Making Certain It Goes on 1ST Edition

by 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.

Genres: Poetry, American, Literature, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Richard Hugo (December 21, 1923 - October 22, 1982), born Richard Hogan, was an American poet. Primarily a regionalist, Hugo's work reflects the economic depression of the Northwest, particularly Montana. Born in White Center, Washington, he was raised by his mother's parents after his father left the family. In 1942 he legally changed his name to Richard Hugo, taking his stepfather's surname. He served in World War II as a bombardier in the Mediterranean. He left the service in 1945 after flying 35 combat missions and reaching the rank of first lieutenant.

Hugo received his B.A. in 1948 and his M.A. in 1952 in Creative Writing from the University of Washington where he studied under Theodore Roethke.[1] He married Barbara Williams in 1952, the same year he started working as a technical writer for Boeing.

In 1961 his first book of poems, A Run of Jacks, was published. Soon after he took a creative writing teaching job at the University of Montana. He later became the head of the creative writing program there.[2] His wife returned to Seattle in 1964, and they divorced soon after. He published five more books of poetry, a memoir, a highly respected book on writing, and also a mystery novel. His posthumous book of collected poetry, Making Certain It Goes On, evinces that his poems are marked by crisp, gorgeous images of nature that often stand in contrast to his own depression, loneliness, and alcoholism. Although almost always written in free verse, his poems have a strong sense of rhythm that often echoes iambic meters. He also wrote of large number of informal epistolary poems at a time when that form was unfashionable.

Hugo was a friend of poet James Wright.

Hugo’s The Real West Marginal Way is a collection of essays, generally autobiographical in nature, that detail his childhood, his military service, his poetics, and his teaching.

Hugo remarried in 1974 to Ripley Schemm Hansen. In 1977 he was named the editor of the Yale Younger Poets Series.

Hugo died of leukemia on October 22, 1982.

Reviews

[Steve Saroff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a friend of Richard Hugo, meeting him when I was living outside when I was 18. I met Hugo in Harold's club one summer afternoon. He talked me into taking his classes and encouraged me to send my dyslexic writing -- short stories -- to magazines. He said, "There are lots of people out there who can spell and fix grammar mistakes, but not so many who can get the story right." He changed my life. So, how in the world can I write a fair review of any of his perfect books? I can't. The world is not fair. I miss this guy, his laughter, his stories, his wisdom, his vodka and freskas he would serve at his small kitchen table, the windows in his classroom that he would open to blow his cigarette smoke out of during class, his pointed attention to everything honest. And all that, and more comes through his words. Buy two copies of this book. One to keep. The other to give. You won't regret the actions, and you will love the sound his words will give to your dreams.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This guy makes my heart explode. I don't really care about drinking or Montana or fishing that much. Those are Hugo's main obsessions. But he drops truth like this:

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.

And then you sit alone for awhile.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think of this collection as an unintentional autobiography. If you read the poems from start to finish in the order presented, you follow Richard Hugo's progression from loneliness to love and friendship, addiction through recovery, and depression to hope. Most appealing of all are his poems revealing his love of nature, and of beauty in all its manifestations. He visited places altered by progress and imagined the lives of those forgotten by history, those who loved and depended upon the land they occupied.

Of all the bits and pieces of poems I could share here, this is the one that speaks to me most deeply of Hugo's essence:

"Today I am certain,
for all my terrible mistakes I did the right thing
to love places and scenes in my innocent way and to spend
my life writing poems, to receive like a woman
the world in its enduring decay and to tell
that world like a man that I am not afraid to weep
at the sadness, the ongoing day that is draining our life
and is life."
(excerpt from "Letter to Peterson from the Pike Place Market" p. 289)

Tidbits on other topics:

Friendship
"The best friends
we remember took us home the way we are."

Politics
"One thing about politicians, they can never be whores,
they're not honest enough. They screw men in ways that only
satisfy themselves."

War
"Dear Charles: And so we meet once in San Francisco and I
learn I bombed you long ago in Belgrade when you were five."

Stones
"Act friendly to the stone.
Smile. Touch. Even pat its brown hand
and say 'good stone, good,' though of course
be alone when you do. Don't get a reputation:
'Creep with pet rock.'"

(It's always a good idea to proofread your reviews before posting. When I previewed this review I discovered I'd left the "p" off of "weep" in the first excerpt!)

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just discovering Hugo's poetry. My heart hurts, it dances, it sinks and it soars with his words. He was a Seattle native, but wrote about Montana, Italy and Scotland as well as the Pacific Northwest. My copy-only a week old- is becoming dog-eared as I select poems in wonder, promising to return.

[Dan Butterfass · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read Hugo over and over, over long period of time, and the more I read him, the better he gets. He's just a rock solid, really really really first-rate poet, especially if you love Montana. His book on teaching and writing poetry, The Triggering Town, is also something I turn back to, every couple years.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote a review that covered this book as well as four others. You can find it here:
http://hubpages.com/hub/FiveBestNewBo...

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed Triggering Town by this poet, and wanted to read some of his poetry. Poems always have context, and the context here is fish, desolate landscapes, almost deserted towns, more fishing, going home, surviving growing up, Italy, WWII, and more. The earlier poems felt very impersonal to me, but I think it can be difficult to face the personal and history when it wasn't happy and supportive. I really enjoyed the section of letter poems. My context is more internal perhaps, or a different landscape than his. I had a hard time connecting to these poems.

[Greg D'Avis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got this to read to my then one-year-old; she's now nine and has a seven-year-old brother, so that gives you an idea of my pace. Probably my favorite poet. Beautiful and so, so sad. As I get older, the poems hit harder.

[Charis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Place and nature based poems. Richard Hugo is one of those old school American poets that I appreciate and enjoy reading at times, but as expected his rhetoric regarding sex and race is occasionally problematic.

[Bill McCloskey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The collected poems of one of America's finest poets. Hugo was one of those poets that I guess I was destined to like. The first few weeks of my freshman year at the University of Colorado I heard him read. I think he was the first "professional" poet I'd ever heard read and the moment was transformative for me. A decade later I heard him read again, not too many months away from his death. We talked about Jack Wheatcroft, my poetry teacher. He read well. He had gained much weight.

And over the years I collected the individual books of poetry, and the collected works when it came out. and then the softcover version when I wore out the hardcover version.

Each journey into Hugo I come away changed. No higher recommendation.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best way to explain his ability is to quote him:

" Today, I am certain,
for all my terrible mistakes I did the right thing
to love places and scenes in my innocent way and to spend
my life writing poems, to receive like a woman
the world in its enduring decay and to tell
that world like a man that I am not afraid to weep
at the sadness, the ongoing day that is draining our life
and is life."
==

To reassure you, there are no noted "terrible mistakes" in his biography, he, as Kunitz would note, is just guilty of being fallible and mortal. In Hugo's defense, he admits, he is "not afraid to weep at the sadness."

[Jeffrey St. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Hugo's poem "Driving Montana" begins like this:

"The day is a woman who loves you. Open."

It may be the best first line by any American poet and it is fully representative of the body of Hugo's work: imagistic, personal, honest and finely attuned the music and heartbreak of life in the American West.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew Richard Hugo's essays before I knew his poetry -- if that makes any sense at all. I picked up this collected poetry volume from a local library --- and while I can't say this book changed my life, I did enjoy Hugo's work, especially the poems from his book The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservior. This is a fine collection of a poet's life work!

[Wendy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will be honest and say that I knew almost nothing about Richard Hugo and had never read his poems until I became Writer in Residence at the literary center that bears his name. Now, having completed a first pass through his collected poems, I am in love. He is the quintessential Seattle poet.

[Ron Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another book from Chris Wall. He sent me this collected works of this great Montana poet, and oh Lord, does his work hit hard. He has a unique voice and has slipped from the scene since his death in '82. That's a real shame. This guy should be read and reread.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of poetry mostly adheres to the "in things not ideas" school of poetry and writing with great success. This is narrative poetry at its best and I constantly re-read work from it. Hugo taught and influenced James Welch, James Crumley and others.

[Craig Morgan Teicher · Rating 5 out of 5]

something tells me there's something uncool these days about Hugo, but he's very important to me.

[Mugren Ohaly · Rating 1 out of 5]

How many poems can a single person possibly write about nature and expect them to all be good?

[Lorraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't like the first two collections in this anthology at all; the poems in them are very abstract. I had a hard time understanding what is happening in most of them.

The third collection, about his experiences in WWII, is much more narrative, and from that point on, the poems continue to be narrative and comprehensible to me.

I really like the 6th, 8th, and 10th collections in the anthology: 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, The Right Madness on Skye, and New Poems.

Themes: fish, fishing, rivers, wind, clouds, poverty, declining cities.

[j.e.rodriguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

"He knows grief repeats on its own."

[Sheppard Braddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would be surprised if there was a better collection of Richard Hugo's poems that existed in the world. Awesome when paired with Hugo's essays in The Triggering Town as well.

[Susan Eubank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Dick, Loved your war poems and how they permeated the rest. Read you because they say you did good nature poems. I think they don't know the west. We just take that part for granted; it suffuses our lives. Good thing though, couldn't live any other way, myself. Could have used less about trout and your early take on women. Who am I to judge and give stars? Oh well, we are all trying. The last ones sailed. Susan

[Adam Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

This man was incredibly talented. His poems are all crafted with a clean, crisp sense of line; an immaculate ear; and quite the libido (just look at how many are in this collection!). My problem? I don't think he achieved that point beyond sheer virtuosity in many of the works,—the whole pastoral jazz can get tiring. I miss, in comparison, Roethke's delicacy, whimsy and masterful hysteria.

[Catherine StClair · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love love love Richard Hugo. He writes earthy poems in colloquial language, but he takes on sweeping themes -- love, death, the passing of time, and the tenacity of the human spirit!
Try "Glen Uig" or "Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg"

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong aura of rural decay but also resilient beauty. "Nothing dies more slowly than a scene". Populated by dead end dive bars and lonely people, Hugo's poems sound across mountains and plains alike.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential book of poetry. Hugo makes his place your place, and never lets you leave. Quite funny as well.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreak has got nothing on Richard Hugo.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

My new favorite poet. "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg" is magical.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour of an amazing life's work, it's great to read this alongside The Real West Marginal Way.

[Marissa]

Really quite captivating marvelous work. I love "Pike Place Market," another titled "Eileen," sand dunes, and Montana. Landscapes.