by Richard Hugo
A. R. McCollister
When a man is in the middle of the road I can give a man a drink of water and feed a man. I have done. I only lost homes in my lifetime. These rabbit hutches I’m taking with me and other planks that is loose and lumber. I will have to unbolt the planks to the rabbit house unless you give me a good price for them like you said this afternoon. That money will go to my mother. The Welfare will not advance any until the 15th of the month but I’m going to have the trailer before that. If I had only known what they was like a day or two ago things might have been different because I do play around, Mr. D., but a poor man has to do the best he can.
You can almost smell the man’s fear in the words. What an act of courage it must have been writing these. How little that poor twisted man had, and a terrifying billion-dollar corporation was taking it away. And what sudden bursts of eloquence reserved usually it seems for primitives. “I only lost homes in my lifetime.” T .S. Eliot said “Bad poets imitate. Good poets steal.” If not stealing that line means I’m a bad poet, so be it. I couldn’t do it, though years later I changed it to use in a long poem called “Last Words From Maratea”: “Green in your lifetime/You lost nothing but homes.”
As for The Admiral and his wife, their departure was something like it is in the poem. The Admiral claimed he owned property in the Monroe Valley, north and somewhat east of Seattle, about thirty miles away. The company provided a truck and driver, and in a scene that must have been agonizing, The Admiral threw worthless things onto the truck, old pieces of dirty rags, hunks of wood, maybe even stones, anything that might show a hostile world that he was not destitute, that he had the pride of possession still. No one mentioned what became of the rabbits.
The driver drove The Admiral and his wife and their strange possessions to the Monroe Valley. There for hours The Admiral directed the driver to this place and that. Is this it? Yes. No. Wait. That’s not it. Down the road farther. I think this is it. Finally at nine or after, the driver, tired and hungry, simply announced: This is it. He left The Admiral, his wife, and the odd items, worthless except in The Admiral’s mind, by the side of a remote country road in the dark. That was the last anyone I knew ever heard of them.
Although it didn’t impress me at the time, it seems important now that no one at Boeing questioned the writing of the poem. It seemed an unstated fact that people like The Admiral and conditions like eviction are what prompt poems. It was the only time a lot of people I didn’t know at Boeing were aware I was a poet, and certainly the first time they’d read a poem I’d written. I was surprised at the response, the sophisticated reception. I’m not saying Boeing didn’t have its share of Philistines. All groups do. I’m saying that there’s a broader base to humanity than I’d been aware of.
I suppose I haven’t done anything but demonstrated how I came to write a poem, shown what turns me on, or used to, and how, at least for me, what does turn me on lies in a region of myself that could not be changed by the nature of my employment. But it seems important (to me even gratifying) that the same region lies untouched and unchanged in a lot of people, and in my innocent way I wonder if it is reason for hope. Hope for what? I don’t know. Maybe hope that humanity will always survive civilization.
But the original question remains even though I’ve tried to answer it and some other question it implies. Let’s drop the phrase “as a poet.” As a person, I simply like teaching in a university better than working in an aircraft factory. The rumors have stopped. The three people who hated me for being a poet have moved on, and the remaining ones know I lead a rather solitary life, certainly not a swinging one. Here, I am close to poetry’s only consistent audience. I like students because they are not far removed from being children, and that is a bond between us. What adult would dream of writing a poem? And teaching gives me a personal satisfaction no other job ever did.
But no job accounts for the impulse to find and order those bits and pieces of yourself that can come out only in the most unguarded moments, in the wildest, most primitive phrases we shout alone at the mirror. And no job modifies that impulse or destroys it. In a way The Admiral speaks for all poets, maybe for all people, at least a lot of us. We won’t all disappear on a remote country road in the Monroe Valley, but like The Admiral and his wife we are all going into the dark. Some of us hope that before we do we have been honest enough to scream back at the fates. Or if we never did it ourselves, that someone, derelict or poet, did it for us once in some euphonic way our inadequate capacity for love did not deny our hearing.
* From Brewster Ghiselin, Against the Circle (New York: Dutton, 1946), p. 60. Reprinted with permission of the author.
* The reader may object that here I’m limiting the young poet’s chance of writing a good poem early, and that is true. Letting the birds hold things together is perfectly good technique. But to prepare a young writer for the long haul, I believe it is better to emphasize style (his or her way of writing) as the binding force and to promote faith in the imagination. If it means making more problems for the moment, it may result in fewer later on. Creating artificial problems early can help the poet through major problems later. No need to worry it will ever get too easy. Plenty of problems will remain.
* From Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 21. Reprinted with permission of author.
* From A Run of Jacks (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1961), p. 36. Reprinted with permission of the author.
* From Good Luck in Cracked Italian (New York and Cleveland: World Publishing, 1969), pp. 43–44. Reprinted with permission of the author.
* From Good Luck in Cracked Italian, pp. 37–38.
* From Good Luck in Cracked Italian, pp. 35–36.
* From Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965), p. 49. Reprinted with permission of the author.