Writing the Personal Life in Poetry: Tips from Richard Hugo's Essay "The Triggering Town"
When it comes to the personal life in poetry, it often begins with a sensation, a flutter behind closed eyes, a tightening in the chest, the chest that held the erratic and wild heart of youth. It begins with a word, an utterance in the dim office early in the morning as the right words seem impossible—if such words exist at all.
There, at the heart of this struggle, the answer is simple: write.
But when you’re not sure of the subject, or perhaps too close, or perhaps too focused, to the subject, how then can you write? How then can you preserve in ink the reality of your memories, memories that are difficult because they are painful, memories that are difficult because they are joyous, which is to say that this overwhelming want to get them right creates a fear worse than failure because why else does a writer not write other than that very fear?
There’s a solution I’ve learned of that can overcome this fear when it comes to the writing of the personal life in poetry, one that requires the writer to visit a town that both is and isn’t their own. At least, this is the prescription that Richard Hugo offers up in his essay,“The Triggering Town.”
A Foreign, Familiar Town
Hugo’s guidance is simple (perhaps seemingly too simple): write by word association.
To get at the heart of this idea, Hugo opens the essay by looking at what a journalist does in a news article. The relation to the word is tethered to the subject, which is to say that all language and thought will focus on and filter through that main premise behind the article. The writer, themself, have little or no connection to what they’re writing about on a personal level — in most cases, anyway.
That’s not to say it’s a weak way to write, but rather that it is intrinsically different than how poetry functions. It’s here that Hugo offers up this:
“When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves. That is, the relation of the words to the subject must weaken and the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength.”
For Hugo, the writer (you) has to focus on words rather than the subject. Don’t set out to write a poem about your father; instead write a poem that uses, say, three words from your past in no specific order and without any predetermined intent.
The reason for this kind of approach to writing is that it helps to draw connections from word to word, which can sustain a poem, rather than acting as a tentpole subject that might not be stable enough to prop the poem up. This practice is particularly helpful when writing the personal life in poetry, as it allows for the necessary distance from your memories while keeping one a toe in the emotional pool, so to speak. This is what Hugo means when he refers to a town that is both familiar and foreign.
“Somehow,” Hugo writes, “you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the [triggering] words.” And while this can be a difficult change to enact in your work, it’s one that can (again) help sustain a poem through the writing process.
But there’s something else to keep in mind when taking the “triggering town” approach to writing personal life in poetry.
Public Poet Versus Private Poet
Hugo makes it a point to indicate the two different types of poets: public and private.
When it comes to the public poet, Hugo asserts that the public poet “must always be more intelligent than the reader, nimbler, skillful enough to stay ahead,” but they must also be “entertaining so [their] didacticism doesn’t set up resistance.” The public poet’s relation to language resides in the fact that the “intellectual and emotional contents of the words are the same for the readers as for the writer.”
This is to say that the words of a public poet are what they are—there’s no hidden meaning beneath how they are used, and often the public poet relies more on their own witticism paired with the words concrete meaning to pull the reader through their poetry.
But as a private poet, the goal is to be as honest as possible and to avoid boring the reader. It seems less intense perhaps than the public poet, though there is much more to the private poet than this simplified version, particularly when it comes down to the association with language.
“With the private poet, and most good poets of the last century or so have been private poets, 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.”
A Method for Writing the Personal Life in Poetry
The “triggering town” approach to writing the personal life in poetry, particularly for one who more closely identifies as a private poet, is able to enter into a different sphere of creative thought through this act of privatized language.
Of course, the poem must have a logic to it, and certainly, it must have a purpose and intent, but its propulsion comes from the associative leaps made in the language, and there’s much more to work with when you’re not focused on a single subject.
To put it another way, “If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions.”
There, at the heart of Hugo’s explanation of the private poet, is a method for generative writing about the personal life in poetry.
And if you don’t believe me, or if I’ve done a lousy job of ferrying through this process, I leave you with this final bit of wisdom from Richard Hugo: “Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life.”
