When presented with the possibility of leaving the United states for an extended period of time, the title of Richard Hugo's fifth book of poems inevitably comes to mind. The reason, for this, I think, is that for a period of time beginning roughly in 2003 and extending to about 2006, Hugo was the only poet who made any sense to me whatsoever. In hindsight and without my knowing it, I feel I moved to Montana for no other reason than to be near the places in which the majority of his poetry is firmly rooted, the small towns and abandoned, burnt out cities, the mountains and the highways and the streams. While this is obviously a highly nostalgic and narrow interpretation of events, I can say, rather objectively, I don't think I ever wrote a single decent line until I read "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg" for the first time, a poem to which I still turn every now and then when the moment's right for breaking.
Arriving "Sunday on a whim," the speaker finds himself at the poem's beginning wandering a city similarly burdened by an experience of disrepair. Haunted and made static, as it were, by a past to which it is impossible to return, both the speaker and the city find themselves in a state of perpetual, but ineffective, flight. For many of Hugo's speakers, the crisis of a death-in-life is almost always characterized by the de-humanizing weather of inter-personal, romantic loss; for his cities, by social and economic realities beyond the ability of the inhabitants to make sense of or control. Plainly stated, both Philipsburg and those who find themselves in the shadow of "fifty years that won't fall finally down" are firmly and thoroughly fucked by forces which, at least at the beginning of the poem, exist abstractly at the outer edge of their own real limits. These limits, of course, insofar as they are created as much by the act of interpreting history as they are by the actual occurrence of history itself, are subject, thankfully, to transformation. It shouldn't surprise a reader, I don't think, that both the town and speaker are, by the end of the poem, vastly altered entities, though nothing has changed, not really. Philipsburg is still a shit-hole, has-been mining town, the girl's still not coming back. And yet, "the car that brought you here still runs. / The money you buy lunch with, / no matter where its mined, is silver / and the girl who brings you food / is slender and her red hair lights the wall." While I too have likely fallen in love/lust/infatuation etc. with more waitresses, bartenders, barristas, and girls walking past me on the street than I care to put a number to, what moves me most in Hugo's work, and in this poem in particular, is the extent to which, at least for him, "all memory resolves itself in gaze." For me, this is the moment where the poem completely stops, where I stop, where the world around me stops. Its not so much the poet's insight locating memory as the central, crucial crisis, but the "gaze" which he posits as the potential catalyst of possible reform. When I would teach this poem to my freshman Lit class at the University of Iowa, I would always ask them how this line would change if "gaze" was replaced with a different method of perception. If the problem of memory, especially of good memories which are no longer tangibly available, could be resolved with a simple glance, for instance, what would this say about the relative importance of the memory itself, of our ability to control and be held personally responsible for the way in which we look out upon, and to that degree, make and re-make the world. Here, Hugo's "gaze" is at once the act of possessing and being possessed by that which is being held both in and by it. By gazing at the town, by walking directly "past hotels that didn't last, bars that did," the town is effectively internalized, relocated within the speaker where it is allowed, finally, to die. This death, however, as opposed to a death-in-life, is ultimately reformative. Turned in upon the self, and upon the memories which simultaneously define and limit self, the gaze evaporates the distances between the exterior (Philipsburg as object) and the interior (the subjective experience of self-hood), thus making hospitable the potentially hazardous space between past and present moments, past and present selves. I like very much the assertion that this possible, both as a poet and as a person with more than one place I feel I need to hang.
There is, I suppose, a chance that when I left Montana this summer, I was doing so for the last time. I don't know that I will live there again any time in the foreseeable future, though I would welcome the opportunity with open arms. Hugo, I left years ago. The world doesn't need any more half-assed imitations of something already gracefully perfected. Plus, I needed to put him down for the sake of the next writer, the next poem, the next experience of influence. Karen Volkman told me once, years ago, in a comment on a poem I turned in for one of her workshops, that unless I stopped reading Richard Hugo, I would never become a better poet. Though I took it rather personally at the time, she was right. I don't imagine I am the first poet to be made static by the poets I love. Part of why I am excited to move to Bangkok is the opportunity to live and write under the influence of forces, aesthetic and otherwise, which are, here in America, largely unavailable to me. Though I am terrified to again be leaving, home, in all its unforeseeable and shifting incarnations, will be here when I get back.
Every little thing
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