Poetic triggers

I’m currently enjoying being a student on the Writers’ Bureau online poetry course, ‘Poetry - The Next Steps’ led by poet Mandy Pannett in a series of Zoom workshops. Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town is one of the recommended reads on the course, and I have found some of the poetry advice he offers valuable and resonant.

Here are a selection of my favourites:

Firstly, Hugo celebrates the importance of freeing oneself from a poem’s initiating subject. This relates to the triggering town of the book’s title and the idea that every poem has a triggering idea or image that causes the poem to be written, and this is separate from the generated subject. Considering poetry in this light, I realise that for me, it very often is a physical object that is the initiating idea for a poem. A recent poem was initiated by the memory of two red cartwheels, for example. The generated subject is what the poem comes to say or mean and is ‘discovered’ during writing. Going back to redraft earlier poems that I haven’t been happy with, I can see that sometimes this is because I haven’t managed to pull away effectively from the triggering image. It has proved a useful way of conceptualising poetry, and Hugo’s words suggest that it is fine not to know what the generated subject might be until it emerges.

Secondly, Hugo’s reminder that in the world of the imagination, all things belong. Hugo advises trusting what the imagination offers, even if images and ideas seem disconnected initially. This is one of the things that I realise that I particularly enjoy about reading poetry, as well as the business of writing poetry: confrontations with the unexpected, and the surprising.

Thirdly, the idea that a poem seldom ‘finds room for explanations, motivations, or reason’ seems another helpful reminder. I sometimes feel the need to explain too much to a reader when writing, forgetting that it is from the reader that the ‘explanation’ should come.

Finally, the advice to start ‘in the middle of things’ is useful. The idea that, as you are writing a poem, even a narrative poem, things should already have happened. Like writing short stories, it is sometimes helpful to get rid of anything too explanatory at the start (or anywhere, in fact, relating to the point above), and simply plunge in. Poetry is not the place for lengthy exposition.

So, all in all, I’m having a great time with The Triggering Town. The only thing I struggle to agree with is Hugo’s rule about avoiding semi-colons; I fear I rely upon them far too much.