The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

by Richard Hugo

"Richard Hugo's free-swinging, go-for-it remarks on poetry and the teaching of poetry are exactly what are needed in classrooms and in the world."―James Dickey Richard Hugo was that rare phenomenon of American letters―a distinguished poet who was also an inspiring teacher. The Triggering Town is Hugo's now-classic collection of lectures, essays, and reflections, all "directed toward helping with that silly, absurd, maddening, futile, enormously rewarding activity: writing poems." Anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, will benefit greatly from Hugo's sayd, playful, profound insights and advice concerning the mysteries of literary creation.

Genres: Poetry, Writing, Nonfiction, Essays, Crafts, School, Literary Criticism

128 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1978

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Richard Hugo (December 21, 1923 - October 22, 1982), born Richard Hogan, was an American poet. Primarily a regionalist, Hugo's work reflects the economic depression of the Northwest, particularly Montana. Born in White Center, Washington, he was raised by his mother's parents after his father left the family. In 1942 he legally changed his name to Richard Hugo, taking his stepfather's surname. He served in World War II as a bombardier in the Mediterranean. He left the service in 1945 after flying 35 combat missions and reaching the rank of first lieutenant.

Hugo received his B.A. in 1948 and his M.A. in 1952 in Creative Writing from the University of Washington where he studied under Theodore Roethke.[1] He married Barbara Williams in 1952, the same year he started working as a technical writer for Boeing.

In 1961 his first book of poems, A Run of Jacks, was published. Soon after he took a creative writing teaching job at the University of Montana. He later became the head of the creative writing program there.[2] His wife returned to Seattle in 1964, and they divorced soon after. He published five more books of poetry, a memoir, a highly respected book on writing, and also a mystery novel. His posthumous book of collected poetry, Making Certain It Goes On, evinces that his poems are marked by crisp, gorgeous images of nature that often stand in contrast to his own depression, loneliness, and alcoholism. Although almost always written in free verse, his poems have a strong sense of rhythm that often echoes iambic meters. He also wrote of large number of informal epistolary poems at a time when that form was unfashionable.

Hugo was a friend of poet James Wright.

Hugo’s The Real West Marginal Way is a collection of essays, generally autobiographical in nature, that detail his childhood, his military service, his poetics, and his teaching.

Hugo remarried in 1974 to Ripley Schemm Hansen. In 1977 he was named the editor of the Yale Younger Poets Series.

Hugo died of leukemia on October 22, 1982.

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

At turns humorous and serious, The Triggering Town is a mix of poetry advice, poet's experience, and poet's personality. A nice mix. I'll post some of his more interesting pieces of advice for writers of poetry soon. I tracked some of his "nuts and bolts" (read: rules of thumb) about poetry writing here:

https://www.kencraftauthor.com/?s=hug...

If you write poetry, you might give them a look. Even these do not give his rules full justice, however, as I omit his elaborations and such. If you're a true student of the trade, you might want to check the book out.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the introduction, Richard Hugo observes that there is this "notion that the writer's problems are literary," which he counter-acts with his own theory: "In truth, the writer's problems are usually psychological, like everyone else's." This is the humble idea of the book. People aren't special because they are poets, poets are special because they are people. And Hugo spends his time exploring not just the poetic craft, but the emotional and psychological underbelly from which poems are birthed. Poems, for both the reader and especially the writer, become devices to explore the things we cannot otherwise dredge up from the soul.

He begins with the "triggering" subject of a poem is the initial inspiration: A rattlesnake, a forest brook, a busy airport. We start here, and then travel from this "town" into something deeper. The subject transfers from the trigger to the real or generated subject. The poet says discovers something, or generates some meaning, consciously or not.

The real magic of the book is later. He tells a story from high school of a kid who had written an honest experience that "could have gotten him thrown out of most classes in the school." But his teach had a different response: "McKensie broke the silence with applause. She raved approval, and we realized we had just heard a special moment in a person's life, offered in honesty and generosity, and we better damn well appreciate it. It may have been the most important lesson one can teach. You are someone and you have a right to your life. Too simple? Already covered by the Constitution? Try to find someone who teaches it. Try to find a student who knows it so well he or she doesn't need it confirmed." (p65)

This idea that "you are someone" is extended. Not only are you someone, but who you are and how you feel about yourself are the key shapers of your poetry:

Behind several theories of what happens to a poet during the writing of a poem--Elliot's escape from personality, Keat's idea of informing and filling another body, Yeats's notion of the mask, Auden's concept of the poet becoming someone elese for the during of the poem, Valery's idea of a self superior to the self--lies the implied assumption that the self as given is inadequate and will not do.
How you feel about yourself is probably the most important feeling you have. It colors all other feelings, and if you are a poet, it colors your writing. It may account for your writing. (p67)

Hugo writes humbly, honestly, and sincerely. He bemoans all the conflicting advice given to poets and speaks with a voice of maturity: "I've been seriously advised to take drugs, to avoid drugs, to eat only seafood, to live on welfare, to stop drinking (good advice it turned out), to drink more (at one time an impossibility), to avoid sex, to pursue sex, to read philosophy, to avoid philosophy. Once someone told me I should master every verse form known to man. A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets, who should know better." (p100)

He avoids the fantastical, and comes across as a very readable, down-to-earth, thoughtful sort of person in touch with his emotions. This book transcends the poetic and would be helpful to anyone seeking to explore their inner self.


More Quotes:

"I've seen the world tell us with wars and real estate developments and bad politics and odd court decisions that our lives don't matter. That may be because we are too many....Maybe the narcissism academics condemn in creative writers is but a last reaching for a kind of personal survival. Anyway, as a sound psychoanalyst once remarked to me dryly, narcissism is difficult to avoid. When we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don't matter, we may be forced to insist, often far too loudly, that they do. A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters. Your life matters, all right. It is all you've got for sure, and without it you are dead." (p65)

"The words should not serve the subject. The subject should serve the words. This may mean violating the facts. For example, if the poem needs the word "black" at some point and the grain elevator is yellow, the grain elevator may have to be black in the poem. You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything." (p6)

"As Bill Kittredge, my colleague who teaches fiction writing, has pointed out: if you are not risking sentimentality, you are not close to your inner self." (p7)

"If I had to limit myself to one criticism of academics it would be this: they distrust their responses. They feel that if a response can't be defended intellectually, it lacks validity. One literature professor I know was asked as he left a movie theater if he had liked the movie, and he replied, "I'm going to have to go home and think about it." What he was going to think about is not whether he liked the movie, but whether he could defend his response to it. If he decided he couldn't, presumably he'd hide his feelings or lie about them." (p62)

"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." (p109)

"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." (p109)

"What adult would dream of writing a poem?" (p109)

"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." (p109)

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

"A lot of students today would rather not learn Milton than be made to feel inferior because they didn't already know his work. That makes academics sound petty. But damn it, some of them are petty." And damn it, what better way to have a resound of Hugo's voice and lectures, than through this single, cogent quote?

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was included in a list I published for Christmas gifts. I named it one of the best books I had read in 2010. A name like Richard Hugo will not sound a familiar chord with young readers, will it? Even I never heard of him until I embarked on an extensive study of the works and life of Raymond Carver. Interesting story in itself, this study of Raymond Carver. You do know Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life has everything to do with that infamous literary giant by the name of Gordon Lish, don't you? Always does. With anything I do. Seems Lish is everywhere in my work, and for good reason.

[S.B. Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those books that came along at the right time for me. The more I engage with the study of poetry the more I learn the different ways you can approach poetry. The beginning chapters of the book were brilliant especially if you've been writing poetry for a couple of years and have the basics under your belt. The later chapters which were more autobiographical were interesting.

[Helen Losse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I return to again and again. By reading this book, I learned to trust myself to become a poet.

[Luna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best textbook (and very thin too!) I have ever read about how to write. Made all the difference.

[Susan Toy · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is such a raw honesty to Hugo's writing, and to his instruction, that is very different and refreshing from many of the contemporary authors I've read in this past year or so. I knew of Hugo, because I had read and enjoyed his only mystery, "Death and the Good Life," when it was reissued posthumously by Clark City Press. This has remained one of my favourite novels since then and I reread on a regular basis. So, as soon as I discovered that Norton was reissuing "The Triggering Town," I snapped it up and have finally had a chance to sit and savour the book. I have underlined a great deal of the text, because what Hugo says of learning about, and teaching, creative writing makes sense to me. While most of his instruction covers the writing of poetry specifically, much of it holds true for writing in general - and also for living the life of a writer. Excellent book! This will remain on my shelf for a very long time.

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

My husband thought it odd that I was laughing while reading a book on poetry. But Hugo is really funny! How refreshing. Very gratifying to hear him explicate ideas I had been mulling over much less eloquently (trying not to let it go to my head). My copy is a used one, marked up by the previous readers--at first I thought it a hindrance, but then I began to like it. Like reading it in a class, I got a couple other opinions on the book. A real treat.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

i didn't realize how fucking brilliant hugo was. no wonder i like his proteges so much, william kitredge, jim harrison, james welch, m l smoke, ron carlson,....

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would die for this man. A must read for poets (maybe all people).

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some parts are more interesting and useful than others, but on the whole, this was helpful and honest.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read these lessons in one sitting. I'm incredibly thankful to my main poetry reader friend for introducing me to Hugo's essay "The Triggering Town." The first essay in this book "Writing Off The Subject" might be the most informative and inspirational lesson I've been taught about writing poetry well.

I recommend this book to poets who consider themselves a bit further along than "beginning," though of course, we're always beginning again and again. I say this only because Hugo's challenges and the implications of his approach require a level of artistry already informed and steeped in some of the more foundational "dos" of poetry writing like showing not telling, writing for the senses, and finding the large in the small. Being "arrogant enough to follow the music" takes some time.

I believe Hugo's book will forever change my writing. I can't recommend it highly enough.

*******

Just reread this book and it was just as helpful and revelatory as it was the first time. Amazing.

[Hank Early · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an odd and wonderful little book. A lot of insight here, not just for writing, but for life. My favorite bit:

"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."

[E H · Rating 4 out of 5]

The exercise in Chapter 4 really did help me write one of my best poems.

[Mary Soon Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a slim book about writing poetry. Published nearly half a century ago, it feels oddly helpful to me. Oddly because two of my favorite sections (the last two) appear least immediately relevant for poets seeking writing advice.

The penultimate section in the book, titled "Ci Vediamo," describes the author's experience as a bombardier in Italy in World War II, and then his experience returning to Italy about twenty years afterward. These accounts are fascinating and affecting, but they are autobiography rather than writing manual. The section does includes, with little commentary, some poems the author wrote that drew on these autobiographical experiences. And so the section does have something to say about where poems come from and how long they may take, but it says it quietly.

The final section in the book is titled "How Poets Make a Living" and opens with a few pages about the author's experience working in industry (Boeing) versus academia. After that, the heart of the section begins, retelling what the author remembers of a story another man told him about Boeing evicting two squatters from company land years earlier. As with the Italy account, it is compelling and disturbing reading, even at one remove. The author includes the poem he wrote based on the story he heard. Again, the section has something to say about where poems come from, and, again, it says it quietly. The quoted poem also illustrates points raised in earlier sections about mixing the factual with the imagined in poems.

Another section, "Nuts and Bolts," contains excellent craft tips for the poetry writer, much more in line with what I'd anticipated when I picked up the book. And another section, "Assumptions," has a sequence of writing prompts, which might well be helpful to a poet in a temporary quagmire.

For poets in quagmires, here's a quote I liked very much from the section titled "The Triggering Town."

-- You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

There are nine sections all told. Like this review, the book is perhaps rather scattered. Yet I found it helpful, even consoling. As if the author were standing at my shoulder, holding out, in friendship, various nuggets he'd uncovered in years of writing poetry and teaching the writing of poetry.

Four out of five well-aged stars.

About my reviews: I try to review every book I read, including those that I don't end up enjoying. The reviews are not scholarly, but just indicate my reaction as a reader, reading being my addiction. I am miserly with 5-star reviews; 4 stars means I liked a book very much; 3 stars means I liked it; 2 stars means I didn't like it (though often the 2-star books are very popular with other readers and/or are by authors whose other work I've loved).

[Alec Lurie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don’t waste your time. Here’s a quick summary:

“Poetry has no rules! Be bold and willing to fail! ...Unless your poems suck. Here’s a list of things that disqualify you from being a good poet...”

[silas denver melvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"you are someone and you have a right to your life."

[Barclay Blankenship · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really loved this book and all of its wisdom for poets. Buuuuut, not a woman in sight. Pretty much no mention of any writers apart from old white dudes. Since the book was published in the early 70s, I’m not surprised, but the writing advice does hold up even 50+ years later.

[Peaches · Rating 2 out of 5]

I stumbled upon this in a reference from another text and it seemed interesting, much how I was motivated to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man primarily because of the introduction with the moocow and baby tuckoo, then was disappointed the further I went. I'm not a poet, nor do I wish to be, but I love when my students write poetry, so even though this was all about poetic technique, I continued reading this descent into madness.
If I had to sum it up, I'd say that Hugo just wants people to disregard conventional writing and be free. Woohoo.

[Russell13013 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best when it strays from its subject, which is fitting I suppose. Still, coming to it as I did out of concern over my bewilderment and skepticism about the act of reading poetry, I found it strangely disheartening that this book only confirmed my suspicions and forgave my ineptitude. Poems, for Hugo, are not about communication, at least not with others. He presents a moving depiction of the act of writing poetry as an engagement of and with that dark, elusive and inarticulable void most particular to ourselves and most common to all. That depiction, though, is strongest in his prose, where we can share in the struggle and the triumph, in the humanity. The lesson I take away is that we should write poetry to learn and become ourselves, but if we want to share that self or save others time in finding their own, it's to prose (or maybe "public language poetry") we must turn. Having written this, I'm not sure I mean it, but if I did take away anything from this book, it's that a provisional position is a better place to start than no place at all.

[Rebekah · Rating 4 out of 5]

1 Sentence Summary: Advice for writing poetry.

My Thoughts: There was some good advice in here, but I disagreed with a lot of what Hugo said. Though of course, he would probably be glad I disagreed: "You'll never be a poet until you realize that everything I say...is wrong. It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you. Every moment, I am...telling you to write like me. But I hope you learn to write like you."

Recommend to: Aspiring poets

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Getting ready to teach this.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely essential reading for poets and writers! Hugo offers a truly unique perspective that stands out from the many other "how to write a poem" books.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blowin' my mind again. Review to come.

[Sigrun Hodne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liked it a lot! Especially the first half which, seems a bit more relevant for writers today than the last chapters of the book.

[Buddy Levy]

Terrific. Have used it teaching writing courses as well.

[Clark Hays · Rating 4 out of 5]

Triggered: Writing Poetry

The Triggering Town (referring to how a poem is “triggered” into being) is a sparkling little book of insights and essays about writing, with one autobiographical piece, by Richard Hugo, a poet I should have known about far sooner.

I found this book, and a collection of his poems, at the small but mighty Cannon Beach Book Company, where there’s always at least one new book I can’t leave without. For the sake of full disclosure, I initially passed up on this one in favor of Life on Mars (Smith), a decision I do not regret. But I made a note to check out Hugo later.

And what I discovered was that Hugo led an interesting life. He was born in 1923 in Seattle and was clearly shaped by the landscape and people of the Pacific Northwest and, it seems, by poverty. He served in the military and, later, was educated, presumably courtesy of the GI Bill. He landed at Boeing as a technical writer. His first book of poetry was published in 1961 and soon after he began teaching creative writing at University of Montana. (Personal digression: I was a Bobcat/Montana State but probably should have been a Grizzly, given the legacy of great writing there. No offense to MSU’s Greg Keeler, who was an exceptional poet and teacher, and who helped sharpen my love of writing from interest to obsession).

Hugo died in 1982, giving about 20 years of his life to writing and to teaching writing, distilling the best parts of what he thought about writing into The Triggering Town. It’s a cranky, contrarian and lovely look at the process of writing, especially poetry, and an exposition on his view that you can’t really teach people to become writers. As he sees it, if you love putting words on paper and that feeling you get when you just know it’s coming out right, you’re going to write.

Hugo loves language and how, when properly deployed, it conveys emotions and provokes responses in readers, even as these emotions and responses are unique for each reader.

“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 that sound meant.”

And he goes to great lengths to explain that we certainly can’t learn to write by reading other authors:

“Like many others, I once believed that by study one could discover and ingest some secret ingredient of literature that would later find its way into one’s own work. I’ve come to believe that one learns to write only by writing.”

While he does not believe one can be taught to write, he does conclude one can be helped to not to be a bad writer. It’s an important distinction, and premised on recognizing and enhancing the love of language, and the love of the process. I found it very reassuring, even in the “nuts and bolts” section:

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

“When you’re 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.”

“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.”

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

And my favorite: “No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.”

I’m adding this book to my very short list of books about writing that have made a lasting difference in my life, along with Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke), and Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Goldberg). Yes, despite the great advice, The Triggering Town is not really about how to write, but more like how to live with being a writer, and how to take sustenance from the process and the inevitable psychosis. Because, as Hugo notes, “I’m inclined more and more to believe that writing, like sex, is psychogenic.” (I had to look that up: having a psychological origin or cause rather than a physical one.)

[Kendrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hesitate to give this disappointing review, having seen it recommended as a craft book for poets on Twitter, but I did not get much value out of this. While Hugo does make the point that most beginning writers get stuck on the initial idea and their best writing lies when they let go of this and continue writing past their intended ending, his thoughts on lineation, cadence, and imagery are lacking. Most of the poetic influences and poems cited in this book are by white men which was a consistent irritation. There are better, more inclusive books on craft. DNF at 80%.

[Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essential for writing poetry.