Richard Hugo is most famous for this devastating little villanelle, called The Freaks at Spurgin Field Road. I just finished his first book, A Run of Jacks. I'd no idea it was his first book. I'll excerpt two stanzas from a poem called "Northwest Retrospective: Mark Tobey." (Mark Tobey was a painter.)
Reaching the silence after the last word was like hearing the end of a piece of music that I didn't know was playing until it was over. There's no rhyme scheme, although plenty of soft reverberations ("air" and "hair" in the last stanza). Partly it must be that the meter is fundamentally iambic, and much of it is in pentameter -- although the shortening of the last two lines to tetrameter is quite an effect. And the words are so simple. I love a poet that turns a list of nouns into verse, as in "cryogenic fuels, free radicals."
Hugo was born in Washington state and is considered a regionalist. He has great one-liners too. There's one in a poem towards the beginning, called "West Marginal Way":
Beyond Van Allen rings, the stars
don't glitter, arrogant as moons.
When did we start? Light-years ago.
Why did we come? No matter. We
are not returning to that world
of ditch and strain, the research terms:
cryogenic fuels, free radicals,
plasma jets, coordinated fusion.
Only the last, in all this void, applies.
A universe is fusing in our eyes.
Why return to air and land, when
free from weight and the weight
of hope, we float toward that blue
that kisses man forever out of form.
Forget the earth, those images and lies.
They said there'd be no wind out here,
but something blows from star to star
to clean our eyes and touch our hair.
Reaching the silence after the last word was like hearing the end of a piece of music that I didn't know was playing until it was over. There's no rhyme scheme, although plenty of soft reverberations ("air" and "hair" in the last stanza). Partly it must be that the meter is fundamentally iambic, and much of it is in pentameter -- although the shortening of the last two lines to tetrameter is quite an effect. And the words are so simple. I love a poet that turns a list of nouns into verse, as in "cryogenic fuels, free radicals."
Hugo was born in Washington state and is considered a regionalist. He has great one-liners too. There's one in a poem towards the beginning, called "West Marginal Way":
Some places are forever afternoon.
'The dim boy claps' is more American, I think, than this one -- as in, the landscape is more unmistakeably American. I remembered that really well too.
ReplyDeleteIn this one, the line 'When did we start? Light-years ago.' seems very familiar. And it's a good one. And I love the ending, the last three lines.
It's also quite nice that (as you say) he doesn't try to squeeze in as many fancy words as possible -- I'm sure poets do it subconsciously, but sometimes contemporary poems that I read seem to be just a list of unusual words the poet is proud of knowing.