[New-Poetry] The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo

[Anny Ballardini]

The book does not have a concluding sentence /paragraph. I reached the bottom of 109 and turned the page to continue and there was nothing. This book is a voice, like someone speaking to you and then he stopped because we had something else to do. And yes, there is no glory but honesty.

  From: jforjames at aol.com 
  Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2007 4:16 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo


  I ran across this piece yesterday...

  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5911
  Richard Hugo’s Constructivist Moment: On The Triggering Town   
  by Joshua Corey  

  Down where the ladders start—that’s where you’ll find the writing workshop of Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town. More nakedly than any American poet I know of, Hugo writes about the task and function of poetry from a position of sheer abjection. "The self as given is inadequate and will not do"—that statement stands at the core of his disarmingly ad hoc poetics, outlined in chapters with titles like "Assumptions," "Nuts and Bolts," and "Statements of Faith." At first and probably even second glance he looks like an advocate of confession and the unified lyric "I"—not least because he himself is a compulsive confessor. We learn about his traumatic experiences as a World War II bombardier; we overhear English Department infighting and gossip; and between the lines we discover Hugo as a painfully shy, immature, sexually inhibited, passive-aggressive alcoholic. And if this weren’t embarrassing enough, Hugo also implicates the reader in his vision of the poet as awkward failure. 

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