suspect subject

Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it, a wise man once told me.

―Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (Norton, 1979)

landscape and weather

By 1969 Richard Hugo had completed his third and even his fourth book of poems. As we must expect, it is the Northwest poems which conduct Hugo’s trial by landscape, his arraignment by weather, to a further pitch of excruciation: the menace of place is acknowledged to correspond to destructive energies in the self….

—Richard Howard, “Richard Hugo: Why Track Down Unity When The Diffuse Is So Exacting?,” Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (Atheneum, 1980)