TITLE: A Few Quotes from "The Triggering Town"
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 28, 2021 3:52 PM
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A couple of weeks back, I saw an article in which Malcom Gladwell noted
that he did not know The Triggering Town, a slim book of essays
by poet Richard Hugo. I was fortunate to hear about Hugo many years ago
from software guru Richard Gabriel, who is also a working poet. It had
been fifteen years or more since I'd read The Triggering Town,
so I stopped into the library on my way home one day and picked it up.
I enjoyed it the second time around as much as the first.
I frequently make notes of passages to save. Here are five from this
reading.
Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems.
The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease
of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones,
nothing will come. Get to work.
That advice works for budding software developers, too.
Emotional honesty is a rare thing in the academic world or anywhere
else for that matter, and nothing is more prized by good students.
Emotion plays a much smaller role in programming than in writing
poetry. Teaching, though, is deeply personal, even in a technical
discipline. All students value emotional honesty, and profs who
struggle to be open usually struggle making connections to their
students.
Side note: Teachers, like policemen, firemen, and service personnel,
should be able to retire after twenty years with full pension. Our
risks may be different, but they are real. In twenty years most
teachers have given their best.
This is a teacher speaking, so take the recommendation with caution.
But more than twenty years into this game, I know exactly what Hugo
means.
Whatever, by now, I was old enough to know explanations are usually
wrong. We never quite understand and we can't quite explain.
Yet we keep trying. Humans are an optimistic animal, which is one
of the reasons we find them so endearing.
... at least for me, what does turn me on lies in a region of myself
that could not be changed by the nature of my employment. But it
seems important (to me even gratifying) that the same region lies
untouched and unchanged in a lot of people, and in my innocent way
I wonder if it is reason for hope. Hope for what? I don't know.
Maybe hope that humanity will always survive civilization.
This paragraph comes on the last page of the book and expresses
one of the core tenets of Hugo's view of poetry and poets. He
fought in World War 2 as a young man, then worked in a Boeing
factory for 15-20 years, and then became an English professor at
a university. No matter the day job, he was always a poet. I
have never been a poet, but I know quite well the region of which
he speaks.
Also: I love the sentence, "Maybe hope that humanity will always
survive civilization."
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