The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing
by Richard Hugo
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard HugoEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1992-08-17
ISBN: 0393309339
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780393309331
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing
Book Review: Triggering Great Writing and Teaching
Summary: 4 Stars
Richard Hugo begins his collection of essays on poetry and writing the same way he begins his poetry classes: "You'll never be a poet until you realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong. It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you" (3). It is with this caveat that Hugo proceeds to presents his ideas on writing and poetry. Hugo writes in a voice that is at once omniscient and intensely personal--it is this voice, and the attitude it embodies, which Hugo believes is necessary for a writer.
Hugo's essays address both the beginning and the mature creative writer. He is concerned with his own writing process, not his students'. His most powerful example of how poems are written comes in an essay detailing his experiences in Italy during World War II, how he returned to Italy with his wife in the 1960s, and the poems that resulted from those two separate and complementary experiences. His thesis is delivered again and again: This is how I write; figure out how you write. His one exception is in detailing how his own creative writing professor, Theodore Roethke, taught, although there is again the suggestion of "This is how Roethke taught. This is how I teach. It depends on the writer." In fact, Hugo admits to mimicking Roethke in the classroom, noting how Roethke's style of teaching was not Hugo's style, and how he had to move from under that shadow to become his own kind of writer and his own kind of teacher.
Summary of The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing
"Richard Hugo's free-swinging, go-for-it remarks on poetry and the teaching of poetry are exactly what are needed in classrooms and in the world."-James Dickey Richard Hugo was that rare phenomenon of American letters-a distinguished poet who was also an inspiring teacher. The Triggering Town is Hugo's now-classic collection of lectures, essays, and reflections, all "directed toward helping with that silly, absurd, maddening, futile, enormously rewarding activity: writing poems." Anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, will benefit greatly from Hugo's sayd, playful, profound insights and advice concerning the mysteries of literary creation. .Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, originally published in 1979, remains one of the freshest and most refreshing treatises on the writing of poetry. While you won't find formality or nicety here, Hugo has the unusual quality of being highly opinionated and yet not at all convinced that what works for him will work for you. Hugo doesn't believe that he can teach you how to write; he believes he can teach you how he writes, and by doing so, teach you "how to teach yourself how to write." And while most writing instructors claim that one can't be a good writer without being a good reader, Hugo claims "that one learns to write only by writing." Hugo's essays are strong-willed and funny and by turns full of bluster and cloaked in modesty. While "a good teacher can save a young poet years by simply telling him things he need not waste time on, like trying to will originality or trying to share an experience in language or trying to remain true to the facts," he writes, "ultimately the most important things a poet will learn about writing are from himself in the process." Above all, Hugo stresses that creative writing is creative because it is a creative act: "if one is writing the way one should, one does not know what will be on the page until it is there." So, he warns, "If you want to communicate, use the telephone." And "Think small.... If you can't think small, try philosophy or social criticism."
Hugo, Richard Books
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