apoetreflects:

ATTENTION!  For those of you who are beginning poets/writers, these next two posts, which I will present as Part 1 & Part 2, may contain some of the most important information that I will share since starting this blog.  I highly recommend the book from which these excerpts are taken.

If you have not already read The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo, I encourage you to find a copy and do so.

Part 1 of 2

“I often make these remarks to a beginning poetry writing class.

You’ll never be a poet until you realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong.  It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you.  Every moment, I am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like me.  But I hope you learn to write like you.  In a sense, I hope I don’t teach you how to write but how to teach yourself how to write.  At all times keep your crap detector on.  If I say something that helps, good.  If what I say is of no help, let it go.  Don’t start arguments.  They are futile and take us away from our purpose.  As Yeats noted, “Your important arguments are with yourself.”  If you don’t agree with me, don’t listen.  Think about something else.

When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it.  One is that all music must conform to truth.  The other, that all truth must conform to music.  If you believe the first, you are making your job very difficult, and you are not only limiting the writing of poems to something done only by the very witty and clever, such as Auden, you are weakening the justification for creative writing programs.  So you can take that attitude if you want, but you are jeopardizing my livelihood as well as your chances of writing a good poem.

If the second attitude is right, then I still have a job… . Besides, if you feel truth must conform to music, those of us who find life bewildering and who don’t know what things mean, but love the sounds of words enough to fight through draft after draft of a poem, can on on writing—try to stop us.

One mark of a beginner is his/her impulse to push language around to make it accommodate what he/she has already conceived to be the truth, or, in some cases, what he/she has already conceived to be the form.  Even Auden, clever enough, at times to make music conform to truth, was fond of quoting the woman in the Forster novel who said something like, “How do I know what I think until I see what I’ve said.”

A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or “causes” the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing.  That’s not quite right because it suggests that the poet recognizes the real subject.  The poet may not be aware of what the real subject is but only have some instinctive feeling that the poem is done.

Young poets find it difficult to free themselves from the initiating subject.  The poet puts down the title: “Autumn Rain.”  He/She finds two or three good lines about Autumn Rain.  Then things start to break down.  He/She cannot find anything more to say about Autumn Rain so he/she starts making up things, he/she strains, he/she goes abstract, he/she starts telling us the meaning of what he/she has already said.  The mistake he/she is making, of course, is that he/she feels obligated to go on talking about Autumn Rain, because that, he/she feels, is the subject.  Well, it isn’t the subject.  You don’t know what the subject is, and the moment you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain start talking about something else.  In fact, it’s a good idea to talk about something else before you run out of things to say about Autumn Rain.

Don’t be afraid to jump ahead.  There are a few people who become more interesting the longer they stay on a single subject.  But most people are like me, I find.  The longer they talk about one subject, the duller they get.  Make the subject of the next sentence different from the subject of the sentence you just put down.  Depend on rhythm, tonality, and the music of language to hold things together.  It is impossible to write meaningless sequences.  In a sense the next thing always belongs.  In the world of imagination, all things belong.”

Richard Hugo, from Chapter 1 “Writing off the Subject” in The Triggering Town, (W.W. Norton, 1979)

Stay tune for Part 2 …