Hugo, Richard

The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, originally published in 1979, remains one of the freshest and most refreshing treatises on the writing of poetry. While you won't find formality or nicety here, Hugo has the unusual quality of being highly opinionated and yet not at all convinced that what works for him will work for you. Hugo doesn't believe that he can teach you how to write; he believes he can teach you how he writes, and by doing so, teach you "how to teach yourself how to write." And while most writing instructors claim that one can't be a good writer without being a good reader, Hugo claims "that one learns to write only by writing." Hugo's essays are strong-willed and funny and by turns full of bluster and cloaked in modesty. While "a good teacher can save a young poet years by simply telling him things he need not waste time on, like trying to will originality or trying to share an experience in language or trying to remain true to the facts," he writes, "ultimately the most important things a poet will learn about writing are from himself in the process." Above all, Hugo stresses that creative writing is creative because it is a creative act: "if one is writing the way one should, one does not know what will be on the page until it is there." So, he warns, "If you want to communicate, use the telephone." And "Think small.... If you can't think small, try philosophy or social criticism."

Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo

The definitive collection of a major American poet's work, with a new introduction by William Kittredge.

Richard Hugo was, in James Wright's words, "a great poet, true to our difficult life." Making Certain It Goes On brings together, as Hugo wished, the poems published in book form during his lifetime, together with the new poems he wrote in his last years.

Selected Poems

The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography

The Right Madness on Skye: Poems

Icehouse Lights (Yale Series of Younger Poets Series: Vol.)

Winner of the 1981 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. "David Wojahn's poems concern themselves with emotive basics: leaving home, watching those we love age and die, the inescapable drone of our mortality. Yet as poems, they are far from usual. They help us welcome inside, again and again, the most personal of feelings." -Richard Hugo, Poet and Judge of the Competition