My Right Foot---Day 18: The Triggering Town

I think one of the best gift books a writer can give to another writer is a small little thing called, The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo.

Richard Hugo was a poet.

And if the word “poet” conjures up images of guys in berets or a drunk girl pulling a spiral notebook full of her teenage poems out from a drawer on a date-gone-bad---think again.

All writers should read poetry. No other branch of the writing tree lays such an emphasis on rhythm, syntax, and brevity.

Even the best lyric writing will often find itself dependent upon the hook.

Poetry is the most difficult of the writing arts to master.

If you are a writer, and you don’t read poetry (good poetry) on a regular basis, you’re really missing the boat.

Today, while pondering which of my inspiring friends I would write about in my daily blog, I got an email from my friend Paul. He told me he’d been reading my blog and following my journey out of Artistic Scurvy-land. He also sent me some of his recent poems.

Paul is a poet. Lives in New Orleans, now. This is what he does.

Getting poetry in my Inbox, for me, is completely normal.

Back in college, I had a small circle of poet friends. They were serious about the craft. And somehow, though not a poet by any means, I was included in their little group. It seems funny to say now, but I was flattered. It was Paul and Randy and Rodney who made me realize, for the first time in my life, that I actually had the ability to write.

They all seemed filled with angst.

I was filled with silly.

But I wrote.

Little pieces. Articles on music. Short stories that no one ever saw. That sort of thing. Looking back, what we seemed to have in common was The Trigger. The ability to be inspired by the same sort of thing. A train station. A phrase. A small stretch of the river. A one-armed man. A fish. A man drumming on a table screaming that “God has forsaken me.” A strange woman drunkenly declaring to us that she was dying of AIDS and giving us her possessions over cheap draft beers.

We took these moments and made them our own.

If you write about it---it’s yours.

And if you can do it well, that simple moment in time transcends. Becomes real for others. They read it. And, in an interior fashion, make it their own.

Perhaps they begin to see the triggers and stake their own claims.

The cycle continues.

It was the poets who told me of Richard Hugo. I fell in love with his simple words and sat in awe one day on the banks of the Missouri River reading his collected works. Wondering how he was able to draw so much beauty out of obscurity. How nothing became something. And how I, somehow, understood.

I’d read poetry before. In grade school and high school, the classics had been shoved down our throats. But Tennyson is not for teens. And Rimbaud wasn’t writing for the Gossip Girl set. Most of us dutifully schemed the poems and simply prayed that Robert Frost wouldn’t turn up on the final exam.

But that day, as the Missouri River rushed by, I somehow was able to translate what Hugo wrote:

When old, you needed words like “lake.”

“Lake” I’d say. Your eyes began to farm.

Horses took you and a friend where coves

were wonderful with bass---bluegills

clowning for your rind below the log.

Catfish ran five pounds. See my picture.

See my mustache then. Any photo fades.

You remain in yellow with your catch.

Richard Hugo was one of the few great writers who could also teach. But he did so, in a typical Hugo-like fashion.

“You’ll never be a poet until you realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong,” he wrote.

The Triggering Town is a collection of essays based on his teaching. He doesn’t as much tell you HOW to write, as he tells you how to live.

“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.”

And his writing advice slaps you across the face with shrewd authority and a silly piece of string.

“Use ‘love’ only as a transitive verb for at least fifteen years.”

“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.”

“No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.”

More than anything, he talks about the triggers. That certain something you spy with your little eye that gets your imagination going.

But imagination can’t be taught. Hugo acknowledges this, in so many words.

Today I remember a day in college. Working at a local hangout with Randy. Paul comes in. Wearing a robe. He’d been modeling for the college art classes to make some cash on the side. He’s lovelorn. Moaning about some woman whose name I don’t know. Randy is about to drop out of school. He eventually does. With the choice of taking his final exam or going to see Leon Redbone perform, he chooses Leon Redbone. One of our friends (a bass player, I think) walks in with a loaf of Wonder Bread taped to his head. He is going thru a Dada phase. We barely bat an eye.

“I feel just feel like quitting everything I’m doing,” he tells me at the counter, as he stands there with a bonnet of bread. I try to get inside his dough-covered head.

“I know. But you’re thinking that it would be even stupider to quit, right?”

His eyes light up. I understand.

Rodney had proposed to his long-time gal. He was older than us. At least ten years, I think. The Godfather of the group. Later that night. we go out for pitchers of beer and potato chips smothered in ranch dressing and parmesan cheese. It’s bad poetry night, and everyone brings their worst. We careen in laughter at poorly written stanzas and order another round.

And, though not a poet, I bring a poem that night, as well. A poem titled, “The Last Bad Poem I’ll Ever Write.”

It’s inspired by something Rodney had said a few weeks earlier on another bad poetry night. Something he mumbled before every poem that he read.

“This is the last bad poem I’ll ever write.”

We would laugh---knowing there will never truly be a last. And then he would read. And read another. All of them bad. And all of them declared the worst. But Rodney was brilliant---and scathingly self-deprecating. We never imagined there would be another worst. Nor a day when another worst would never come.

But I was determined to top them all. Like a sponge, I’d soaked up their various styles. Their references. Their Triggering Towns. And collected them all into one poem.

"The Last Bad Poem I’ll Ever Write"

To this day, I can still recite it from memory.

God has put this bottle into my hands

and sent me down to the river.

To think of nothing

or at least to try.

At least that’s what I thought.

Nothing more,

except how the driftwood floating by

reminded me of you.

And how you were merely a dead branch from a living tree.

A salmon jumped up

and I thought it was you.

But the damn fish had fooled me.

I smoked my last cigarette and

threw the butt into the water

and watched it follow you.

Unafraid.

It may not seem funny to you, but the entire table was doubled over in stitches as I read. In one bad poem, I’d parodied them all. And, thru writing, I’d made them laugh.

And if they laughed…then I could write.

A few weeks later, I was thrilled when Rodney took the time to read something I’d written for real.

For serious.

Rodney was the center. The only real writer amongst us. We were nothing but proletarians lurking at his feet.

I still have a copy of the poem I showed him that day---with his markings on the side. He particularly liked a phrase I’d used:

Not really waiting for the bus. But not really minding if it came.

I saw Rodney smile. I’d made a moment my own. Claimed it. And, in the murk of an otherwise bad poem, Rodney had spotted this.

And I spotted myself. Not long after, I began writing my first play.

A few months after I left my college town, I got a call one night from a friend. Just one of those friends-about-town who know the same people. “I don’t know if you know a guy named Rodney Tullis. But he died last week. In a car accident. Such a shame.”

I’ve written about this before. So I don’t want to talk about it again. But his death hit the poet group like a meteorite smashing into The Grand Canyon.

His death was the ultimate Triggering Town.

Not even Tennyson’s death could possibly have inspired more verse.

I even took a stab. This is what I wrote the night I heard the news:

On hearing news of Rodney...

The moths are all excited---

zooming in like drunken pilots towards their

destination.

Antique velvet wings flickering in

from recesses of the night towards the

solitary light.

The phone rings,

far along the outskirts of the luminescence.

I had been sitting on my mother’s back porch. It was night. Summer. When the phone rang, and it was for me, I would go outside to talk and grab a cigarette. The moths hounded me under the solitary light bulb as I heard the news.

I remember I came inside bawling.

My mother asked me what happened. I told her a friend of mine had died. She seemed to have no reaction. Later, I realized it was the reaction of experience. A sad symptom of age.

She’d seen many die. I had seen few.

I was a mess. She left me alone.

I went down to the corner store and bought a bottle of something called “Boone’s Apple Wine” or something like that.

I never drank at home. Certainly, never alone. But that night, I sat on my back porch and drank and cried about Rodney. I called everyone who knew him. Tried to get all the details. And how was his wife? How was his mother, riddled with Huntington’s Chorea, taking the news?

To this day, I think an entire book could be written on the ripple effect Rodney’s death had over this tiny community.

It’s the poets of your life who teach you the things that cannot be taught.

The Triggering Town.

In Zen terms---The Way.

To have been included in this group for that short span of time was an honor and a privilege. And I will never cease to be grateful for the enlightenment they provided.

Today, one of Paul’s poems pops out of the computer screen:

The way out is pure. If you want to find

a way out. This is all that I really believe: You

need to forget many things. Say: I forget

and I forgive. Take one of those leaflets they

hand out on the street and read it then throw

it away. Forget. Forgive. But this isn't

new, nothing new here. Look your loved

one in the face and decide what you need to

do. Do you love your loved one? The time we

have trickles away, you know. Stare into the

man's eyes. The man you don't know that happens

to be walking down the same sidewalk as you -

he is going in the opposite direction. He is going

south and you are going north. You have said

many things in your life so far. Many words

have passed between your lips, flopped out

into the air, made music, sang the song. The

world is chaotic inside its randomness. The radio

station delivers me the color of a faraway distance now-

tells me night is becoming morning - tells me all kinds

of things - repeats the word until the word

begins to make just enough sense.

He captures. Triggers. And causes the circle to begin again.

Rodney would be proud.

Today, I forget to take a picture of my right foot. I begin to stress. I get home tonight and remember The Trigger that inspired this whole process to begin with---a photo I'd taken a few years ago in black and white of my foot on some railroad tracks.

I look for the photo, but can't find it.

I do, however, find another photo of the railroad tracks I'd taken that same day. I add my right foot into the mix.

Still Life with Right Foot.

Paul still has angst.

I still have silly.

But then, I'm not a poet. I continue to scribble.

Hoping to make Rodney proud.