Random one liners from Hugo and a discussion of one of his poems...
So today I was feeling shitty, so I went to the library and read some Hugo essays from "The Triggering Town" (my little pick-me-up trick)
Some ideas that I like...
"When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music. If you believe the first, you are making your job very difficult, and you are not only limiting the writing of poems to something done only by the very witty and clever, such as Auden, you are weakening the justification for creative writing programs"
I think that might be one of the hardest things for younger poets to overcome. Lorca talked about how it is the struggle with death from which the duende makes itself known. I think it is more an inner struggle. You think you know the truth, but if you write what you think you know., you are only writing falsehoods. Ginsberg talked a lot about honesty and frankness in a poem. I think Hugo is right, when you concern yourself not with what your mind is telling you to write but what your heart finds pleasing, you bypass that internal censor that lets the real truth out in all its glory. Or as Hugo remarks...
"One mark of a beginner is his impulse to push language around to make it accommodate what he has already conceived to be the truth, or, in some cases, what he has already conceived to be the form."
I used to think that part of what poetry was all about was letting go part of yourself to the poem and finding a meeting ground. I guess I've gotten more extreme in that by realizing that my best poetry has happened when I totally let go of every notion I had and let the art be on its own. My most recent poem had 4 or 5 different starts to it, but one day I woke up after having a dream about hugging a person and I sat down and the poem happened. It wasn't what I thought I wanted to write about, but when I finally let the poem do its own thing, things happened. 3 years ago I wouldn't have understood it. Even now I think that sometimes I know what I should be doing but it is so tempting to try to say things that you think you want to say. But that is why I know I have a lifetime of getting better ahead of me.
"When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you'll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good."
Even I have said things like "to be a writer is to embrace a life of rejection" or something, and I know it to be true. Not in any way that I can explain, but it is just something I feel. It is a lot like love. Well, it is exactly like love. Sometimes it works and you feel great, and other times it just rips the hell out of you. But you don't do it because you know the feeling will always be sugary and great. You do it because that's what you have to do. You do it because it is dangerous, but you can't help it. You do it because it is what you were meant to do. Sometimes it feels like it'll never come, and you're painfully alone in everything. But you have to have hope that someday you'll wake up and it'll be there waiting for you only for you to find out it was there all along.
"...when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there."
Right. Say what you say and don't apologize for it.
"The words should not serve the subject. The subject should serve the words."
Again, write not for what you think you should write, but for what is.
And lastly...
"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."
Being honest sometimes means being cliche or schmaltzy. It is nothing to be ashamed of.
The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field
Richard Hugo
The dim boy claps because the others clap.
The polite word, handicapped, is muttered in the stands.
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back.
One whole day I sit, contrite, dirt, L.A.
Union Station, '46, sweating through last night.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.
Score, 5 to 3. Pitcher fading badly in the heat.
Isn't it wrong to be or not be spastic?
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back.
I'm laughing at a neighbor girl beaten to scream
by a savage father and I'm ashamed to look.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.
The score is always close, the rally always short.
I've left more wreckage than a quake.
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back.
The afflicted never cheer in unison.
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back
to stammering pastures where the picnic should have worked.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.
Yeah ok, it is a villanelle, and an expertly crafted one at that. What has always shocked me about this poem, however, was the brutal honesty that comes in at the end that I wasn't even aware of until I met a student of Hugo's last year. She was telling me about how he was born into an abusive, dysfunctional family. Parents were always fighting and it was your basic, tragic broken home. Hugo the child had an idea to fix things. He concocted a plan where he would get his family to go on a picnic together and somehow everything would be fine. However, things didn't work, and his childhood innocence was forever lost.
This opening of the scars is just mind boggling to me. Now that I really understand the poem, its weight almost brings me to tears when I read it. But I think it also shows what Hugo was talking about in his essays. Maybe in his mind he thought the poem should be about how people just do what other people do and we ignore things and let evil carry on. But what the poem was really about was himself. Hugo was just brave enough to let go and let the poem be what it should be.
I think a lot of young writers can't open up. They can't write what they feel. Instead they only write what they think might sound or look like what "poetry should look like." In doing so we've created an entire generation of writers who all sound the same. A unique voice in poetry is rare these days. The further down the line you go into youth, the rarer it becomes. I don't know if that is society's imprint, or a failure of creative writing classes. I like to think it is both, but I fear it is the latter.
Some ideas that I like...
"When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it. One is that all music must conform to truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music. If you believe the first, you are making your job very difficult, and you are not only limiting the writing of poems to something done only by the very witty and clever, such as Auden, you are weakening the justification for creative writing programs"
I think that might be one of the hardest things for younger poets to overcome. Lorca talked about how it is the struggle with death from which the duende makes itself known. I think it is more an inner struggle. You think you know the truth, but if you write what you think you know., you are only writing falsehoods. Ginsberg talked a lot about honesty and frankness in a poem. I think Hugo is right, when you concern yourself not with what your mind is telling you to write but what your heart finds pleasing, you bypass that internal censor that lets the real truth out in all its glory. Or as Hugo remarks...
"One mark of a beginner is his impulse to push language around to make it accommodate what he has already conceived to be the truth, or, in some cases, what he has already conceived to be the form."
I used to think that part of what poetry was all about was letting go part of yourself to the poem and finding a meeting ground. I guess I've gotten more extreme in that by realizing that my best poetry has happened when I totally let go of every notion I had and let the art be on its own. My most recent poem had 4 or 5 different starts to it, but one day I woke up after having a dream about hugging a person and I sat down and the poem happened. It wasn't what I thought I wanted to write about, but when I finally let the poem do its own thing, things happened. 3 years ago I wouldn't have understood it. Even now I think that sometimes I know what I should be doing but it is so tempting to try to say things that you think you want to say. But that is why I know I have a lifetime of getting better ahead of me.
"When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you'll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good."
Even I have said things like "to be a writer is to embrace a life of rejection" or something, and I know it to be true. Not in any way that I can explain, but it is just something I feel. It is a lot like love. Well, it is exactly like love. Sometimes it works and you feel great, and other times it just rips the hell out of you. But you don't do it because you know the feeling will always be sugary and great. You do it because that's what you have to do. You do it because it is dangerous, but you can't help it. You do it because it is what you were meant to do. Sometimes it feels like it'll never come, and you're painfully alone in everything. But you have to have hope that someday you'll wake up and it'll be there waiting for you only for you to find out it was there all along.
"...when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there."
Right. Say what you say and don't apologize for it.
"The words should not serve the subject. The subject should serve the words."
Again, write not for what you think you should write, but for what is.
And lastly...
"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."
Being honest sometimes means being cliche or schmaltzy. It is nothing to be ashamed of.
The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field
Richard Hugo
The dim boy claps because the others clap.
The polite word, handicapped, is muttered in the stands.
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back.
One whole day I sit, contrite, dirt, L.A.
Union Station, '46, sweating through last night.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.
Score, 5 to 3. Pitcher fading badly in the heat.
Isn't it wrong to be or not be spastic?
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back.
I'm laughing at a neighbor girl beaten to scream
by a savage father and I'm ashamed to look.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.
The score is always close, the rally always short.
I've left more wreckage than a quake.
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back.
The afflicted never cheer in unison.
Isn't it wrong, the way the mind moves back
to stammering pastures where the picnic should have worked.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.
Yeah ok, it is a villanelle, and an expertly crafted one at that. What has always shocked me about this poem, however, was the brutal honesty that comes in at the end that I wasn't even aware of until I met a student of Hugo's last year. She was telling me about how he was born into an abusive, dysfunctional family. Parents were always fighting and it was your basic, tragic broken home. Hugo the child had an idea to fix things. He concocted a plan where he would get his family to go on a picnic together and somehow everything would be fine. However, things didn't work, and his childhood innocence was forever lost.
This opening of the scars is just mind boggling to me. Now that I really understand the poem, its weight almost brings me to tears when I read it. But I think it also shows what Hugo was talking about in his essays. Maybe in his mind he thought the poem should be about how people just do what other people do and we ignore things and let evil carry on. But what the poem was really about was himself. Hugo was just brave enough to let go and let the poem be what it should be.
I think a lot of young writers can't open up. They can't write what they feel. Instead they only write what they think might sound or look like what "poetry should look like." In doing so we've created an entire generation of writers who all sound the same. A unique voice in poetry is rare these days. The further down the line you go into youth, the rarer it becomes. I don't know if that is society's imprint, or a failure of creative writing classes. I like to think it is both, but I fear it is the latter.