The inconsolable Mr. Hugo

Poet Richard Hugo was a native of Seattle, or technically, White Center, an unincorporated neighborhood familiarly known as “Rat City.” White Center is a tough, rundown area of immigrants and low-cost housing, a place feared by many Seattleitesas a lawless no-man’s-land of bars and gaming parlors prowled by gangs and prone to random gunfire. In Richard Hugo’s youth, the 1930s, it wasn’t much different–a hardscrabble place where the poor lived.

White Center permeates Hugo’s poetry. It haunts hi...