December 15: The City, "The Triggering Town," Richard Hugo, New Cartoon

Once upon a time--of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve--old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house.  It was cold, bleak, biting weather:  foggy withal:  and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement-stones to warm them.  The City clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already:  it had not been light all day:  and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighboring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air.  The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.  To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The scene above is Charles Dickens describing one of his favorite subjects:  London.  Dickens lived the majority of his life in the city, with brief sojourns in Paris and a couple of trips to Italy and the United States.  But, when push came to shove, he always returned to his beloved town.  Much of the stereotypical images we have of Great Britain come straight from the novels of Dickens.  London was Dickens' triggering town.

The poet Richard Hugo first published his book The Triggering Town:  Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing in 1979.  I first encountered Hugo's text in a poetry workshop I took as a grad student.  I expected writing that was dry and academic, a poet expounding on issues of rhythm and meter and prosody.  Hugo's first paragraph proved my expectations wrong:

I often make these remarks to a beginning poetry-writing class.

 never be a poet until you realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong.  It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you.  Every moment, I am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like me.  But I hope you learn to write like you.  In a sense, I hope I don't teach you how to write but how to teach yourself to write.  At all times keep your crap detector on.  If I say something that helps, good.  If what I say is of no help, let it go.  Don't start arguments.  They are futile and take us away from our purpose.  As Yeats noted, your important arguments are with yourself.  If you don't agree with me, don't listen.  Think about something else.

Richard Hugo and his crap detector were refreshing changes for graduate school.  Hugo gave me the right to listen to his advice and my instructors'  advice, absorb what worked for me and my writing, and dismiss the rest as interesting but useless.  The thing about Hugo's book is that most of his wisdom is right on target, for beginning and experienced poets alike.  I have kept returning to his text through the years, and I continue to learn from it.

The title of his book comes from his second chapter.  In it, Hugo says, "...The poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.  The reason for that, I believe, is that the stable set of knowns that the poem needs to anchor on is less stable at home than in the town you've just seen for the first time...You must take emotional possession of the town and so the town must be one that, for personal reasons I can't understand, you feel is your own."  This "triggering town" is the basis, the launch pad, for a poem or short story or, in Dickens' case, novel.  Whether Dickens was living in England or France or Italy, he kept returning to London in his work.

Hugo gives other practical writing rules to follow (or ignore), as well:

• Use a number of pencils.
• Don't write with a pen.
• Pen or pencil, write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction.
• Write in an hard-covered notebook with green lined pages.
• Don't erase.  Cross out rapidly and violently, never with consideration if you can help it.
• Make your first line interesting and immediate.
• Use "love" only as a transitive verb for at least fifteen years.
• No semicolons.  Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation.  Besides, they are ugly.

You get the idea.  Hugo is opinionated about a lot of things when it comes to writing poetry.  I don't follow all of his rules, but he gives me the freedom to realize that each poet is as unique as a fingerprint; if I want to use a semicolon, I can.  If I agree with Hugo, I can avoid them.  The whole book is one great lesson on how to be yourself as a poet and person.

 Richard Hugo is a great friend to all writers.  His book is a triggering town for me, a place to which I keep returning when I want to live in Hugo's neighborhood and be reminded of the streets he travelled, the verbs and nouns in his backyard.

Saint Marty plans on having a cup of tea with Hugo this afternoon.  Maybe some blueberry muffins, too. 

Confessions of Saint Marty