THE TRIGGERING TOWN by Richard Hugo

The Triggering Town; Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, by Richard Hugo, was published in 1979. Hugo, a poet who won several honors and who directed the creative writing program at the University of Montana , died in 1982. Recently, I came across his book and found myself stimulated by his commentary on the writing process.

Consider the following advice:

Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, "That's pretty lucky." Nicklaus is suppose to have replied, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get." If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

So, if you're like me and sometimes wonder why you spent two hours writing something that later seems less than stellar, Hugo's advice may provide the motivation to write without guilt about your unmade bed or your unmopped floor.

January 2011 issue of Still Crazy

Still Crazy will begin its fourth year of publication in 2011. The January issue will be out the first part of the month.

American Life in Poetry

American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. Sponsored by the Library of Congress, The Poetry Foundation, and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the project is an initiative of Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate of the United States, 2004-2006. The column's sole mission is to promote poetry. To receive American Life in Poetry via email, sign up on the web site: http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/

W. S. Merwin named Poet Laureate

For news on poet laureates - past and present - go to the Library of Congress web site:
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/

79th Annual Writer's Digest placement

Barbara Kussow's entry placed 27th in the top 100 in the Genre Short Story category of the 79th Annual Writer's Digest competition:
http://www.writersdigest.com/article/annualwinners79_genre

Call me conventional

Call me conventional or bourgeois. Say my taste is all in my mouth, if you want to be crude and unimaginative. Or call me a philistine, or say I have a "sour grapes" attitude, or a literal mentality.

Much of contemporary poetry leaves me cold.

I just bought a current issue of a literary magazine at one of the local bookstores. One of the elite in the literary world.

I read the fiction and non-fiction pieces with enjoyment, not so the poetry.
I had the same feeling I often have when reading poetry that gets published in literary magazines. Oh, yes, there are images that are arresting but very little I'd call memorable or quotable. It's nothing I would ever want to spend my time rereading or pondering.

It's not that I am unwilling to work a bit to understand a poem when its meaning is not apparent to me at first reading. I find poems that intrigue me enough to reread from time to time, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

I tend to have favorite poems, rather than favorite poets, but here are a few contemporary poets I like: Billy Collins, Maxine Kumin, Rita Dove, and Ted Kooser.

I would like to see more "accessible" poetry (and that doesn't mean Hallmark sentimentality). If this were the case, then I think poetry would have a broader audience and not just belong primarily to the world of academia.

Garrison Keillor's Good Poems is an example of a collection of poetry that I consider more "accessible."

The poetry of Wallace Stevens

Lately, I've been reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens. I find his poetry of ideas powerful and transcendent. Here are a couple of his poems on the subject of poetry:

THE HIGH-TONED OLD CHRISTIAN WOMAN

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
the conscience is converted into palms,
like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
the opposing law and make a peristyle,
and from the peristyle project a masque
beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
is equally converted into palms,
squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
madame, we are where we began. Allow,
therefore, that in the planetary scene
your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
proud of such novelties of the sublime,
such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
may, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
a jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.


POETRY IS A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing

It is a thing to have,
a lion, an ox in his breast,
to feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-leged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own...

The lion sleeps in the sun
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.