Category: Blogging

I’m not sure how many people today would identify with the central image in these two poems, but I certainly do. I’ve always had a garden my whole life, and there’s nothing more back breaking than hoeing a garden, particularly a new garden with lots of rocks. Perhaps, though, I’m even fonder of the image because it reminds me of all the times I would return home to find my mother in her last years weeding the garden, keeping it as spotless as she kept the house. Then again, maybe it just reminds me of Roethke’s excellent poem “Long Live the Weeds," and how we define ourselves by the weeds we fight.

The image of a person hoeing the garden is obviously an important image to Hugo because he used this same image in poems that were written years apart and a continent away from each other.

“The Way a Ghost Dissolves” seems to describe someone special to the Hugo who lived in White Center. She appears in two poems in his first book of poems.

The woman in the poem is at first glance a simple, unsophisticated woman, one who loves being out of doors working in the sun and dirt. She had a simple faith that if she planted and weeded the garden that God would take care of the rest. While the lady is unsophisticated and superstitious, she has managed to survive for years because of her faith in God, and because of her hard working habits. She’s even a good enough gardener to realize that a cover crop of rye in the fall will help to produce more crops the next year, something that not many gardeners today would know. She’s certainly persistent because despite her fear of snakes, she keeps on gardening more fiercely than ever.

Despite apparently mixed feelings about her, the narrator styles his working habits after her habits. He “will garden on the “double run,” trust in fate to keep him “poor and kind,” and “work until my heart is short.” He obviously feels a lot of love for this “ghost.”

“South Italy, Remote and Stone” appeared in Hugo’s third volume of poetry written eight years later. Here he uses the same image to portray an Italian peasant’s survival and, in an extension of the image, his own survival:

Here the element of the wind, or human spirit, is added to the image of hoeing. For it is the human spirit that drives the peasant to “hoeing rock,” hoping against hope that the hoe and “five stunted olive trees” will carry the family through the year. Here the image is also extended to include all the peasants whose “hoe and wind have fought this stone forever and lost.”

In the second and third stanza, Hugo portrays just how difficult life is for these people and the disastrous effects such poverty has. on “paese abbandonato,’ this abandoned country.
Abandoned or not, the people struggle to survive, loving even the tragedies of their lives, “the screaming wife” or the “crippled child.” If a girl happens to be pretty, she will be persecuted by the people and driven out or sent out on the road with “no chance to be saved by a prince or kind ox.” Here, according to Hugo, “only the ugly survive,” ugly because of what it takes to survive, here where there is no room for pity or mercy.

In the final stanza, Hugo suggests that this is very much like the kind of life, though in “much better soil,” that he has survived. He is forever on the road, but it is only in a place like this that he feels truly at home. His spirit helps him to hoe the row that he has been given in life.

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’ss 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.

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

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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

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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.

Richard Hugo’s “Duwamish” is as melancholy and depressing as “Skykomish River Running” was exultant and uplifting, and yet the Duwamish River is less than sixty miles from the Skykomish River. The difference between the two is industrialization and pollution.

When I was growing up in Seattle, the Duwamish was probably the major source of salmon in Puget Sound. On fishing derby days, rows of boats nearly covered the bay between West Seattle and Skidroad while endless schools of salmon headed up the river.

Those salmon barely exist today, partially because of we fishermen, but mainly because of the pollution that has destroyed the salmon’s breeding grounds, the destruction that Hugo so clearly portrays in “Duwamish.”

This is the Northwest, not the Midwest; here rivers run swift and clear, not slow and gray. But here the lumber mills and concrete plants crowd the river banks slowing the river, spewing waste products, turning the already gray water ever dingier.

At low tide the garbage discarded by new and old industries emerges, dominating the landscape. Even the businesses that helped destroy the river have shut down, leaving their brick corpses behind. It is a landscape of the dead.

Even the Indians who named this river, just as they named the beautiful Skykomish, no longer claim this river as their own. They’re ashamed of what has become of it and no longer interrupt their beer drinking to tell miraculous tales of the river.

There are more than enough gray days in Seattle, but the dinginess of this river turns even a sunny day gray. At the very least, a single cloud blocks the sun. Bright trees that should reflect brilliantly in the river are muted and gray. The river always looks gray, just like the heavy rain clouds that gather in November.

In reality, this river is dead. Dead like a decaying porgy nailed to the piling. It has been abandoned just like those who live here in poverty have been abandoned. A lack of friends has killed it.

In the end, though, the poet does not have adequate words to describe this place of abandonment. “There is no word along/ this river I can understand or say.” This is the ultimate betrayal.

It is a betrayal not only of the land, but of the heritage of the land. It is a betrayal of those whose memories are intertwined with this river. I can never take my grandson fishing on this river, so he will never know the joy that I had while fishing here with my father. In essence, he will never know my father existed at all because this river has been taken from us by greed and ignorance.

Little wonder Indians feel betrayed by the white man’s failure to honor the old fish treaties. We have destroyed not only the Indians but the very rivers that sustained them. In the end, if we’re not careful we will also destroy that which sustains us, and there will be no one to name the rivers. There will be no more Skykomish, no more Duwamish, just gray rivers dumping sewage into a gray Sound.

Outsiders or newcomers to Washington may think that Microsoft, or Boeing, if they haven’t read of recent defections, is the King of the Northwest.

But anyone over the age of fifty who was born and raised in Western Washington will know that Salmon is the Once and Only King. There is no way to have been raised in this state and missed seeing and being inspired by the magnificent salmon runs that have historically shaped the Pacific Northwest and the cultures that have thrived here.

Richard Hugo, born in White Center, just as I was, offers poems that celebrate this event and others that mourn its passing as industry, aided and abetted by government neglect, have decimated these magnificent runs.

“Skykomish River Running,” though it focuses somewhat on the steelhead thriving on the salmon runs, beautifully captures the feelings one has when observing a salmon run.

The narrator begins by simply wading out into the middle of a salmon migration, accurately observing the “dorsal fins like gravestones in the air” and the bright autumn-like colors of the dying fish.

But in the midst of this sacrificial and holy grounds, the narrator suddenly feels“the river Sky” humming in his ear, as he becomes one with the river and identifies with the Indians who gave this river its name, SKYkomish, saying he’ll “pound the drum for rain.” He continues to transform, saying I will “be a trout,” “swim a/ week to be a witness to the spawning,” and, in the last stanza, “floating past the troutless pools/learning water is the easy way to go.”

I, too, am of these salmon, nourished of their flesh before I was flesh. I, too, struggled with them, brothers, nearly as big as myself, to discover through the struggle who I was and who I was to become. I, too, survived the winter to be reborn in spring by feasting on their flesh.

And I, like Hugo, discovered my common heritage with the American natives who celebrated the salmon’s spirit long before my ancestors came to these shores. I continually try to reinforce that shared heritage by attempting to ensure the salmon’s continued existence despite the many obstacles they face.