Triggered

I brought Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town to the beach. I’d never read it, and what better time? A classic, or so I’d been told, a book about the poetics of place. (The title kinda tells us that.)

I read it under a blue-and-white cabana, spreading the pages with delight. Nodding along.
The first page brought me to tears.

And then someone pulled a man from the lake.

Later, at the hotel, I wrote a poem.
(I’ve tried writing this in prose, but the words won’t stay put.)

White Lake Fish
after Richard Hugo

Richard Hugo says not to choose
the topic,
not to write a poem because
it feels like it should be written.

But has he ever been on a beach
when a man’s body is fished
from the lake,
served on a paddle board,
and rushed away in an ambulance?

Has he
sat, stunned, unsure:
Life?
Death?

Was it a final departure or
a resurrection,
and why are the boats…

Oh God, are they searching?

Or just patrolling?

Visions of a child,
dragged under,
of a man
who tried to save her.
No.

No?

No one’s saying.

A tent rises and falls,
opens and closes,
desultorily waving, mawing,
something else hungry
denied (we hope, both) today.

My mother, her nose looped
with the oxygen cannula,
gasped like that,
mouth wide for her
eternal breath
last month.

I stare at my pale legs.

White.

Forgive me if I skip some time in my story here.

Back at the hotel, Hugo’s book stared up at me like nothing had happened.

So I took him to bed with me, which led to arguing with him, which wasn’t entirely fair. I might have had a better experience reading him if I hadn’t just witnessed what I had.

Even still, his voice was charming, authoritative, often wry. He writes like an orator, full of clever asides, and I didn’t mind it.

(Word Raccoon says she has no idea about those.)

He preached the gospel of place in poetry, and I was ready to say amen. He wrote of craft, of not listening to anyone if their advice didn’t serve your process. Another amen.

I don’t let people touch my writing unless I trust them. Even then, I only revise with their advice if it actually makes the piece stronger. Unless I know you’re better with my work than I am, which is rare, duckies, then I yield. I might curse inside, but I yield. 

Still, as I kept reading Hugo, I noticed the absences.

Maybe I was spoiling for a fight to relieve the sorrow clogging my chest.

So I wrote another poem.

While I won’t give away its premise (or title), I’ll say this: the women in Hugo’s book fall into a few predictable types. Wives. “Whores,” he calls some. The one teacher who didn’t shame a teenage boy for writing about a bordello he fled in fear.

There. I did just give away a chunk. I guess that’s okay.

Word Raccoon is shooting a very unladylike finger up at Hugo right now, and I’m not going to stop her because I don’t want her to be a lady, I want her to be real and take no BS.

A certain someone near me when I was reading the book made the mistake, when I vented, of starting to say, “He was of his time.”

Word Raccoon shut that shit down. Fast.

Women can say that. Men? Absolutely not.

And while we’re here: if a man in the ’60s or ’70s chose not to be a condescending ass, was that really such a notable miracle?

Oh, thank you, kind sir, for noticing I am a human being and not just a vessel for your…

Anyway.

I’m not saying Hugo is evil. I’m not even saying he’s beyond redemption.
To be honest, I wasn’t as pissed at him for his casual erasure of women as I probably should have been, because I was curled on a hotel bed trying to erase the image of what happened on the beach from my mind.

It was one pretentious line that made me kick him out of my bed.
If you present yourself as the poet who notices what others don’t, Hugo, and then drop a line that mostly says, look how tender I am for noticing, and it ends up highlighting your own damn misogyny? That breaks the spell.

Without saying it, you were all, “Oh, see, I asked the question no one else asked.”
Newsflash: I would have asked that question, Richard.
Out of genuine curiosity. Not to signal my sensitivity.

I know you were making a point. But in context? It was dehumanizing, budro.
(I’m sorry I can’t share the passage, but my poem speaks for it. Sharing both would ruin the effect.)

I squirm writing this, because I did find many of his tips helpful. And you know when you’re reading something and you keep saying “yes” instead of attacking it with red ink? Yeah. That.

When I’m most frightened and annoyed, I fight on the page.
So I wrote.

I had to write White Lake Fish. Then the next one about him. Not because I thought Fish was a “worthy” topic. He would’ve scolded me for picking it because it was “intense” or “interesting.”

But I wrote it because if I didn’t, it would have wriggled in me and done damage.

So maybe don’t tell people what they should or shouldn’t write with one breath, and then tell them not to listen to you with the next.

Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of teaching writing?

That’s not my central argument here.

Is it?

I feel judged by a dead guy. The poet.
I’m judging myself.

But I swear, I didn’t write the poem to be dramatic.
I wrote it because I had to.

Even now, thinking of the man on the board, my stomach knots.

We’re going to the cemetery tomorrow to weed my mother’s grave.

And I’m pressing up against my (other, unshared) poem’s title again by saying this much,
but this still haunts me in a way even highly targeted internet searches can’t resolve:

No one ever said what happened to the man on the beach.