The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography

The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography
by Richard Hugo

The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography
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Book Summary Information

Author: Richard Hugo
Editor: Ripley S. Hugo
Editor: James Welch
Editor: Lois Welch
Introduction: William Matthews
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1992-06-17
ISBN: 039330860X
Number of pages: 261
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.

Book Reviews of The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography

Book Review: His Star Gets Brighter With Time
Summary: 5 Stars

Whether a long-time admirer, or new to Richard Hugo's poetry, this autobiography will give you a much broader context in which to read or re-read Hugo's significant body of work.

It contains a non-chronological series of biographical stories about his background. The stories are interspersed with selected poems that are grounded in, or spring from, the gist of the stories. This strikes me as the most complete and intellectually honest way in which to present poetry.

I re-read this book after visiting the ACTUAL West Marginal Way, an industrial road that follows the Duwamish waterway south of Seattle (and northeast of Hugo's home town White Center).

My pilgrimage to West Marginal Way occurred on a boundless blue-sky day last August...not quite the contents of Hugo's briefcase, but, in the essence of this fine poet, it turned out I was the lone visitor at a roadside stop along West Marginal Way where a empty train right-of-way dissects a picnic-less municipal park (probably built as an afterthought by folks from a better part of town).

This book will not disappoint you.

Summary of The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography

Of Richard Hugo's Making Certain It Goes On, David Wagoner has written: "Richard Hugo spared himself (and us) no pains or joys in making the wonderful, vigorous original poems brought together in this single collection. His was and is a very important voice in modern American poetry." Hugo was also an editor of the Yale Younger Poets series and a distinguished teacher and master of the personal essay. Now many of his essays have been assembled and arranged by Ripley Hugo, the poet's widow and a writer and teacher, and Lois and James Welch, writers and close friends of the poet. Together the essays constitute a compelling autobiographical narrative that takes Hugo from his lonely childhood through the war years and his working and creative life to an interview just before his death in 1982. William Matthews, also a friend of Hugo's, has written an introduction. .

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