Book Review – Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town
A Classic Book of Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing
Culled from years of teaching creative writing and developing his own poetic eye, Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town (Norton, ISBN: 0393309339, 1992) is not so much an instructional manual as 109 pages of “This is how I do it.” Though a better way to teach poetry is yet to be found, there are few better to learn a personal writing philosophy from than Richard Hugo.
Writing Off the Subject, The Triggering Town, and Assumptions
Broken up into nine sections, the first three of the book serve as the straightforward teaching material. In the first, Hugo sounds off brilliantly on the difference between one-syllable and multi-syllabic words, the importance of risking sentimentality, and how the music of language should hold a poem together. Though it is called “Writing Off the Subject,” Hugo tackles its inverse, essentially describing how to write around a poem as to not smother it or milk it dry.
Any fan of Hugo will undoubtedly mention his affinity for place, his love of “the town.” In “The Triggering Town” section, he takes the fiction writing technique of simply making stuff up and applies it to poetry, encouraging a writer to write what feels accurate instead of what is accurate.
He not only strives for an impossible disconnect from the triggering subject (the impetus for a poem. In the examples he uses it’s usually a town), but he almost seems to encourage a “word soup” style of writing that forgoes narrative in favor of pretty sounds. His love of words takes precedence at all costs, but his advice is sound.
The “Assumptions” section is a comprehensive list of what Hugo assumes when he begins to not write about or even think about writing a poem, but simply feel a town begin to inspire a poem. The list includes minor but important details and their opposites: there is no crime or there were a series of brutal murders that took place, the annual picnic is an annual failure or the only fun people have all year. He doesn’t state it, but he is definitely encouraging writers to develop their own assumptions about triggering towns, a positive by all means.
A Life Spent Living Poetry
Even if Hugo’s own poetry wasn’t enough to lend him credibility (which it certainly is), he was a student of Theodore Roethke’s, a former bomber in the United States Army stationed in Italy during World War II, a professor of creative writing at the University of Montana (Missoula Campus), and an introverted alcoholic with an eye for the towns of yesteryear.
With the exception of the outwardly craft-heavy “Nuts and Bolts,” the remaining sections are largely autobiographical, giving the reader a context for how and why Hugo creates his work the way he does. His time spent in Italy and a selection of some poems that resulted are especially telling, showing how to use the tools and ideas the previous sections express.
Statements of Faith
Though written for the aspiring, beginning poet, The Triggering Town contains enough fundamental truth to make it essential for writers of all skill levels. Writers in general seem to need encouragement and a constant recharging of words and themselves. As Hugo says in his “Statements of Faith” section: “How you feel about yourself is probably the most important feeling you have.”
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The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo
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