Mike Sanders is certainly right. It’s certainly much easier to provide a couple of links for the day and get on with the rest of the day than it is to come up with original ideas.

I just noticed that I’ve been blogging for nearly six months with few breaks. I got used to those week-long breaks as a teacher, and I’m starting to remember why they were needed. I need one now in order to recharge some batteries.

As much as I love poetry, it hasn’t been easy reading a poetry book in a week and trying to review it. At times I’ve almost found the task overwhelming. Personally, I find it much easier to read and review a novel than a book of poems because there’s so much more involved in interpretating a poem.

At the moment, I’m considering reading a newly-purchased Wendell Berry book of poems or John Berryman’s The Dreamworks. I’m a little intimidated by the the Berryman book. Maybe that’s a lot intimidated. It may take me awhile to work up the courage to be publically humiliated again.

I’ll get started soon. I think.

Right now I’m thinking I need to use the computer to do my taxes in TurboTax.

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:

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.

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 as shown in Hugo’s “Eileen.”

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.