The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

by Richard Hugo

  Some traditionalists seem to think that forms exist to be solved for their own sake, as if the poet is an engineer. That’s just foolish. If a poet finds himself solving the problems of a form simply for the sake of challenge, he has the wrong form. After you’ve written for a long time, to do it in the forms at all is a little like cheating because you are getting help. But the forms can be important, and when Roethke felt himself going dry he always returned to them. For some students, the exercise will not work because the form is not theirs. They need another or, in some cases, none. Though I can’t defend it, I believe that when the poem is coming on with imaginative honesty, there is some correspondence of the form to psychic rhythms in the poet.

  The second half of the Roethke final usually consisted of one question, a lulu like, “What should the modern poet do about his ancestors?” “Do you mean his blood ancestors or the poets who preceded him?” I asked. “Just answer the question,” Roethke growled.

  Roethke could read so effectively that he could set a student’s mind rigidly in favor of a poem for years. I came to realize that “The Golden Echo” is not good Hopkins, or even much good for that matter, despite Roethke’s fine reading of it. On the other hand, “Easter 1916” still remains a favorite of mine. I think of it as possibly as good a poem as we have in the language, and it was Roethke’s reading of it that first prejudiced me.

  Just calling attention to what the student is hearing but doesn’t know he’s hearing can be a revelation. A student may love the sound of Yeats’s “Stumbling upon the blood dark track once more” and not know that the single-syllable word with a hard consonant ending is a unit of power in English, and that’s one reason “blood dark track” goes off like rifle shots. He’s hearing a lot of other things too that I won’t go into here. O.K. Simple stuff. Easily observed. But how few people notice it. The young poet is too often paying attention to the big things and can’t be bothered with little matters like that. But little matters like that are what make and break poems, and if a teacher can make a poet aware of it, he has given him a generous shove in the only direction. In poetry, the big things tend to take care of themselves.

  When I started teaching at the age of forty I was terrified. It was bad enough to hold Roethke up as an ideal and to hope to imitate his methods and techniques rather than my own, but to be told my first day on campus that I was Leslie Fiedler’s replacement was a bit too much. I hope I’ve found my own way of doing things in the classroom, but if I have I didn’t find it easily. I found it much easier to shake Roethke’s influence as a poet than as a teacher. Only in the last few years have I dropped a phony, blustery way of teaching that was never mine but that I assume was his, though twenty-five years of memory can kink a lot of cable.

  Roethke’s life would have been easier today in the classroom. Students are far better writers now than we were then. Jim Wright was one of the few students who was writing well in Roethke’s classes. I have at least six who are excellent and another dozen good enough to appear in most literary magazines. For one thing, they’ve had much more exposure to good poems than we ever did. They work hard and have no illusions about writing being easy. I don’t think poems come easier for them either, just sooner. They seem to absorb methods of execution faster and to assimilate technique faster than most of us could then.

  Mark Strand remarked recently in Montana that American poetry could not help but get better and better, and I’m inclined to agree. I doubt that we’ll have the one big figure of the century the way other nations do, Yeats, Valéry. Giants are not the style of the society, though the wind knows there are enough people who want to create them, and not just a few who want to be them. I think we’ll end up with a lot of fine poets, each doing his thing. There are a lot of bright and substantial young people writing and a lot of good poetry-writing teachers available to help them, poets who earned the title the hard way and who are generous enough to pass on all that they learned for themselves. Donald Justice and Marvin Bell at Iowa, A. R. Ammons at Cornell, John Logan at Buffalo, David Wagoner at the University of Washington are just a few who come to mind.

  Then there’s that banal, tiresome question: can writing be taught? Yes it can and no it can’t. Ultimately the most important things a poet will learn about writing are from himself in the process. A good teacher can save a young poet years by simply telling him things he need not waste time on, like trying to will originality or trying to share an experience in language or trying to remain true to the facts (but that’s the way it really happened). Roethke used to mumble: “Jesus, you don’t want to say that.” And you didn’t but you hadn’t yet become ruthless enough to create. You still felt some deep moral obligation to “reality” and “truth,” and of course it wasn’t moral obligation at all but fear of yourself and your inner life.

  Despite Roethke’s love of verbal play, he could generate little enthusiasm for what passes as experimentation and should more properly be called fucking around. Real experimentation is involved in every good poem because the poet searches for ways to unlock his imagination through trial and error. Quest for a self is fundamental to poetry. What passes for experimentation is often an elaborate method of avoiding one’s feelings at all costs. The process prohibits any chance the poet has to create surrogate feelings, a secondary kind of creativity but in most poems all the poet can settle for. 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. It makes little difference to the reader, since a good poem sounds meant enough to be believed.

  “Each newcomer feels obliged to do something else, forgetting that if he himself is somebody he will necessarily do that something else,” said Valéry. And Roethke told students to “write like somebody else.” There are those usual people who try desperately to appear unusual and there are unusual people who try to appear usual. Most poets I’ve met are from the latter and much smaller group. William Stafford, at his best as good as we have, is a near-perfect example. It doesn’t surprise me at all when the arrogant wild man in class turns in predictable, unimaginative poems and the straight one is doing nutty and promising work. If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival.

  Roethke would probably take issue with that. He had all sorts of odd notions about what makes a poet. Once he told me seriously that we, he and I, being physically large, presented a kind of presence to others, and the pressure we felt from this role dictated by our physical proportions was fundamental to creating poems. He didn’t put it that way but that’s what he was saying.

  Other ideas deserved more serious consideration. Roethke was fond of quoting Rimbaud’s idea of the “systematic derangement of the senses,” but he always left off the “systematic.” When I was in grad school in ’49 and ’50, the smartest faculty member I knew at the time told me he believed that omission to be important. He felt that Roethke might actually cultivate madness because he believed it essential to writing. That may or may not be true. I suppose it could be argued that all madness is self-created. But what a great compliment to Roethke that people could believe it of him. How many great artists, including Yeats, could be credited with risking their very being for their work? Some poets do burn themselves for their work, like Dylan Thomas, but most prepare themselves for the long haul.

  I vaguely recall a class in ’48 when Roethke defended madness as important to creativity. I disagree plenty. Madness is crippling anywhere but in art where it belongs and can always find a home. It is obvious that all art is screwy and it is equally obvious that most men who create it are not. They are often “silly like us.” Some of them—William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens—aren’t even particularly silly. What is remarkable is that men handicapped by periods of mental aberration can still fight through and create, while others are simply incapacitated, sometimes forever.

  But then we know almost nothin
g about creativity, where it comes from, what causes it. People who profess to be astounded that Wallace Stevens could be a corporate executive and still write are really saying, “How could he be a poet when he’s not like me?” There are a lot of poets who aren’t like you, even if you’re a poet.

  Most creative-writing teachers in Roethke’s day worth mentioning were formalists, and formality was an end in itself. Obligation to play “by the rules” remained paramount. As a teacher Roethke stood virtually alone at the time. For Roethke the rules were simply one way to help a poet get to the gold. Certain areas he wisely left alone. I think he instinctively knew that fool’s gold is what fools end up with, and a teacher can do nothing about that.

  In one area Roethke lacked sophistication at moments. He was far too competitive for his own good, and while I’m far more competitive than I admit, I believe that it is only in periods when you can transcend your competitive instincts that you can write. A sound analogy could be made with hitting a baseball. If you concentrate on beating a particular pitcher, your chances of hitting him are not as good as they are if you can ignore him until he disappears and you can concentrate on the ball. And your chances of writing a poem are greatly reduced if you are trying to beat Robert Lowell or T. S. Eliot or anybody else. Roethke’s love of prizes, rave reviews, and applause would sometimes prevent him from emphasizing to the student the real reward of writing—that special private way you feel about your poems, the way you feel when you are finishing a poem you like.

  Yet he knew it, and in rare moments it showed. Once he said to me, that nervous undergrad who wanted the love of the world to roar out every time he put a word down, “Don’t worry about publishing. That’s not important.” He might have added, only the act of writing is. It’s flattering to be told you are better than someone else, but victories like that do not endure. What endures are your feelings about your work. You wouldn’t trade your poems for anybody’s. To do that you would also have to trade your life for his, which means living a whole new complex of pain and joy. One of those per lifetime is enough.

  5

  Nuts and Bolts

  THAT’S WHAT these are. Nuts and bolts. My nuts and bolts. For me they helped, or once helped, and some still do. I’m stating them as rules, but of course they are no more than suggestions—I find the axiomatic tone preferable to a lot of qualifiers. If these work for you, good.

  Use number 2 pencils. Get a good pencil sharpener and sharpen about twenty pencils. When one is dull, grab another.

  Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed.

  Pen or pencil, write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction. When I said use number 2 pencils, I was really saying that when I use number 2 pencils I feel good putting words on paper.

  Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white paper seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page? The lines tend to want words. Blank paper begs to be left alone. The best notebooks I’ve found are National 43–581.

  Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it.

  When young it’s normal to fear losing a good line or phrase and never finding anything comparable again. Carry a small pocket-size notebook and jot down lines and phrases as they occur. This may or may not help you write good poems, but it can help reduce your anxiety.

  Make your first line interesting and immediate. Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things. When the poem starts, things should already have happened. (Note: White unlined paper gives you the feeling nothing has happened.) If Yeats had begun “Leda and the Swan” with Zeus spotting Leda and getting an erection, Yeats would have been writing a report.

  When rewriting, write the entire poem again. If something has gone wrong deep in the poem, you may have taken a wrong turn earlier. The next time through the poem you may spot the wrong path you took. If you take another, when you reach the source of your dissatisfaction it may no longer be there. To change what’s there is difficult because it is boring. To find the right other is exciting.

  If you want to change what’s there, use the same words and play with the syntax:

  This blue lake still has resolve.

  This lake still blue with resolve

  By playing with the syntax we’ve dropped a weak verb and left the sentence open with a chance for a stronger one. But maybe you can’t find a stronger verb, or you still want to end the sentence:

  This lake’s still blue with resolve.

  You may object that the meaning has changed, that you are no longer saying what you want to say. Never want to say anything so strongly that you give up the option of finding something better. If you have to say it, you will.

  Sometimes the wrong word isn’t the one you think it is but another close by. If annoyed with something in the poem, look to either side of it and see if that isn’t where the trouble is. You can seldom be certain of the source of your annoyance, only that you are annoyed. Sometimes you may feel dissatisfied without justification. The poem may be as good as it will get. Often a word is not right but very close: dog—hog, gill—gull, hen—hun.

  When you feel a poem is finished, print it. The time needed to print a word is a hair longer than the time needed to write it. In that extra moment, you may make some lovely changes. Had Auden printed his poems he might not have needed the happy accident of the typist inadvertently typing “ports” for “poets,” a mistake that helped a poem considerably.

  Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.

  Put a typed copy on the wall and read it now and then. Often you know something is wrong but out of fear or laziness you try to ignore it, to delude yourself that the poem is done. If the poem is on the wall where you and possibly others can see it, you may feel pressure to work on it some more.

  Use “love” only as a transitive verb for at least fifteen years.

  End more than half your lines and more than two-thirds your sentences on words of one syllable.

  Don’t use the same subject in two consecutive sentences.

  Don’t overuse the verb “to be.” (I do this myself.) It may force what would have been the active verb into the participle and weaken it.

  Once out of nature I shall never be taking

  My bodily form from any natural thing.

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths are making

  Of hammered gold and gold enameling…

  If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer.

  What stunned the dirt into noise?

  Ask the mole, he knows.

  If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time.

  Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum: one.

  No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.

  Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.

  Use any noun that is yours, even if it has only local use. “Salal” is the name of a bush that grows wild in the Pacific Northwest. It is often not found in dictionaries, but I’ve known that word long as I can remember. I had to check with the University of Washington Botany Department on the spelling when I first used it in a poem. It is a word, and it is my word. That’s arrogant, isn’t it? But necessary. Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.

  Beware certain words that seem necessitated by grammar to make things clear but dilute the drama of the statement. These are words of temporality, causality, and opposition, and often indicate a momentary lack of faith in the imagination.

  Temporality:
meanwhile, while, as (at the same time as), during, and (implying “and at the same time”)

  But no one comes

  and the girl disappears behind folding doors

  while the bus grinds and lurches away.

  No one comes.

  The girl disappears behind folding doors.

  The bus grinds and lurches away.

  Here, the words “and” and “while” point up a relation that can be provided by the mind. “While” simply means that two things happen at the same time. Without “while” they happen at the same time. What was funny about “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” was the superimposition of the words on the screen over a shot of the ranch. We are told what was being demonstrated. It would be boring if not maddening to live in a world where all things were labeled. Where “house” would be stamped on a house.

  In my skull