The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

by Richard Hugo

  The examples used are either made up or taken from poems submitted in my classes at the University of Montana. My thanks to the students for permission to use their work.

  6

  In Defense of Creative-Writing Classes

  I BELIEVE worthwhile things can’t be justified. I would never try to justify sex, fishing, baseball, or Mozart. My grandfather used to say that some whiskey is better than others, but there is no bad whiskey. That might well apply to sex and Mozart. They seem to be in a class of their own.

  Creative-writing classes seem better put in a class with fishing and baseball. I’ve had bad fishing, I’ve seen and played bad baseball, and I’ve seen and taught bad creative-writing classes.

  Let’s put one matter aside. I’m not getting into some semantic rhubarb about the term “creative writing.” Call it “imaginary writing” or whatever you want. It is called “creative writing” in most places, and you know what I’m talking about.

  It’s not new. For around 400 years it was a requirement of every student’s education. In the English-speaking world, the curriculum for grammar and high school students included the writing of “verses.” In the nineteenth century, when literary education weakened or was dropped from elementary and secondary education, colleges picked it up, all but the creative writing. Creative writing was missing for 100 years or so, but in the past 40 years it has returned.

  It was never really missing, just missing from educational institutions. Writing is hard and writers need help. Pound was a creative-writing teacher for Eliot, Williams, Hemingway, and Yeats. Yeats, by Pound’s admission, was Pound’s creative-writing teacher in return. Nothing odd about that. If we creative-writing teachers are doing our job, we are learning from the students. If we are writers as well as teachers, we are also stealing from them, and they from us. As long as people write, there will be creative-writing teachers. It’s nice to be on the payroll again after a century or more of going unemployed.

  So, if any defense is needed, it is the defense of creative writing in school, specifically, if we are speaking of college, in the English department, where creative writing seems to find itself. Creative writing belongs in the university for the same reason other subjects do: because people will pay to study them. If you challenge the right of creative writing to be in the university, to be fair you’d have to challenge a long list of other subjects in the catalogue. (Not a bad idea, but let’s not wreck the economy beyond repair.)

  The English department seemed a logical place for creative writing, perhaps because it was already involved with other writing, critical and expository. It can be argued that all writing is creative writing, since if one is writing the way one should, one does not know what will be on the page until it is there. Discovery remains the ideal. Another reason for putting creative writing under English is the assumption that reading and writing are closely related. It is even assumed that reading naturally precedes writing, though common sense tells us that in the beginning that could not have been the case.

  From experience and observation, I’ve come to believe reading has as serious a relation to writing as do any number of activities such as staring pensively out the window or driving to Laramie. A very serious relation at times. At other times no relation at all. The writing of a poem or story is a creative act, and by “creative” I mean it contains and feeds off its own impulse. It is difficult and speculative to relate that impulse to any one thing other than itself. Please understand, I’m speaking of the impulse to write and not the finished work.

  Sometimes I talk about the triggering subject, about locating a home for the impulse to the poem. I’m trying to let students know that like Baudelaire’s albatross, our chances of flying off to the beautiful selves we always were increase if we start out with our talons on deck, even if we must endure the teasing and ridicule of those coarse Philistine sailors. I’m convinced that a genuine impulse to write is so deep and volatile it needs no triggering device other than the one it already has. When not writing, a writer may search for a triggering device, and literature is one of several places to find it. But the urge to search came from need, and that remains mysterious, evidently complete in itself.

  So here we are, in the English department, in some ways privileged, in others the victims of bigotry surprisingly unsubtle, coming from educated colleagues.

  And we are privileged. Let me cite some evidence. For about 100 years we weren’t here and no one seemed to miss us. I’ll clear some of the air right now by admitting I believe in the traditional teaching of literature and I believe that the teaching of literature is the most important function of an English department. I don’t know if the present Ph.D. system is the best way to prepare teachers of literature. It seems to have worked well in many cases, and I’m not imaginative enough to dream serious alternatives. One thing it does not do is teach people to write. When I read some academic writing I marvel that as common and everyday as language is, it would have the effrontery to get in the way of all that thinking. I’ve seen sentences that defy comprehension written by people with doctorates in English from our best universities. So have you. And I doubt that academic writing will improve until academics believe Valéry, who said he couldn’t think of anything worse than being right. In much academic writing, clarity runs a poor second to invulnerability.

  One of our privileges as creative writers is that we are vulnerable people who hold jobs in an environment where self-protection is a way of life. Our vulnerability can be enjoyable, perhaps even enviable. In some ways it is phony. I confess I’m not nearly as naïve as I sometimes appear, and the innocence feigned by some creative writers approaches being offensive. Our vulnerability can also be unhealthy, the social counterpart of the kind of exposure some report to the police.

  Not only does the Ph.D. system graduate many people whose writing approaches the disgraceful, there is contempt for good writing among some scholars. When I was in graduate school it was common to hear a published scholar who wrote clearly referred to as a popularizer.

  Scholars seem to assume that if you can read you can write. It’s sad to see someone with a fresh Ph.D. coast for a few years, understandably after such a grueling period of work, then embark on a book. It is a struggle because the scholar doesn’t realize one simple thing about writing: it is like shooting a basketball. You’ve got to stay in shape and practice to do it well. It is not a natural reward of study, and having an education does not mean you can write well whenever you want.

  We creative writers are privileged because we can write declarative sentences, and we can write declarative sentences because we are less interested in being irrefutably right than we are in the dignity of language itself. I find words beautiful that ring with psychic truth and sound meant. If such a choice were possible, I would far rather mean what I say than say what I mean. To use language well requires self-sacrifice, even giving up pet ideas. George Garrett had no small point when he proposed that all literature teachers be made to take a course in creative writing: “they might at least learn a measure of common humility.”

  We are privileged because we are supported by those who are threatened by our cavalier intellectuality. Scholars look for final truths they will never find. Creative writers concern themselves with possibilities that are always there to the receptive.

  And we are privileged in other ways. The rewards of our teaching are relatively immediate and tangible. I often find ex-students published in literary magazines. At Iowa where I visited for a year, Mike Ryan and Maura Stanton, who both later won the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest, were in my class—though I’m sure they learned little from me that year. James Welch, Dave McElroy, and Rick DeMarinis have been in my classes at Montana. If I’m corrupt enough to give myself some undeserved credit, it is because pride blinds. I would guess that around forty of my ex-students are now publishing. Many creative-writing teachers can list far more than I can.

  Compare that with the lot of the academic professor. I mean
a fine academic professor, a whiz in class, one who brings an energy to teaching born out of love of the material, whose stimulating lectures ignite in students more than they knew they could know. Unless that professor is lucky enough to be in one of a dozen or so schools, he has at best a general sense of what has happened in the minds of his students. The tangible evidence is slight. Years from now one may take a Ph.D. somewhere and write a fine critical book. One. Maybe two. In a lifetime of giving much, the good academic professor will finally realize little in return.

  Side note: Teachers, like policemen, firemen, and service personnel, should be able to retire after twenty years with full pension. Our risks may be different, but they are real. In twenty years most teachers have given their best.

  I’m not sure the sudden popularity of creative-writing courses is a privilege. It may be our ruination. It is becoming a sore point in English departments. The enrollment in creative writing increases and the enrollment in literature courses is going down. I’m not sure why and I’m not sure the trend is healthy.

  There’s more than a little truth in the explanations offered by some academic professors. They cite the increasing narcissism of students, the egocentric disregard of knowledge, the laziness, the easy good grades to be had in the writing courses. And in creative writing, especially undergraduate classes, we get more than our share of ego trippers who don’t want to write any more than they want to read. Certainly in most of our academically exclusive schools we find creative writing missing or offered as a grudging gesture. And in those schools as well as in many of our large state universities, creative writers suffer a status something like Japanese prisoners in World War II.

  As for grades, if anyone will tell me how to grade creative writing, I’ll be grateful. The only people who seem to feel creative writing should be graded are administrators far removed from the firing line. Many creative-writing teachers give high grades for a very good reason. If you write you know how difficult it is. A lot of people teaching freshman composition can’t write much better than the students and have no idea how hard good writing is. Another reason for high grades in creative writing is that most teachers of creative writing disdain grades and are trying to tell others what they should realize themselves—grades don’t mean a thing. When a student asks me for a grade I try to let him know I don’t care what his grade is and he shouldn’t either. I’ll give you an A if you promise to feel cheap. But that’s naïve, I fear, trying to improve human nature.

  Other reasons may account for the dwindling popularity of lit courses and the increased demand for creative writing. Some lie in the way the mind reacts to different forms of knowledge. For example, here are two pieces of knowledge, one literary, the other biological.

  1. In John Dryden’s “An Essay on Dramatic Poesy,” toward the end of his long discourse, Neander says to Crites, “As for your instance of Ben Jonson, who, you say, writ exactly without the help of rhyme; you are to remember ’tis only an aid to a luxuriant fancy, which his was not: as he did not want imagination, so none ever said he had much to spare. Neither was verse then refined so much to be an help to that age, as it is to ours. Thus then the second thoughts being usually the best, as receiving the maturest digestion from judgment, and the last and most mature product of those thoughts being artful and laboured verse, it may well be inferred, that verse is a great help to a luxuriant fancy; and this is what that argument which you opposed was to evince.”

  2. All groupers are born females and later become males.

  Which offers the most interesting possibilities? For the scholar? For the critic? For a poet? For a stand-up comedian? When you read the two pieces above, some of you may have become poets for a moment. A few may have become comedians. If you were still a scholar or a critic, you may have had some regrets. If you felt excited about the imagistic and metaphorical possibilities suggested by the odd biological history of groupers, you might head for a creative-writing course. When universities were smaller and more exclusive, you were either ignored or forced to adjust. You studied Dryden, and, if you weren’t interested, feigned interest or you got out. Today the department budget in most state universities is based on enrollment statistics. A department may not get more budget line positions if the enrollment goes up, but it might very well lose them when enrollment goes down. The professional administrator is everywhere, and English departments are not above using statistics swelled by people who find that with some subjects the difference between knowing and not knowing is simply too small to bother about. It is better than going under to accommodate people for whom knowing is less fun at times than guessing.

  It hardly endears creative writing to the average academic that he has spent years of hard work getting the Ph.D. degree, involving himself deeply in scholarship and criticism, and now his position depends on the presence of people who don’t care about his expertise. It may get worse. A lot of creative writers, students and teachers, don’t help the situation. They don’t give the academic, who often has much to offer them, a chance. There is hostility, and in some universities it is bad.

  Happily, Montana has very little hostility between creative writers and academics. An occasional nasty remark, usually disguised and sometimes intended as a joke, and some rather bizarre treatment of graduate creative-writing students by a couple of isolated academics is about as far as it has gone. That is not the case everywhere. But we have a tradition of creative writing that goes back many years. Walter van Tilburg Clark taught creative writing for years at Montana. My first creative-writing teacher at the University of Washington, Grant Redford, a fine teacher with a wretched class, came from the University of Montana. Faculty and students, creative writers have enjoyed full status here.

  At the risk of sounding self-righteous, I’ve found that in schools where such hostility runs deep, it usually originates with the academics. The old explanations are easy to hop on: the professor of literature always dreamed of being a poet, academics are jealous of the psychic energy of writers, academics feel that creative writers don’t work hard enough. Whatever there is to these explanations, I find them wanting. I’ve come to believe that the hostility between academics and creative writers is simply the result of small-mindedness on both parts. It is failure to recognize and grant each other’s worth. It is a xenophobia not worthy of people who call themselves educated.

  I started teaching at the age of forty. In the fourteen years I’ve been at it I’ve talked to many students and faculty, and I’ve reluctantly come to a few conclusions. It hurts to state why I believe students are turning away from literature courses because even at fifty-four maturity is not my strong point, and polemic tends to make me either nervous or bored and withdrawn. I do not like a fight, and I hope what I say doesn’t start one.

  A young recent Ph.D. asked me to attend his class to discuss some of my poems with his students. I like the young man and was pleased he wanted to teach my work. It was a good class. The teacher had done his work well. That was obvious from the enthusiastic attention the students brought to the work being discussed and the intelligent way they made points.

  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 a writer sits alone in a room and makes things up.

  Understand this is a bright young man. A good teacher. He has a Ph.D. in literature from one of our very best universities. Where did he get such ideas about writers? The answer is obvious. He got them from the same place he got his education.

  One of my reluctant co
nclusions is that the Ph.D. system tends to train people to teach literature as if it is some grand, mysterious system that has little or nothing to do with human existence. Obviously enough good teachers come out of the system to justify it. But I fear such a system attracts its fair share of people who are eager to put knowledge between themselves and their lives. To put it bluntly, dull people. As the punch line of the old joke goes, “I’ve been going through my notes and it turns out I have read Hamlet.”