We could if we had to eat stone and go on.

I could post and post about Richard Hugo. I want to tell everyone I ever meet that he's the greatest poet who ever lived, if only they would read him. He's not unknown by any measure- he taught the Roethke chair at Montana and is acknowledged as one of America's best- but when I gabble out his poems in excitement to Annie, for example, she doesn't light up the way I do. My instincts say, my wild connection to his voice has a lot to do with what I bring to the page myself when I start reading. Example:

The Only Bar In Dixon

Home. Home. I knew it entering.
Green cheap plaster and the stores
across the street toward the river
failed. One Indian depressed
on Thunderbird. Another buying
Thunderbird to go....

Those lines sing for me. Why? The bar sounds depressing, but the "Home. Home." rings like my personal bell. I've felt that walking into bars. I get it every time I open my book on the Brewhouse counter top. And the times I spent saving for Thunderbird in Glasgow.... That poem concludes:

I want home full of grim permission.
You can go as out of business here
as rivers or the railroad station.
I new it entering.
Five bourbons
and I'm in some other home.

Again, what's my trip? Permission to lose it? Like I need any more encouragement. No: I guess it's just a thrill of recognition. He's been there too and faced it perhaps with more honesty than I can muster right now. He's not celebrating it exactly. But he's making music in it and without making it beautiful he's finding beauty. Hugo died of cancer in 1982. His last poems reverberate with love. Some were elegies for dead friends, one for his father. Or there's this...

Pishkun Reservoir
for Bud Guthrie

Think of those big trout,
Bud, fifty years
back and more and no limit then, no game regulations
and no sonic booms cracking the dam

Begins like a standard bitter elegy for the West that's gone, an old man's poem. Ends:

...your bobber
moves some right slightly wrong way
and we know no
matter how faint that nibble seems
it could be fifty years old, something
real big.
Still no limit, Bud. No limit that counts.

No limit that counts. Well it seems he died in love. He was a great teacher too, by all accounts, and he wrote a fine book about the teaching of writing, The Triggering Town, which ends with excellent words about how our inadequate capacity for love may not always disqualify us from reaching one another*. Words to live by. I keep saying it.

*These words on Hongkie Town were the grit this post finally grew around. "Am I weird because I insist on treating these working girls as real people with real feelings? I can't do it any other way."

Words to live by.

What about the student who is not good? Who will never write much? It is possible for a good teacher to get from that student one poem or one story that far exceeds whatever hopes the student had. It may be of no importance to the world of high culture, but it may be very important to the student. It is a small thing, but it is also small and wrong to forget or ignore lives that can use a single microscopic moment of personal triumph. Just once the kid with bad eyes hit a home run in an obscure sandlot game. You may ridicule the affectionate way he takes that day through a life drab enough to need it, but please stay the hell away from me. - Richard Hugo