Richard Hugo > Quotes

“You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.”
― Richard Hugo

“Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.”
― Richard Hugo

“In the world of imagination, all things belong.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“I hate that phrase "the real world." Why is an aircraft factory more real than a university? Is it?”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed.

Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction.

Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white pages seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page?

Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it.

Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things.

Play with syntax.

Never want to say anything so strongly that you have to give up the option of finding something better – if you have to say it, you will.

Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.

If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. (If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time).

Maximum sentence length: seventeen words.

Minimum: One.

Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying.
In news articles the relation of the words to the subject is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is weak. (Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way).
When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves: The relation of the word to the subject must weaken – the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength.
This is probably the hardest thing about writing poems

In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business.
Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse 40 years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t.


RICHARD HUGO
Public versus private poets:

With public poets the intellectual and emotional contents of the words are the same for the reader as for the writer. With the private poet, the words, at least certain key words, mean something to the poet they don’t mean to the reader. A sensitive reader perceives this relation of poet to word and in a way that relation – the strange way the poet emotionally possesses his vocabulary – is one of the mysteries and preservative forces of the art.
If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions.
In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over. (Wallace Stevens was honest enough not to try to hide it. Frost’s statement that he tried to make every poem as different as possible from the last one is a way of saying that he knew it couldn’t be).”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Think small.... If you can't think small, try philosophy or social criticism.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Scholars look for final truths they will never find. Creative writers concern themselves with possibilities that are always there to the receptive.”
― Richard Hugo

“I was willingly confused by the times”
― Richard Hugo

“Isn't this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn't this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don't empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?”
― Richard Hugo

“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 you do on one poem is put in on all poems. 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.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you’ll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good! Assuming you can write clear English (or Norwegian) sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.

To write a poem you have to have a streak of arrogance (…) when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Never has your Buick / found this forward a gear.”
― Richard Hugo, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir

“In truth, the writer’s problems are usually psychological, like everyone else’s.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“There are those usual people who try desperately to appear unusual and there are unusual people who try to appear usual.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it, a wise man once told me.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“…I’ve seen the world tell us with wars and real estate developments and bad politics and odd court decisions that our lives don’t matter. That may be because we are too many. Architecture and application form, modern life says that with so many of us we can best survive by ignoring identity and acting as it individual differences do not exist. Maybe the narcissism academics condemn in creative writers is but a last reaching for a kind of personal survival. Anyway, as a sound psychoanalyst once remarked to me dryly, narcissism is difficult to avoid. When we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don’t matter, we may be forced to insist, often far too loudly, that they do.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Believe you and I sing tiny
and wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on. ”
― RICHARD HUGO

“You are someone and you have a right to your life.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“I hate that phrase "the real world." Why is an aircraft factory more real than a university? Is it? In universities I've had in my office ex-cons on parole, young people in tears racked with deep sexual problems, people recently released from mental hospitals, confused, bewildered, frightened, hoping, with more desperation than some of us will ever be unlucky enough to know, that they will remain stable enough to stay in school, and out of hospitals forever. I've seen people so lovelorn that I've sat there praying as only an unreligious man can pray that I don't say something wrong, that I can spare their feelings, that I might even say something that will make their lives easier if only for a few moments. Sad drug addicts too. Not people you usually meet in industrial offices. . . In some ways the university is a far more real world than business.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“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.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival.”
― Richard Hugo

“Lovers inside and horses ignoring the lovers. And the creek nearby. The willows. That was the scene. I forget the sky. The sky, let’s say, was green and dotted with silly clouds that looked like dimes. Then”
― Richard Hugo, White Center: Poems

“you have to risk being overly sincere or being affected, be affected. False”
― Richard Hugo, The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography

“We never quite understand and we can’t quite explain.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“Hope for what? I don’t know. Maybe hope that humanity will always survive civilization.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“We won’t all disappear on a remote country road in the Monroe Valley, but like The Admiral and his wife we are all going into the dark. Some of us hope that before we do we have been honest enough to scream back at the fates. Or if we never did it ourselves, that someone, derelict or poet, did it for us once in some euphonic way our inadequate capacity for love did not deny our hearing. * From Brewster Ghiselin, Against the Circle (New York: Dutton, 1946), p. 60.”
― Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

“The car that brought you here still runs.”
― Richard Hugo, Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo