#triggering town

[fatemareads]

You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.

Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

[fatemareads]

Knowing can be a limiting thing.

Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing

[grimbeau]

Ten days from Persepolis I find is quite enough devious hand signals indicate the time to go is now…

[emilieideas]

The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo (1979)

“Depend on rhythm, tonality, and the music of language to hold things together. It is impossible to write meaningless sequences. In a sense the next thing always belongs. In the world of imagination, all things belong. If you take that on faith, you may be foolish, but foolish like a trout.” (5)

“The poem grows from an experience, either real or imagined” (7)

“if you are not risking sentimentality, you are not close to your inner self” (7)

[sweaterknots]

It comes, first, in a wave of unease, settles into benign, weathered concrete walkways speckled with empty liquor bottles there is something ethereal about these neighborhoods, something about what can be seen and What remains behind vinyl-panelled building and Chain-link fence. you remember reading about these old houses, blue shuttered and red doored White pickets, Each one placed upon tree stump foundations by tired men with tired hands and too much drink in their bellies. men with too much time on their hands men who never meant to be fathers men who meet in the basements of churches to talk about restless legs, begging to run and the seduction of a smooth, curved flask of Brown you heard once that it rots you from the inside the distraction, sedation, we build our homes in our own image, decay and desperation dressed up in a new coat of paint. Time stops when you stay for a while, that’s what the locals keep saying. you’re only beginning to understand it. You have stood here, facing this home Across the street from a school-house church For half an hour, which was really only pretending To be five minutes (your watch has only moved five notches, but you’re still skeptical) the church itself is sizable, empty for a Tuesday evening -God rests on Tuesdays- yet the sign in front with missing letters and faded fluorescent looks almost pretty in the purples and pinks of setting sun Urges SALV TION OR D MNAT ON Jesus might not come in a bottle, But it seems He serves the same purpose. the kids here seem restless, avert their eyes. Their parents tell them to keep close to kin, and still they bike down to the stream to smoke cheap cigarettes and pray they don’t inherit the rot from their fathers. forsakes their red-faced, red-doored heritage the unrest boils, hoping to be bound for Better things. “You know, this town is built on tree stumps,” an old voice, gruff and crusty like bark, scrapes at you “folks ain’t got no roots here, though.

things my mother taught me

[walls-hum]

Packs of Virginia Slims suicide from the sky And all men live off of cigar smoke and their own words Femininity is bread, raised and embraced Tornadoed from the mouths of young boys And declared from rooftops You’ve come a long way, baby And I would keep happy-screaming as My hair cocoons my summit of cheekbones as I speed down the wrong side of the highway, But I think I’ve reached a dead end The churches are post-storm streets Now little girls pray to the stars About things God wouldn’t approve of The cigarettes now tell you that Everything is always trying to kill you The women constantly remind themselves That no one is ever trying to do anything but Burn their bodies to the ground

- "Triggering Town," Bianca Asare

[iamthetulip]

We creative writers … can write … because we are less interested in being irrefutably right than we are in the dignity of language itself.

Richard Hugo, the Triggering Town

[mirthandmoxy]

Still Well

I don't have a place. My childhood was shinnying up trees, slipping on river rocks,  and cutting my lips on the sweltering heat of cornfields. My adolescence was musty basements and shared bedrooms. Little privacy,  and the kinds of neighbors you looked for but your eyes never saw. I left a town I didn't like filled with people I didn't care to know to escape the bones of a suicide boy that made all my inside places feel unwelcome. My home is a white-washed room and my marriage is the sound of paper jams and missed deadlines. They evict me every night at 11 o'clock.