Although Richard Hugo tends to be associated with Theodore Roethke more than with Richard Wright, Hugo seems closer in style and content to Wright than to Roethke. Both Hugo and Wright focus on the downtrodden other more than Roethke did. Though all three can be seen as “confessional” poets, Hugo tends to be less so than either Wright or Roethke. Although the details of Hugo’s personal life emerge from the Selected Poems, the focus seems to be on those who have suffered like him, rather than on he himself. He has managed to transcend his own neglect, or abuse, and go on to be a successful poet and teacher. He has not forgotten that background, though. Instead, he has used it to communicate his particular insights to his reader, insights we all need if we are going to deal with society’s ills.

Certainly Hugo’s message is not a unique one, but he does an excellent job of helping us to understand the neglected, the abused, the abandoned. In “What Thou Lovest Well Remains American” Hugo reveals the kind of experience that forever maimed him, but also granted him the remarkable ability to speak for those who have suffered the same way he has:

What Thou Lovest Well Remains American

You remember the name was Jensen. She seemed old
always alone inside, face pasted gray to the window,
and mail never came. Two blocks down, the Grubskis
went insane. George played rotten trombone
Easter when they flew the flag. Wild roses
remind you the roads were gravel and vacant lots
the rule. Poverty was real, wallet and spirit,
and each day slow as church. You remember threadbare
church groups on the corner, howling their faith
at stars, and the violent Holy Rollers
renting that barn for their annual violent sing
and the barn burned down when you came back from war.
Knowing the people you knew then are dead,
you try to believe these roads paved are improved,
the neighbors, moved in while you were away, good-looking,
their dogs well fed. You still have need
to remember lots empty and fern.
Lawns well trimmed remind you of the train
your wife took one day forever, some far empty town,
the odd name you never recall. The time: 6:23.
The day: October 9. The year remains a blur.
You blame this neighborhood for your failure.
In some vague way, the Grubskis degraded you
beyond repair. And you know you must play again
and again Mrs. Jensen pale at her window, must hear
the foul music over the good slide of traffic.
You loved them well and they remain, still with nothing
to do, no money and no will. Loved them, and the gray
that was their disease you carry for extra food
in case you’re stranded in some odd empty town
and need hungry lovers for friends, and need feel
you are welcome in the secret club they have formed.

Poverty might not be contagious, but the despair it breeds may well be. Who can spend years around Ms. Jensen and not feel her sorrow? Who could ignore the fact that the Grubskis went insane? People you love, for better or for worse, always remain with you. And if you’re not careful, and sometimes even if you are, they will adversely affect how you deal with others you love. How many wonderfully competent people we know feel totally inadequate because of how they were brought up?

Eileen

Why this day you’re going so much wind?
When you’ve gone I’ll go back in alone
and take the stillest corner in the house—
the dark one where your dark-eyed ghost
will find me whipped and choking back my rage.
I won’t show my hatred to their food.
I have to live here with these shaking hands.

Find a home with heat, some stranger
who’s indifferent to your dirty dress
and loves you for that quiet frown
you’ll own until you die or kiss.
The wind is drowning out the car
and raising dust so you can disappear
the way you used to playing in the fern.

Some day I’ll be too big for them to hit,
too fast to catch, too quick to face the cross
and go away by fantasy or mule
and take revenge on matrons for your loss
and mail you word of faces I have cut.
Be patient when the teasers call you fat.
I’ll join you later for a wordless meal.

Then I’ll stroke the maggots from your hair.
They come for me now you’re not here.
I wax their statues, croak out hymns
they want and wait for dust to settle
on the road you left on centuries ago,
believing you were waving, knowing
it was just a bird who crossed the road
behind you and the sunlight off the car.

It’s hard to miss Eileen’s tragedy, but it’s all too easy to overlook the greater tragedy of the equally-abused younger child left behind to bear the parents’ anger. A child who can now only dream that his sister has gotten away to a better place, and that soon he too can get away. It’s hard not to bring a tear to your eyes when you realize the agony implied in the lines “on the road you left on centuries ago,/ believing you were waving, knowing/ it was just a bird who crossed the road/ behind you and the sunlight off the car.” Even the sister he has most loved because she shared his abuse has abandoned him, and he’s not even sure that she ever loved him or thought enough of him to wave a simple goodbye.

I read these poems now and think I should have read them at the beginning of each semester to help remind me exactly what kind of living hell many of my students had to go through day after day. Is it any wonder that they were unable to learn or that they managed to get in trouble?

In some of the dharma Jack Kerouac wrote, “ I write Duluoz legend not for praise, or blame neither? but for the reason that I have hired myself out to do the work of pity…” It seems that Richard Hugo has hired himself out for the same reason, and he’s done a damn fine job of it.

Although I like to think I’m a well-rounded person, I often feel that the parts of my life are compartmentalized. It’s not often enough when my thinking life meets my personal life, when the ideas I care the most about actually touch moments in my life.

However, that happened this weekend while visiting my stepdaughter, her husband, and their new baby. While there I happened to mention to Cory, an avid fishermen, that I had been writing about Richard Hugo’s love of fishing. I mentioned that I had thought of putting in a Hugo poem about steelhead fishing that reminded me of Cory’s devotion of fishing, but I doubted that he was reading my weblog.

Cory went to the website and read the blogs I had written, and we spent a good part of Sunday talking about fishing and our common environmental beliefs. Cory’s trying to preserve a small, but beautiful plot of land on the Puget Sound.

Left alone, I spent a few minutes taking photographs of the fishing mementos that decorate their beautiful house that faces the Puget Sound, fishing mementos that reminded me once again just how important fishing is to the Northwest’s image of itself. Here’s a collage of those mementoes:

Plunking the Skagit

It’s mystery, not wind, the men
endure. Steelhead drew them here
where tons of winter drive above
them north and fires start the day
along the bar. A hundred feet
of nylon settles on the river
and the wait begins. Each line slants
tight from an upright rod to water
and underwater to the pencil lead.
A flat south: wind will hammer
water from their eyes, wind and water motion
faking knocks of steelhead in the bells.

These men are never cold. Their faces
burn with winter and their eyes
are hot. They see, across the flat,
the black day coming for them
and the black sea. Good wind
mixes with the bourbon in their bones.

A real name-steelhead-rainbow
from the sea. He runs in summer, too
but that is undramatic, the river
down and warm. No pour to push against.
No ice to snap his fins. No snow
to lay him on for photographs.

Men keep warm with games. The steelhead
is a Burmese spy, a hired gun
from Crete. He comes to mate, not die
on some forgotten sand like salmon.
He rides the river out in spring
planning then his drive for next
December, when big rains bring him
roaring from the sea with fins on fire.

This near the mouth, the river barely glides.
One man thinks the birds that nick
the river mark the fish. Birds believe
the men are evergreens. Above
the guess and ruffle, in the wind –
steelhead to the spawning ground.

Richard Hugo from Selected Poems

I like to tell myself that I read poetry to discover new ideas, to see the world in new ways. Sometimes when I read a book like Richard Hugo’s White Center, though, I realize I also read to rediscover old truths. Poetry can help to see the world in new ways, but it can also help us the rediscover old truths.

Since I was born in White Center and found several poems in Hugo’s Selected Poems that made me remember my childhood there, I was looking forward to more of the same in a book named after that town. I was a little disappointed, though, to discover that most of the poems seem to focus on Hugo’s adopted home, Montana.

You’ll have to forgive me, then, when I admit I was a little disappointed in these poems, though I still found several poems I liked. Perhaps, though, it was my nostalgic bent that drew me to the poems that I ended up liking the most from this slim volume.

My favorite poem,

SECOND CHANCES

I can’t let it go, the picture I keep of myself
in ruin, living alone, some wretched town
where friendship is based on just being around.
And I drink there a lot, stare at the walls until
the buzzing of flies becomes the silence I drown in.
Outside, children bad mouth my life with songs
their parents told them to sing. One showers
my roof with stones knowing I’m afraid
to step out and tell him to stop. Another yells,
“You can’t get a woman, old man. You don’t get a thing.”

My wife, a beautiful woman, is fixing lunch.
She doesn’t know I dream these things. She thinks
I’m fine. People respect me. Oh, she knows all right
I’ve seen grim times. But these days my poems
appear everywhere. Fan mail comes. I fly east
on a profitable reading tour. Once in a while
a young girl offers herself. My wife knows that, too.
And she knows my happiness with her is far more
than I ever expected. Three years ago, I wouldn’t
have given a dime for my chances at life.

What she doesn’t know is now and then
a vagabond knocks on the door. I go answer
and he says, “Come back, baby. You’ll find
a million poems deep in your destitute soul.”
And I say, “Go away. Don’t ever come back.”
But I watch him walk, always downhill toward
the schoolyard where children are playing ‘ghost,’
a game where, according to the rules, you take
another child’s name in your mind but pretend
you’re still you while others guess your new name.

reminded me once again that, no matter how much you change, who you once were is still part of who you are now. Sometimes even later success and wealth can’t change the inner feelings you had as a child. At the very least, we are left with the fears that we will end up having to relive that life. Sometimes we simply can’t believe our good luck. The juxtaposition of “You can’t get a woman, old man. You don’t get a thing/” with “My wife, a beautiful woman, is fixing lunch” instantly reveals how irrational this fear is, but whoever said fear had to be rational?

More surprising, though, is the idea suggested in the last stanza that at times there is a longing for the past, the past that everyone, likely including ourselves, would say is crazy. The truth is that most changes seem to entail a trade-off of some kind, perhaps a loss of freedom, a greater sense of obligation, or merely a sense of alienation because you somehow feel you don’t truly belong in your new situation.

I suspect I’m showing my age even more in my preference for:

CHANGES AT MERIDIAN

It’s a problem, why I’m here with amplified rock
from the resort hammering the shoreline straight
and driving the planted trout deep where catfish lived
before they were poisoned away. Coves I remember
aren’t coves anymore and perch are not welcome
since Fish and Game labeled them scrap. Where I row
the lilies seem decor. No trace of Robert’s cabin caving
under the weight of moss. No sunfish nest under the dock.
No old man, set hard in himself, rowing me home.

It’s not that no one knows me after forty years
or that at P.M. the surface reflects a world
hopelessly changed for the worse. What nags is
loss of loss, the desperate way I brought farms back
because I wanted the pastures always slanted gently
into the lake, warm reflection of willow and cow,
the old man cautioning patience days the crappie went dormant.
These don’t come anymore as if I don’t need them
and this rehabilitated water, these clustered dull homes are ok.

One poet said it is enough to live perpetually in change.
He didn’t believe it. I say we want everything static
including farms we lose and rebuild. That way,
when the fish start feeding and the first chill of day
reminds us we haven’t come far, home is a mild row back,
we love the old man repeating over and over,
“Keep your line in the water.” Change or no change,
with the right bait this world has twenty-three moons.

I guess I can comfort myself a little bit in that I left Seattle over 35 years ago because I felt precisely this way when Seattle’s population began to explode. Still, it’s hard not to feel a little like a dinosaur when you look around and your whole world has changed, and, no matter what others say, it doesn’t feel like it a change for the better. The first lake I ever hiked to and stayed for four days outside Seattle is now surrounded by estates owned by ex-Microsoft employees. No matter how fabulous their homes, I can’t convince myself they’re an improvement over the firs that used to line the shores.

Like Hugo, I can’t convince myself that is “enough to live perpetually in change.” And, like Hugo, I still miss my old man’s advice to “Keep your line in the water” and regret that I can’t take my grandson out fishing the same way my father took me out.