31 Letters and 13 Dreams by Richard Hugo (review)

174 Western American Literature 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. By Richard Hugo. (New York: Norton, 1977. 80 pages, $2.95.) The America that Richard Hugo’s poetry has been showing us since his first book, A Run of Jacks (Minnesota, 1961), is a bleak place. Some­ times it is bleak with that sweet loneliness of a trout stream in the mountains; but more often it is an intimidating bleakness of the poor, lost in rage and squalor, or of those rural farms and towns where the facts of distance, of isolation, are more important to the people there than the grand beauty of landscape. This bleakness of isolation is something Hugo has often con­ fronted; in 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, however, he encircles rather than confronts the bleakness, making the acts of connections — letters — the center of his poetry; the resulting poems, though prosy for Hugo, are compellingly written. He wrote most of them after having had a breakdown while teaching at Iowa in 1971. Leaving Iowa City, he went home to Montana. There is nothing, in his book, of the self-scrutiny of the confessionals. Hugo talks the matter over with three friends in three letters, then leaves it behind. The book is not about therapy; it is not essentially about his friends, either, although those first three happen to be Carolyn Kizer, Marvin Bell and Sr. Madeleine DeFrees — all recognizable names to anyone familiar with contemporary poetry. The book is bigger than its parts. And the book is loosely divided into parts. After two or three letter poems comes a “dream” that sums up or supplements the previous poems. There are sections concerned with war (Hugo was a bombardier in Italy during WWII), with Montana, with the everpresence of change in our culture, with important places in his life. By mid-book those places Hugo writes his letters from become important, chosen as emblematic of friend­ ship; he writes of rain in Port Townsend, Washington, to David Wagoner; of “the new heavy kind of wolf” a posse chases, to William Stafford; of fishing to James Wright. And to Denise Levertov, Hugo sends as political a poem as he can write, outlining the brutality of poverty and the hurt it causes. “Letter to Levertov from Butte” has all the bitter precision of those photographs Walker Evans took for his and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; it is a poem worth hearing spoken or read as a speech. We distrust public speech and rightly distrust the catch-words and signals of politicians left and right; but this is speech that happens — it has not so much rhetoric as rightness: the hurts of poverty do last. But as those hurts last, so does another part of poverty: that lesson, learned out of need, that people need each other not just to make their lives enjoyable, but in order to survive. What started for Hugo as a psychological need to touch friends for support becomes, as poem follows poem, a social statement about our isolation, as Americans, from each other: “we don’t take others by the hand and say: we are called people. The power to make us better is limited even in the democratic sea.” How refreshing it is to have Reviews 175 a poet give us more than surrealism or the crypto-personal or the arcane. How refreshing to have a poet look at our whole society and speak without reference to stock politics or sociology. Richard Hugo speaks to us of community, of friends, of those minimal, essential emotional ties that mean survival in a bleak landscape, be it Montana or our national landscape of ego-speak and fragmentation. To Richard Hugo, the experience of poverty, of need, is as valuable as harmful; he sees the experience of need, expressed in the making of human connections, as an emotion one cannot forget, cannot lose touch with, and still be called human. MICHAEL ALLEN, University of Indiana Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle. By Katie Lee. (Flagstaff, Arizona: North­ land Press, 1976. 254 pages, $12.50.) Katie Lee tries to do three things in this book: describe a mode of life she claims is disappearing, establish...