Elegy for Richard Hugo

Elegy for Richard Hugo

(1923-1982)

You said to wait ten years before

trying to write an elegy about someone

who just died. I waited more than three times

that. No doubt it's not enough.

So, something here about a lake's face

changing--ripple, riffle, wrinkle; you

said never use semicolons. (I’m kidding

a kidder.) "Be glad to fish

with you sometime," you wrote in

in the one letter to me, "but I warn you,

I'm strictly a bait fisherman.” If that

were on Twitter now, I'd favorite (a verb, sir)

it and tweet back, No worries. You

haven't missed much. Let's say

a man sits on a rock. He's connected

to a lake, call it Saw Lake, by a fishing

line. He's not really waiting for anything.

He’s drinking beer. A hit, a strike, would be fine,

a rousing thing. Just over the ridge

doesn't lie a town. That's why

nobody's heard of it. I will say

women and men who work at the factory

there return from a women's softball

game, someone won, who cares. Now

everybody will wash their hair, their bodies,

put on clean jeans, heave on the nice

boots, and go out and dance and drink

and kiss and hug and fight. The

man on the rock has seen the rusted

iron roofs of just that town. He

wonders if he should call them rooves.

The lake tugs him away from words

but not for long. "There you go," he says.

Hans Ostrom copyright 2016

Glimpses of Towns

(image: a piece of a road-map of Sweden, including
Söderfors)






My goodness, Washington (the state) is flooding. The combination of much recent snow in the high country plus what we call "The Pineapple Exress"--lots and lots of warm rain from the Pacific--have made many rivers burst. The nearby town of Orting is in danger of going under water. It also has the dubious honor of being in the path of a major lava-flow, should Mt. Rainier decide to wake up. Fire and rain, indeed.

Of course, I picked this day to ride the train north to Bellingham, pick up a car, and drive it back. Things went fine, although even Interstate 5 was covered with water in places, and there were menacing signs about side-highways being closed.

I stopped in the small town of Darrington to get a bite to eat--and thought of Richard Hugo, who dearly loved to visit the small towns of Washington and Montana and write poems about them--well, not really about them so much as about the responses they generated in him. In The Triggering Town, Hugo advises not knowing too much about the towns. He encouraged poets to make all sorts of (unfounded) assumptions. So if I were following his advice, I would assume that the waitress who served me food came in second in the homecoming-queen contest.

Many moons ago, in Sweden, I stopped briefly in Söderfors, Sweden, a former steel and manufacturing town (no doubt some things are still manufactured there), and based strictly on a few observations and a lot of impressions, I wrote a "triggering-town" poem. As both a reader and a writer, one must assess such poems as poems, not as journalistic reports--unless of course the poem really does present itself as an historical poem--and then a different set of legitimate criteria come into play. I remember that a municipal clock wasn't keeping the right time--a charming detail, as far as I was concerned. I remember being exceedingly fascinated by the color of bricks used in many buildings in the town: black. Perhaps the clay used to make the bricks was full of iron or another kind of mineral/metal. . . . On the train-ride today, I saw some "violent brown-black water" rushing off hillsides and out of culverts. . . .

. . .And here's hoping the rivers in Western Washington crest soon and recede quickly, as I post the Söderfors poem:

Söderfors, Sweden


Brown mortar, black bricks, buildings
from industry’s youth.

Two girls walk along a narrow
sandy path over the dam. Violent brown-black
water rushes through
the spillway. A sign cautions.

A gull nests in a granite slab.
(Incubation is a branch of geology.)

Reach for the black bricks—
to know them. Their texture is glass.
They were cooked to the point
at which manufacturing gives way

to beautiful compounds. Söderfors
is a silent town. Its cast-iron clock
is ornate and wrong. Bright green,

nearly lime: that used to be the color
of a rusting Saab parked all by itself.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Answering Questions In Poems

In his book, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (W.W. Norton, 1979, but still in print), Richard Hugo includes a chapter on "Nuts and Bolts" in which he gives such specific advices as "use no. 2 pencils," "never erase--just cross out [lines or words you don't like as you write]", and "If you ask a question [in a poem], don't answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. . . .If you can answer the question [in a poem], to ask it is a waste of time" (p. 40).



Of course, the business about pencils is a bit tongue-in-cheek--but also refreshingly specific, especially in contrast to the tired, vague advice usually given to writers, such as "write what you know" or "show, don't tell." Because poetry and fiction concern imagination, or making things up, one is always writing what one doesn't know even when s/he is writing what s/he knows. And sometimes it's better to tell rather than show. You just never know.



A student in class reacted to some of this advice (from Hugo) by saying that it made him want to do just the opposite of what Hugo advised; he had the "don't-tell-me-what-do-do" response, not a bad one for a poet to have. Probably Hugo himself would endorse the reaction, and of course most writers and teachers of writing assume that when they give advice, it will be taken, dismissed, and/or modified but that each of these three responses is fine as long as it works. No doubt Hugo deliberately gives specific advice on seemingly trivial matters (in some cases) just to get poets thinking specifically about how they write, not to get them to write exactly as he does.



In the following poem, I think I unintentionally followed Hugo's advice about not answering questions. The poem does ask and answer questions (a no-no), but, arguably, it also answers questions not asked (okay according to Hugo's "rules"). (It's interesting that all politicians answer questions not asked, but probably not for poetic reasons.) The poem first appeared in Poetry Northwest (Spring 1987), a venerable magazine (founded at the University of Washignton, edited by David Wagoner for a long time) that went out of business but was just revived--in Oregon, I believe. Rather belatedly, I'll "dedicate" the poem to the late Richard Hugo. I never met him, but we exchanged letters once in which fishing was mentioned. Here's the poem:





From Another Part of the Forest


How are you today?
Ten dead fish float in the lake.

May I help you?
Five cattle lie in the shade.

Won’t you please sit down?
A bobcat rakes a deer’s back.

Do you love me?
A butterfly folds up its wings.

What are you waiting for?
Seven geese waddle toward a pond.

Are you sure?
A frog jumps from a log into mud.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom. First published in Poetry Northwest (Spring 1987).