Usually I hate “prose poems,” you know those kinds of poems poets write to fill out a book when they can’t write real poetry anymore. Have to admit, a goodly amount of the time I don’t even bother to read them. Just skip right over them looking for something I might enjoy. And, if the truth be known, I didn’t like any other one of these in Hugo’s Selected Poems.

But this “Letter to Levertov from Butte” summarizes the essence of Richard Hugo’s poetry so beautifully that I would be a fool to try to write anything better. In fact, it’s so clearly written that I won’t insult your intelligence by trying to interpret it.

Letter to Levertov from Butte

Dear Denise: Long way from, long time since Boulder. I hope
you and Mitch are doing OK. I get rumors. You’re in Moscow,
Montreal. Whatever place I hear, it’s always one of glamor.
I’m not anywhere glamorous. I’m in a town where children
get hurt early. Degraded by drab homes. Beaten by drunken
parents, by other children. Mitch might understand. It’s kind
of a microscopic Brooklyn, if you can imagine Brooklyn
with open pit mines, and more Irish than Jewish. I’ve heard
from many of the students we had that summer. Even seen
a dozen or so since then. They remember the conference
fondly. So do I. Heard from Herb Gold twice and read now and then
about Isaac Bashevis Singer who seems an enduring diamond.
The mines here are not diamond. Nothing is. What endures
is sadness and long memories of labor wars in the early
part of the century. This is the town where you choose sides
to die on, company or man, and both are losers. Because
so many people died in mines and fights, early in history
man said screw it and the fun began. More bars and whores
per capita than any town in America. You live only
for today. Let me go symbolic for a minute: great birds
cross over you anyplace, here they grin and dive. Dashiell
Hammett based Red Harvest here though he called it Personville
and "person" he made sure to tell us was "poison" in the slang.
I have ambiguous feelings coming from a place like this
and having clawed my way away, thanks to a few weak gifts
and psychiatry and the luck of living in a country
where enough money floats to the top for the shipwrecked
to hang on. On one hand, no matter what my salary is
or title, I remain a common laborer, stained by the perpetual
dust from loading flour or coal. I stay humble, inadequate
inside. And my way of knowing how people get hurt, make
my (damn this next word) heart go out through the stinking air
into the shacks of Walkerville, to the wife who has turned
forever to the wall, the husband sobbing at the kitchen
table and the unwashed children taking it in and in and in
until they are the wall, the table, even the dog the parents
kill each month when the money’s gone. On the other hand,
I know the cruelty of poverty, the embittering ways
love is denied, and food, the mean near-insanity of being
and being deprived, the trivial compensations of each day,
recapturing old years in broadcast tunes you try to recall
in bars, hunched over the beer you can’t afford, or bending
to the bad job you’re lucky enough to have. How, finally,
hate takes over, hippie, nigger, Indian, anyone you can lump
like garbage in a pit, including women. And I don’t want
to be part of it. I want to be what I am, a writer good enough
to teach with you and Gold and Singer, even if only in
some conference leader’s imagination. And I want my life
inside to go on long as I do, though I only populate bare
landscape with surrogate suffering, with lame men
crippled by more than disease, and create finally
a simple grief I can deal with, a pain the indigent can find
acceptable. I do go on. Forgive this raving. Give my best
to Mitch and keep plenty for yourself. Your rich friend, Dick.

When I started reading Hugo’s Selected Poems, I was mainly hoping that Hugo would help me remember places like the Skykomish and the Duwamish in a new light, which he certainly has done .

What I ended up discovering, though, is that we shared a lot more than similar experiences. We ended up seeing the world through our experiences. White Center apparently left indelible memories, memories that, in turn, affected the way we both saw the rest of our lives. Like Hugo I “remain a common laborer, stained by the perpetual/dust from loading flour or coal,” though in my case it is more likely the dust from the janitorial work I did to put myself through college.

A major difference, though, is that Hugo stayed in White Center much longer than I did. He was left to grow up with grandparents. My parents, on the other hand, were gradually fighting their way out of White Center. We moved constantly as my dad worked his way up in his company, but I never lost the memory of White Center and the people I knew there. Like Hugo, I’ve always identified more with the poor and the working class than I have with the wealthy. I think if I had stayed in White Center I would have ended up with a viewpoint even more similar to the one Hugo expressed in this letter to Denise Levertov. As it is, though, having escaped that world early one, I am slightly more optimistic than Hugo is in most of his poetry.

After the Army I became a caseworker in order to help the poor, but I was unable to endure the sheer misery that I came into contact with daily. I knew that if I stayed in that job very long I would end up killing an abusive father or, worst of all, I would become indifferent to the pain I saw every day. I quit that job and became a teacher because I felt I would be more able to help them as a teacher.

As a teacher, I tried to identify with all of my students, but the ones I often cared for the most, and went out of my way to help the most, were the ones who had to struggle the hardest to succeed, the ones who were in the most danger if they did fail, because they would fail life not merely another English class. That’s not to say that many of them didn’t fail, because they did fail in much higher numbers than their classmates. Perhaps I knew that would happen, too, because I saw my share of failures and deaths in my childhood.