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CHAPTER ELEVEN Richard Hugo’s Montana Poems: Blue Collars, Indians, and Tough Style STEVE DAVENPORT It is fitting that The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo’s collection of essays on the practice and teaching of creative writing, ends with the story of a squatter dispossessed of the land he and his wife had lived on for five years, a narrow strip of Boeing property between the company fence and the Duwamish River. In “The Squatter on Company Land,” the poem that came of that story, the speaker voices the company claim: We had to get him off, the dirty elf— wild hair and always screaming at his wife and due to own our land in two more years— (Making Certain 96) Here is the favored Hugo figure,a character living sometimes noisily,sometimes quietly,always rawly in the margins,and usually a double for the poet.In“How Poets Make a Living,”the essay that closes The Triggering Town, Hugo includes the texts of two letters transcribed from the squatter’s“near-illegible,primitive scrawl,”a voice that refuses to go quietly into the night, the one we use“only in the most unguarded moments,in the wildest,most primitive phrases we shout alone at the mirror” (106, 109). About the Boeing squatters and the human condition they express in their reaction to forced removal, Hugo writes,“[W] e are all going into the dark. Some of us hope that before we do we have been honest enough to scream back at the fates. Or if we never did it ourselves, that someone, derelict or poet, did it for us once in some euphonic way” (109). In Ten Tough Trips: Montana Writers and the West,William Bevis describes Hugo’s voice: “The basic subject of Hugo’s poetry—locating the dispossessed—was personal enough,obsessive enough to deserve a passionate style”(143).As poet, essayist, and teacher, Hugo deepened our understanding that poetry might 200 Hugo-Land improve lives by doing some necessary, and necessarily poetic, screaming of his own. In the process, he broadened our definition of poetry by admitting dispossessed figures like the squatter,known as TheAdmiral because of his incongruous yachting cap. Hugo gives us plenty of these derelict-poets, doubles for himself, who teach us about human conduct and spirit in the face of corporate or class power, who make a music, euphonic or not, that critiques the center from the margins. Consider “Mad Sam, the nutty preacher ring[ing] the bells” in “No Bells to Believe” (Making Certain 51) or the “hermit in the trailer at the field’s / forgotten corner” and the “perfect solo on a horn he cannot play” in “At the Stilli’s Mouth”(Making Certain 53) or the beer-drinking“fat man [who] plays a vicious clarinet / all night” along the river in “From the Rain Forest Down” (Making Certain 60) or the fat man“crude as a loon on land”in“The Swimmer at Lake Edward,”forced by his unruly“tongue”to sing“alone in his mind,tunes he connected with rain”and who one day became a local legend: The first warm day, he dove from the sky into the lake we named for the king. We stood on the shore and marveled at his wake. When we applauded, he flashed away, his dorsal fin the only point in the glare. What was his name? . . . (Making Certain 252) The Fat Man’s other name, like The Admiral’s, Mad Sam’s, or the Hermit’s, is Poet, and poems like “The Squatter on Company Land,”“The Swimmer at Lake Edward,”“From the Rain Forest Down,”“No Bells to Believe,”and“At the Stilli’s Mouth”map Hugo territory,a bar or a dead-end Northwest town,a strip of land or a river where such a poet might sing or play his song, however sad and private or public and unruly the music might be. Hugo agrees:“Certainly I was Mad Sam, ringing bells no one responded to, remaining on the scene of a shameful past hoping in time to be accepted”(The Real West 11). That these figures are male is also fitting, for in Hugo’s universe, derived from American culture in general and his Depression-era, rough-and-tumble Northwest upbringing in particular, a man’s masculinity is always in question. Looking back, William Matthews pointed to Hugo’s lack of masculine selfworth ,especially as it manifested itself in an early appreciation of“local toughs for...

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