted and vengeful, but cowardly. So in real life I suffered but in the
poem I had my revenge—at least early in the poem.
A few days after the class, the
teacher told me he had been very surprised at my answer, that he didn’t know
poets used life that way. I was surprised at his surprise and asked him where
he’d assumed poems came from. He replied that he’d believed that a writer sits
alone in a room and makes things up” (Pinsker 79).
Address to Sender
1971 was a rough
year for Richard Hugo. An accomplished poet and successful professor, he was
invited to teach at the University of Iowa’s prestigious graduate writing
program. Unfortunately this experience did not bode well for his state of mind.
In We Are Called Human: The Poetry of Richard Hugo, Michael Allen
explains:
“[Hugo] found
himself drunk more often than not, alienated by his own actions from colleagues
and from the women he dated, and haunted by images of western toughness and
long-standing personal wounds…the lingering aftershock of the collapse of his
14-year marriage 6 years before [led to a] ‘crack-up’ as he put it” (Allen
113-114).
A lot of pain
squeezed into such a quick summation. What’s significant about this tale, about
Hugo’s suffering, isn’t the fact that it further aligns him with the
prototypical Confessional poets; it’s that this period yielded the poems of 31 Dreams and 13 Songs, one of his most
harrowing collections, full of self-loathing, self-examination, and treatises
on the poet’s—on mankind’s—relationship with the world.
31
Letters and 13 Dreams was “at once a ‘reaching out’ to old friends (mostly
fellow poets)…[and] a sustained attempt to break free from the isolation that,
in fact, had imprisoned him” (Pinsker 86). “Goodbye, Iowa” from 1975’s What Thou Lovest Well Remains American hinted at the material to come:
The
waitress mocked you and you paid your bill
sweating
in her glare. You tried to tell her
how
many lovers you’ve had. Only a croak came out.
Your
hand shook when she put hot coins in it.
Your
face was hot and you ran face down to the car.
Miles
you hated her. Then you remembered what
the
doctor said: really a hatred of self.
……………………………………………………….
And
now you are alone.
……………………………………………………….
Your
car is cruising. You cross with ease
at
80 the state line and the state you are entering
always
treated you well. (Hugo 237)
Note the
plainspoken, straight-forward language of the speaker, diction William
Wordsworth describes in the “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” as working to
“choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe
them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used
by men” (Wordsworth). Note the specific words—“sweating,” “tried,” “croak,” and
“shook” (all connoting inferiority and failure); the anaphora of the “your”
(there’s that indicting, reader/author pronoun ambiguity again); the repetition
of “hot” and “face” (why not use the best words, even if they are the same
word?); and the double meaning of “state” (physical and psychological) . This
so-called simple speech is voluminous via its imagery. We see the shame, the
red flush of his cheeks, maybe even the tears that lead the speaker (lead
Hugo?) to mouth what we all fear most: I hate myself.
Is that the point of poetry? To look
into the mirror and report what we see? Richard Hugo seems to have thought so:
“Hugo—especially in
his later years—became a decidedly public poet, unafraid of speaking out with
candor about the messier, less attractive aspects of his life. Again, honesty
was the keystone of his aesthetic. ‘How
you feel about yourself,’ he once
wrote, ‘is probably the most important feeling you have.’ To ‘let go’—of
bitterness, of hatred, of blame—is as important, perhaps more important, as
cataloging the indignities of
childhood”
(Pinsker 86).
It’s interesting how
he dances around the content of the Confessional poets—bitterness, hatred,
blame—without joining their legion. Yet, how is “Goodbye, Iowa” not a Confessional poem? If we return to
Wikipedia’s definition of the genre, Hugo is indeed trafficking in intimate
information about himself. And as we learn from biography and autobiography,
the “I” of the poem is most certainly (at least partially) the author. Hugo
admits as much when speaking about his time at Iowa: “I started dating women I
liked very much, getting drunk and having some conversations that would insure
their hatred…I’m the last person to deliberately alienate others, least of all
women I admire and respect, yet that’s what I was doing’”( Allen 100). This
distancing is, of course, what the speaker in the poem is doing, has done. What
does it get him? Only the comfort of an empty road leading home, a chance to
sort things out. Not to mention the poems of 31 Letters and 13 Dreams.
So
why letter poems? Why at this point in his career? What did Hugo hope to
accomplish with this form, these addresses, this methodology?
“Hugo’s ‘letter
poems’ were enormously popular when the first ones appeared in American Poetry Review. They seemed so
off handedly casual, so effortless, so entirely convincing in voice, in tone,
that a wide variety of poets began to imitate them…[they] were a way of getting
to the heart of psychological matter in ways that the confessional poets of the
1960s could only dream about…Art is, above all else, an illusion and Hugo’s
letter poems made it ‘look easy.’ What could be easier, after all, than dashing
off a letter to a good friend and then breaking the lines until they had the
look, the feel, of a poem?” (Pinsker
86-87).
Voyeuristic in nature, as if the reader has
clandestinely gained access to the private musings of one famous poet to
another famous poet, Hugo’s letter poems lack artifice, at least on first
reading: “[They] were a way of ‘having it out,’ of saying plainly…what needed
to be said. A lyric poem, Hugo tells us, would not have done the trick”
(Pinsker 88). Why wouldn’t a lyric poem have sufficed? Perhaps lyric poems are
limited by the same elite, bourgeois stance as the Language and Elliptical
poems, better served to articulate modernist, meditative states of mind via
innovative syntax? Not necessarily, for Berryman’s The Dream Songs are very lyrical in nature. Then what does “having
it out” mean?:
“Perhaps no American
poet since Whitman has created a work in which the psychological quest for
self-integration has been achieved in such a thoroughly social dimension…Hugo
has discovered a similar strength of self in a bipolar outreach of letters to
friends and of dreams from his haunted psyche” (Allen 113).
Again, I love the
terms—“haunted psyche” sounds like a great gothic band name. But I digress.
What’s important about these poems is, once again, the self v. social
binary—after all, aren’t letters predicated upon a recipient, predicated upon
communication, predicated upon social interaction? Think of how (e)mail
functions today in the workplace, among former college roommates, and
long-distance lovers. Letters are intrinsically social—neither rain nor sleet nor snow can stop them.
Still,
“in letters as in life, to expose a personal fragility is to invite attack”
(Ostriker 59).
There’s something
uncomfortable about reading, in “Letter
to Bell from Missoula,” Hugo write:
Dear Marvin: Months since I left broke
down and sobbing
in the parking lot, grateful for the
depth
of your understanding and since then
I’ve been treated
in Seattle and I’m in control like
Genghis Khan. (Hugo 5).
We know the facts:
Marvin is Marvin Bell, director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, with whom Hugo
had a “short, desperate talk…[then] got into his car, left Iowa in midsemester,
and drove nonstop back to Missoula, his home, and then to Seattle, where his
history began, to seek therapeutic treatment for his alcoholism” (Allen 114).
Suddenly this poem is not a poem at all, but a postcard from the edge, a
gesture from one friend to another saying it’s all right—now. Once more,
though, we must remember not to conflate the author and speaker, for “to read
[Hugo’s poems] as pure biography (if such an animal exists) would be a
mistake…as Hugo once put it, ‘In a poem you’ll fictionalize something just to
see where the possibilities of language take you’” (Pinsker 86).
The first poem of 31/13 is “Letter to Kizer from Seattle.” Heartbreakingly explicit,
it is a communiqué between Hugo and his good friend, poet Carolyn Kizer. The
poem begins:
Dear Condor: Much
thanks for that telephonic support
from North Carolina
when I suddenly went ape
in the Iowa tulips.
Lord, but I'm ashamed.
I was afraid, it
seemed, according to the doctor
of impending
success, winning some poetry prizes
or getting a wet
kiss. The more popular I got,
the softer the soft
cry in my head: Don't believe them.
You were never good.
Then I broke and proved it.
Ten successive days
I alienated women
I liked best. I told
a coed why her poems were bad
(they weren’t) and
didn't understand a word I said.
Really warped. The
phrase “I'll be all right”
came out too many
unsolicited times. I'm o.k. now. (Hugo 3)
Look closely at the
first two words of the poem, the first two words of the book: Dear Condor. Note
the tenderness of the salutation and the sobriquet. This is not the “To Whom It
May Concern” of narrative poetry; it is not the interior monologue of lyrical
poetry. It is a direct address. By doing so, it positions the reader as both
outsider and insider, privy to found art yet guilt-ridden about reading
further.
Aside from address what appeals most
to me about this piece, what is in fact the genesis of my desire to recover
Richard Hugo, is the absolute brutal honesty of his writing. Lines like, “The
more popular I got / the softer the soft cry in my head: Don’t believe them”
speak right through me—perhaps only people with poetic temperaments are this
paranoid, but I doubt it. Thus, in 16 quick words Hugo articulates what it’s
like to exist as a member of a society, as well as explains that no amount of
social success can silence self-doubt.
Hugo again alludes to an act of
misogyny and/or sexism (“Ten successive days I alienated women / I liked best.
I told a coed why her poems were bad / (they weren’t)…”), making almost
comical—via parenthetical admission—his inability to understand women, to
understand how he interacts with women. Finally, he pokes fun at the classic,
empty gesture of the terminally desperate—“I’ll be all right”—by evoking it (“I’m
o.k. now”). Sure you are, pal. Sure you are. The poem then (still without
stanza breaks) shifts gears away from the Just
Checking In tone to larger, sociopolitical issues:
I'm back at the
primal source of poems: wind, sea
and rain, the market
and the salmon. Speaking
of the market,
they’re having a vital election here.
Save the market?
Tear it down? The forces of evil
maintain they’re
trying to save it too, obscuring,
of course, the
issue. The forces of righteousness,
me and my friends,
are praying for a storm, one
of those grim dark
rolling southwest downpours
that
will leave the electorate sane. (Hugo 3)
Here Hugo alludes,
most likely facetiously, to his reputation as a Regionalist poet, using this
reputation—from salmon poet to salmon protestor—to act as an ombudsman for his
home. Yet Hugo treads lightly, deftly switching without stanza breaks to
English department politics and then back to matters of his birth place:
……………………………….....I’m
the last poet
to teach the Roethke
chair under Heilman.
He's retiring after
23 years. Most of the old gang
is gone. Sol Katz is
aging. Who isn’t? It's close now
to the end of summer
and would you believe it
I've ignored the
Blue Moon. I did go to White Center,
you know, my home
town, and the people there,
many are the same,
but also aging, balking, remarkably
polite and calm. A
man whose name escapes me
said he thinks he
had known me, the boy who went alone
to Longfellow Creek
and who laughed and cried
for
no reason. (Hugo 3-4)
So subtle it’s easy
to miss, Hugo slips in this striking image of himself as a boy, sitting alone
along the side of a creek, weeping. While he tempers the pathos with the word
“laughed,” it’s hard not to take from this moment the scene of a sad, lonely
boy in Nowhere, WA.
The final lines of the poem take us to
modern day Seattle, a sprawling metropolis with big city problems:
…………......The city
is huge, maybe three quarters
of a million and
lots of crime. They are indicting
the former chief of
police. Sorry to be so rambling.
I eat lunch with J.
Hillis Miller, brilliant and nice
as they come, in the
faculty club, overlooking the lake,
much of it now
filled in. And I tour old haunts,
been twice to
Kapowsin. One trout. One perch. One poem.
Take
care, oh wisest of condors. Love. Dick. Thanks again.
However, despite the
changes in the city of his youth, Hugo seems to have found a sense of…shall we
call it happiness?...in the Emerald City. A sense of happiness so absolute he
just has to tell someone, tell everyone about it.
The
Greatest Generation
Can you write about
war without serving in a war? Can you write about alcoholism and loneliness
without having experienced them? Is Hugo’s 31/13 merely a series of well-crafted poems, or is a strategy for living? Should we
view Hugo as more than a Regionalist-Confessional poet, given his authority of
experience, when it comes to war and politics? What is political poetry? Work
that takes into account ethical, spiritual, social, and cultural
considerations? What makes a poet political? Can I characterize Hugo as a
political poet? If so, how? Perhaps the most political act is to write about
your own experiences, warts and all? (Well, maybe that’s more punk rock than it
is political, but we’re splitting hairs.) What does it mean to be a Regionalist
poet? In Richard Hugo, Gerstenberger
writes:
“When Hugo says, ‘I
am a regionalist and don’t care for writers who are not,’ he is talking about a
kind of poetry and not about regionalism per
se, as the rest of his comment makes clear. ‘I find it hard to write unless
I have sense of where the speaker is, and I have a hard time appreciating
writing if I sense the author has no clear idea of
where
the things in his work are happening’” (Gerstenberger 41).
Here Hugo seems to
be speaking about his position as a Northwest poet and his position as a
political/outsider poet. In doing so he explains why his letter poems need to
be located (and titled from) somewhere specific.
The
fact that Hugo was at Iowa in the early 70s when he suffered his breakdown is
significant in that Iowa City can be likened to Washington D.C.—the locus of
the poetry world. Thus, Hugo’s need to leave that universe and retreat back to
his home of Seattle, yet write to the very poets that define/pass through Iowa
City, is an interesting political act. Sure, it may simply be coincidence, a
series of actions. But, this backstory can be read as significant in light of
the form—letters—of the poems written shortly after his crack up. It’s as if
Hugo is in the heat of battle (once again), and needs help from his fellow
(poetry) soldiers to make sense of who he was, who he has become.
William
Stafford, who taught for many years in Oregon and was also considered a
Northwest poet, was one person Hugo identified with as a poetry soldier. In 31 Dreams and 13 Letters, Hugo pens a poem to Stafford, entitled “Letter to Stafford
from Polson” in which he creates a metaphor via a wolf character:
“………………………..…I
personally think
the
wolf wants to be one of us, to give up killing
and
hiding, the blue cold of the mountains, the cave
where
he must live alone. I think he wants to come down
and
be a citizen…”(Hugo 27).
Given Stafford’s
well-documented pacifism, and Hugo’s experience as a soldier, it’s easy to read
this poem as a commentary on the barbaric nature of man and society. The idea
that the violent, the predatory, are so because of their alienation.
Another important addressee in 31/13 is Charles Simic. One of Hugo’s
WWII missions consisted of bombing a town in Yugoslavia, the home of
then-three-year-old Charles Simic.
Years later, during
a conversation at a party, Hugo and Simic learned of each other’s role in this
incident. As Simic relates it:
“In 1972, I met one
of the men who bombed me in 1944. I had just made my first trip back to
Belgrade after almost twenty years. Upon my return to the States, I went to a
literary gathering in San Francisco, where I ran into the poet Richard Hugo in
a restaurant. We chatted, he asked me how I spent my summer, and I told him
that I had just returned from Belgrade…Without knowing my background, he
proceeded to draw on the tablecloth, among the breadcrumbs and wine stains, the
location of the main post office, the bridges over the Danube and Sava, and a
few other important landmarks. Without a clue as to what all this meant,
supposing that he had visited the city as a tourist at one time, I inquired how
much time he had spent in Belgrade….“I was never there,” he replied. “I only
bombed it a few times”… When, absolutely astonished, I blurted out that I was
there at the time and that it was me he was bombing, Hugo became very upset. In
fact, he was deeply shaken” (Simic 12-13).
Confessional poetry often gets tagged as being
narcissistic and solipsistic, work that functions
for the author
first, and society never. “Letter to
Simic from Boulder,” Hugo’s correspondence to Simic about their
introduction and the bombing, is not that kind of poem. Part apology, part
justification, part reaching out, “Letter
to Simic” is an important historical document, putting faces on the good
guys, the bad guys, and those caught in-between during a brutal, though
necessary, war:
Letter to Simic from Boulder
Dear Charles: And so
we meet once in San Francisco and I
learn I bombed you
long ago in Belgrade when you were five. ……………………………………………………….
I was interested
mainly in staying alive, that moment I don’t apologize
for the war, or what I was. I was ……………………………………………………………..
…………. ……….Nice to
meet you finally after
Once more, Hugo’s
humble tone creates a sense of intimacy and understatement. The small phrases
of the first stanza (“I remember” and “We missed”), with their truncated
syntax, operate as editorials, thereby establishing the content as recollection
not creation.
Hugo’s self-effacing point of view (“I
couldn’t hit my ass”; the final couplet of the piece) is both humorous and
clearly born out of the need to communicate to Simic that not only did Hugo not
want to hurt him, he couldn’t have if he tried. However, we know this is not
true, understand that it is a means of coping with the fact that he did hit
others, that he did kill innocent men, women, and children.
What I appreciate most about this poem
is the tenderness, the humanity, of the last six lines. Talk about well-crafted
verse. We have another strong image, that of a young, Yugoslavian boy sitting
in the sun, perhaps on a short, brick wall, waving at a young, American pilot.
But the pilot is scared. Sweating profusely, hands shaking, determined to do is
job, he hopes his bombs are not bombs but a child’s greatest wish—chocolate
fragments that bring pleasure instead of pain.
Making
Certain It Goes On
Richard Hugo died of
leukemia on October 22, 1982. He was 58 years old. Despite over a decade of
sobriety after years of flagrant alcohol abuse, his body failed him.
Nevertheless, his words remain: “Of what generally passes for
‘accomplishments,’ there were many: his books had twice been nominated for
National Book Awards; he won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller grant;…Hugo
was, in short, a major American poet” (Pinsker 96).
Considered
a strategy for writing (and reading) within the genre of confessionalism,
Lowell’s suggestion to write what really happened can be applied to the
Confessional poetry of Richard Hugo. However, in The Triggering Town Richard Hugo cautions beginning writers against
worrying about audience. He likens a reader to someone watching your every
move, and we all know how distracting that can be:
Never worry about
the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over
your shoulder, and you’ll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel
lonely? Good. Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry
about
communication.
If you want to communicate, use the telephone” (Hugo 5).
I have to assume
Hugo is being a little facetious with the last sentence, especially considering
how communicative
his work can be. However, point well taken. If writers are too concerned about
reception, then they might edit/censor/obfuscate what they are really trying to
articulate.
Unfortunately,
in my work, I find it impossible to completely ignore some sense of readership.
Allen Ginsberg once said (I’m paraphrasing), “You can write anything you want,
just don’t show it to anybody” and that can be liberating at times. Ultimately,
though, with my writing I’m trying to produce something, to document my
life—those poems not necessarily about me but of me.
A
few months ago I was speaking with my friend about why people—why we—write, and
we came up with two possibilities. The first, which is the one I posited, is to
be remembered or special or noticed or famous or some other ego-based reward.
While this need is rarely, if ever, publicly expressed, I find it hard to
believe that most artists aren’t working from some sort of desire to be
immortalized. It’s why I started writing, when I was teenage and maudlin and
angry and didn’t want to spend my life working in some factory making widgets.
I wanted to create art, to add to the world, to matter. Sounds kind of
preposterous now or, more accurately, megalomaniacal. Though I still believe
it.
My
friend, on the other hand, writes out of a need to express himself. Not
necessarily because he has important and/or painful things to communicate but
because he has things to say. This makes sense, too, especially since most
writers I know are quite observant and slightly shy. Another favorite quote of
mine, I believe by Flannery O’Connor, reads, “How do I know what I think until
I see what I’ve said?” For me, and for my friend, and maybe for poets like
Richard Hugo, writing poetry is just that—it’s the best way we know to
communicate what we think about how we feel:
“When you start to
write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware
of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth
must conform to music. If you believe the first, you are making your job very
difficult, and you are not only limiting the writing of poems to something done
only by the very witty and clever, such as Auden, you are weakening the
justification for creative writing programs. So you can take that attitude if
you want, but you are jeopardizing my livelihood as well as your chances of
writing a good poem. If the second attitude is right, then I still have a job.
Let’s pretend it is right because I need the money. Besides, if you feel truth must
conform to music, those of us who find life bewildering and who don't know what
things mean, but love the sounds of words enough to fight through draft after
draft of a poem, can go on writing—try to stop us” (Hugo 3-4).
Sources
Allen, Michael S. We Are Called Human: The Poetry of Richard Hugo. Fayetteville, The
University of Arkansas Press, 1982.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. “Literature as Equipment for
Living.” (Berkeley: UC Press, 1973.) 293-304.
Burt, Stephen. The Believer. “Close Calls With Nonsense: How to Read, and Perhaps
Enjoy, Very New Poetry.” Vol. 2, No. 5 (2003), 16-24).
Gardner, Thomas and Hugo, Richard. Contemporary Literature. “An Interview
with Richard Hugo.” Vol. 22, No. 2 (1981), 139-152.
Gerstenberger,
Donna. Richard Hugo. Boise: Boise
State University, 1983.
http://en.wikipedia.org
Hugo, Richard. Making Certain It Goes On. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1984.
Hugo, Richard. The Real West Marginal Way: A
Poet’s Autobiography. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986.
Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979.
Ostriker, Alicia. American Poetry Review. “Beyond Confession: The Poetics of
Postmodern Witness.” Mar/Apr 2001.
Ostriker, Alicia. Colburn. "That Story: The Changes
of Anne Sexton." 1988.
Pinsker, Sanford. Three Pacific Northwest Poets: William Stafford, Richard Hugo, and
David Wagoner. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.
Plotz, John. Harvard Advocate. “An Interview with John Berryman.” Boston, 1968.
Rosenthal, M.L. The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II. New
York:
Oxford University Press, 1967.
Rosenthal, M.L. The Nation. "Poetry as Confession," September 19, 1959.
Simic, Charles. A Fly in the Soup. Ann Arbor: University
Of Michigan Press, 2000.
Wordsworth, William. Prefaces and Prologues. Vol. XXXIX. The Harvard Classics. “Preface
to the Lyrical Ballads.” New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14;
Bartleby.com, 2001.
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