Francesmccue's Blog

So many folks want to know about Hugo– he’s deeply compelling as a man and as a poet– that almost all of my discussions have been about him. Of all the “reviews” that the book has received, only one in RAIN TAXI has focused the book itself. So it’s refreshing to get to talk about what guided my choices as I wrote it. Thank you for prompting this.

First of all, this work connected with me on some very young, very primal levels. I was a forestry/environmental conservation major when I went into college. I wanted to spend my life outdoors. This was 1980 when Ronald Reagan came across our campus, touting his silver-tongued ways to the kids of New Hampshire. I ended up becoming interested in Barry Commoner, an environmentalist and intellectual who ran against Reagan. I was beginning to see how a person could write about the environment and make a difference. The outdoors was urgent and palpable; it connected deeply to my early writing. I always planned to write about torn apart landscapes. At that time, I was saddened by the strip mining in Appalachia, and had seen some of it.

But I was also getting interested in writing about poetry and poets. In classes with Charlie Simic and Mekeel McBride, I learned how to embed analysis and close reading into my prose. I loved that and grew absorbed in it as I grew to be a poet. These early experiences lingered inside me and tumbled out when I had the chance to write the Hugo book.

Really though, there were some constraints in working with Hugo. First of all, it wasn’t ever really going to work to do a straight biography. I wouldn’t have been interested in that kind of linearity. Plus, Donna Gerstenberger, a professor of mine from UW and friend of Hugo’s, had tried and couldn’t really get over the obstacles to write honestly and clearly about him. There was the matter of his first wife, Barbara, to whom Hugo was married for a long time. She won’t speak with anyone about Hugo. I tried and Donna tried. Plus, Hugo was married to Ripley those last nine years and they were productive good years. There are myths about Hugo, and they are upheld by his students, his colleagues and his friends. To break into his life and talk about alcoholism and difficulties with women– well, that would have to get awfully specific.

This book is a back-door way at getting to some of his biography without having to write an actual biography. I had the chance to be blunt– to address Hugo’s sexism and his drinking– without dragging it out.

One of my missions in my work, in life and in writing, is to further the reading of poetry and to instigate good conversations about the art form. I want to crack the safe that keeps poetry in academic settings and wrangle it free into the world. That’s why I started Richard Hugo House. If I could bear witness, as one would in a memoir, to the work and travels of Hugo, maybe I could make the close reading interesting and essential. I could be a character in the search for Hugo and his towns. In the process, I could really dive into his poems.

With that scaffolding, a sort of memoir journey into the poems and the places, I found that essays didn’t always match the subjects. In Silver Star, the town was too small and felt too fictional to accommodate an essay form, so I wrote it as a short story. Except the short story really happened. And in Pony, the most angelic of towns in my opinion, the place was far too sweet for a traditional prose inquiry. That’s why the Pony chapter is written in prose poems. They lighten the touch. I’m hoping that the square boxes of the poems are like chunks out of time, just as Baudelaire had done in Paris. The idea was to do a sort of drill sample into the history of Pony and mingle it with the present.

I didn’t start out to do a literary mash up of all these genres. Memoir, fiction, prose poems, an anothology of Hugo’s poems and literary analysis were just the tools I found useful in the writing of the book. I felt, along the way, that these offered better methods to get at the places and the conditions of the poems and the poet. It seemed simple when I started: write a book about the Northwest towns that Hugo wrote about. Then, it became more complicated, as good things do, when I got into the project.

I want to inspire more scholars and writers and journalists to read poems closely, to live inside them like places. I hope this book does that.

Richard Hugo was an outsider. Born poor, abandoned by his mother, drafted to the War… Bill Bevis writes well about this in TEN TOUGH TRIPS, and other critics have seen it too. It’s a writer‘s game, standing outside a scene and then describing it. But, I don’t think it’s always a poet‘s game. Poets, typically, get enmeshed in their scenes. They sort of become the subject. Think of Plath as the tortured mother or WIlliam Stafford as the generous, plain-spoken everyman.

Then, you have Hugo. He can be sad-sack Hugo, or laughing Hugo, or river-loving Hugo– but he’s outside, trying to write himself into a bar, or a social scene, or a whole town, but it never quite aligns. He leans on the reader for companionship as he’s navigating. It’s as if he doesn’t quite trust himself.

But later, say in the 70′s, don’t the letter poems show how much of an insider he is? I mean he’s corresponding with all the big shots in poetry land; he’s unapologetic about using the stanza-less letter poem; he’s thrilled with his realizations of friendship and belonging. At that point, doesn’t the outsider stance turn away from itself and become more of a style than an ache?

Village Books in Bellingham is one great store: café above, discounts beneath, new books all around—it’s just the place to get what you need. Mary and I gave a reading there last week and we met some Hugo fans, some readers and our friend Ann Morris.

Ann is a sculptor with a beautiful gallery and Studio Grounds on Lummi Island where she displays work. In the “Sculpture Woods,” Ann has large scale bronze pieces. What I love about these large pieces is how they merge figures from classical myths with the local wildlife and embed these in human figures. There’s one called “Dance of Life” that presents a huge bull on standing on his back legs who is “goring” a woman by putting his head between her legs. It’s magical. Sexy, astonishing and strangely compassionate.

A lot of what Ann does has to do with scale. In her smaller work pieces, ones on display in the gallery, there are little boats with ribs for oars, bronzed replicas of whale and sea lion bones. One huge rib cage completely undid me. I wanted to lie inside of it. Two inch bones are blown to two feet long. She puts them upright and they are like giant femurs or stubby canes. I want to lean on them.

Here is an artist with lots to express and an outstanding sense of craft that carries the emotion right into your heart.

Meet Blase Reardon, avalanche forecaster and glacier specialist. Mountaineer and athlete.

This picture is taken at Lois and Jim Welch’s house in Missoula. We are having a book party for THE CAR THAT BROUGHT YOU HERE STILL RUNS.

Blase is my first cousin. My mother and his father are brother and sister. As Bill Bevis said when he met us in Missoula, “you two were litter mates.” We did spend about ten years, our early ones, playing in the woods behind our grandparents’ house in Cincinnati.

Blase, like me, liked to read. He read “Boy’s Life” and when I went to visit him, I read all of the back issues. We both were into early American wars: the revolution and the Civil War. Our grandfather gave me a subscription to the Civil War Times, a heady, scholarly periodical that we gawked over while sitting in my treehouse.

Blase grew up and lived beyond those pages of “Boy’s Life.” He’s getting a MS in Glaciology at the University of Montana. Awhile back, he got an MFA in Creative Writing. I tell you this not because of the credentials, but because they show the breadth of Blase’s interests and skills. I interviewed him about his thesis. Here’s what he says:

“Basically there’s a glacier in Glacier National Park where I worked for a long time. We want to know how much mass is coming and going in the glacier. It tells us something about whether climate is changing over the last fifty years, and how much.”

“Do you mean how much ice is melting?” I ask.

“Mass is water or ice. Think of it as income or debt. How much is the glacier gaining or losing in the long term.”

And, there’s another project Blase is interested in:

“I worked on the Going To The Sun Road in Glacier for five years and I started the avalanche forecasting program there. I was well aware of that place when it was covered with snow.

“One thing I was curious about was how, without modern gear, the Salish would cross Logan Pass. They called it ‘Packs Pulled-Up Pass.’ The Salish would cross over and into Blackfeet territory to hunt in winter, the only time it was safe. There were hazards and struggles with the Blackfeet during other times of the year.

“The Salish had snowshoes that allowed them to travel. The Blackfeet didn’t have them or else weren’t efficient with what they had. They were horse people and plains people. I’m curious about what the snowshoes looked like. How did they work?”

And so, Blase is looking into it.

I headed back to Philipsburg, the place where Hugo wrote “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.”

After the poem came out, folks set up an account at the bank and called it “The Richard Hugo Fund.” Funds supported new streetlamps to fend off the “degrees of gray.”

The town, a place where hard people mined silver and manganese, a town where people left town—this is the town where Richard Hugo came, in 1966, to be in a film by Annick and Dave Smith. Back then, Hugo wrote that “the principal supporting business now is rage.”

Now, the principal supporting business includes a wholesome tourism. Here’s Sue Jenner from the Broadway Hotel, a beautiful place to stay:

It’s pretty much a rage-free town.

I was there this last week and it snowed. May 5^th.

This is the stoplight on the cover of my book, taken from the side street.

Doesn’t look “laid out by the insane,” does it?

Fairfield, Montana is a clean apron of a town, a six block grid that includes a swimming pool and park. It’s a cheerful, sunny place. Choteau, the town to the north, is shaded and strung along a winding street. Both have weekly newspapers.

Big story in both papers: local GOP hosts a Shrimp Peeler. It’s a dinner with 380 pounds of shrimp for 340 people. Fairfield only has 675 citizens. The party raised funds to send a conservative recruiting group to the University of Montana to seek out some youth.

They also are working to start a tea party group.

Ripley Hugo, Richard Hugo’s wife, and I are through both towns. “Shrimp peelers,” we both say and sigh. Then we drive up to her cabin on the south fork of the Teton. It’s where Richard Hugo went with her, up until he died in 1982.

First things: John Prine singing. I drive I90 east, through the “Portal to the Pacific” out across the traffic hubs of Lake Sammamish then Issaquah, and then the road thins before North Bend. Up over the first pass, Snoqualmie, I’m starting to get the hang of it.

What I’m first after, on a road trip to Montana, is that feeling of being immersed in the landscapes passing, in the simple narration of place merging with my own concerns. It’s the time to get the fretting aside and let the road take over.

Into the sage country, thinking of Gary and Maddy, of Hugo, of his friends, of my students. People pass in my head as the elevation lifts and the irrigation takes over the desert. I drop down, facing the bench of the Columbia River at Vantage. A magnificent and raw glacial split in the earth. I 90 goes left, up over the hill to the gorge at George Washington, home of the best taco truck I know. Over the Columbia, I think of the radiated water swirling from Hanford, the fish illuminated with uranium and nuclear-hot water. It’s a murky green and brown; above, in the hills is the “petrified forest,” a little stop-by with a hike and excellent fossils. I remember Maddy and Gary winding their way through the little displays. Maddy’s little “Made in Romania” boots.

I turn right on Route 26 just after the bridge and work my way, on this two-laner, into the Palouse. There’s a soundtrack for the colors and rises of this land: mostly Jay Farrar. It rains along the farms here, and as I pass through the hills, big grade rake marks over the farmlands, it splotches in big drops, greening the land.

Since I’m just back from The Bled, the hinterlands of Marrakesh, I compare the dirt here with that fisty rock strewn place. Red dirt, sand that crumbles off the rocks. Here, the dust peels off of the unfarmed hills, the sand gone silt, in dunes.

Ancient places. Poetry goes across the surface. Hieroglyphics.

I am on my way.

I meet Bob and Betsy, the owners of Book People in Moscow, Idaho. It’s a college town, the lady in Dusty told me. It doesn’t have the angst of Coeur d’Alene. It isn’t quaint. They’ve developed a traffic plan like so many in university towns, the one way streets rolling around like ramps, guiding you around and through town.

Book People is a big store. Used and new books. Huge poetry section. It’s a big city independent bookstore in a small town. Bob is an avid historian of unions in the west.

I met Katherine afterwards. She rushed in after missing the reading. She was a friend of another woman’s who came and we were out having beer. I got to stay at her house. What a gift! Ida was with me and we snuggled in. Grateful dead albums. Tom Lerer album propped up, an old one—a small 33—and little rocks on stands and shelves and shelves of books. Music and books, and little nature artifacts—pure western. Low lighting, red and yellow lampshades.

Sandwiches are priced at 2/3 of Seattle’s prices.

Moscow, Idaho.

I think of writing a poem about the view under a railroad bridge built into a hillside. When you look through, you see another wedge further on, a crinkle between hills. It’s one slot after another and it sort of unravels me.

There it was, The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs. Maddy looks at it and says, “It’s so beautiful.” Mary Randlett’s photographs lift the towns into your line of vision. There’s one, “Pathway to the Duwamish,” that makes you want to walk right into the book, straight through the undergrowth to the river.

We launched the book, ready for its little sail into the world, from Richard Hugo House. My friend and trusty agent Elizabeth Wales says there were about two hundred people there. Bravo, little book. Maddy had to rush in at the last minute from her strings ensemble concert (cello) and they had played Russian Sailors’ Dance and some Bach. “We had to start over because we were all playing at different times,” she said.

First, Rebecca Brown gave a warm, informed introduction. That is an amazing feeling—having your work deeply read by someone who is an expert. She connected this project on Hugo back to The Stenographer’s Breakfast and to some essays I’ve written over the years.

I read some of the pieces about Hugo’s river, the Duwamish, and my own early river, the Ohio. Then, we breezed into Wallace, Idaho and then onto Butte and Pony, Montana. I had never heard the work read out loud.

I wished Gary were there. I came home and was up half the night, imagining him at the reading, with the book, at Maddy’s strings concert.