Stopping by the Classroom: Teaching David Huddle’s Poetry

Reading David Huddle’s poetry is a rich experience in many ways, and teaching it is even more so, as I discovered when I taught his collection Stopping By Home. Most of the students in my Introduction to Poetry class at the University of Vermont had only a passing academic acquaintance with the genre, and our immersion in Stopping By Home gave them the opportunity to closely connect not only with its poems but also with its writer as David Huddle, my friend and colleague in the UVM English Department, visited the class as a culmination of our discussion of his work. Experiencing Huddle in the classroom, not only on the page but also in person, was enlightening for me as well as for my students, as we learned together how rewarding an opportunity such a study could be.

A central section of Stopping By Home is entitled “Things I Know, Things I Don’t,” and as I prepared to teach the collection I realized that could well be a focus for our approach to it in the classroom. Through their immersion in its pages my students could come to broaden their understanding of what they had known and what they hadn’t known, not only about poetry but also about themselves and their worlds–they could come to see poetry as a means of investigation and discovery, just as Huddle himself does.

For example “Tour of Duty,” the first section of Stopping By Home, is a sonnet sequence evoking Huddle’s experiences while serving in Vietnam in a military intelligence unit. For most of my students in the late 1990s the Vietnam War was a hazy and controversial event; they knew generally what had occurred, but of course didn’t know what that occurrence might have meant to those like Huddle who had been personally involved in it. In their reading of the “Tour of Duty” sequence, my students confronted what they knew and what they didn’t know about the Vietnam War, about Huddle, and perhaps about themselves. Though they may have known some of the facts about the war, they couldn’t have known what it meant in human terms, and Huddle’s poems enlightened them.

In these sonnets, Huddle presents his experience of being stationed in Cu Chi, Vietnam–his living situation at the base camp, his involvement in office work and interrogations, the Americans and Vietnamese he lived and worked with, bar girls and all. These evocations of the war are not the “war poems” my students no doubt expected, as they are neither heroic nor historical. Rather they are vividly personal, allowing my students inside a world they would not otherwise have known, a world in which Huddle feels “more plant than man,” a world where the local Vietnamese had to live knowing that “Walking nights / out there, you’d be under somebody’s rifle sights”, where

Co Ngoc at the California Laundry wouldn’t say any of our words, but she explained anyway a Vietnamese treatment for a sore throat: over where it’s sore inside you rub outside until that hurts too. That way won’t work for American pain. I’ve tried.

As an American soldier in Vietnam, Huddle bears an internal pain that can’t be rubbed away, one which explains the quietness of the poems in this sequence; they’re not an attempt to make an equivalently painful art, but rather a way of coming to terms with the troubling aspects of his “Tour of Duty.” The kinds of poems these are, in style, voice, and choice of material, say something about the futility and waste of the war, something my students would not otherwise have understood in such personal and accessible terms.

The voice of these poems is one that my students clearly could relate to even as it shared with them a world they couldn’t otherwise know; they recognized and valued the clarity and honesty of Huddle’s language, and in these pages realized how much could be done with it, as in the concluding poem of the sequence :

    Vermont I...