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Kingfisher Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting, Winter
2002-3
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 Joni Mitchell, by Vincent Van Gogh A spoof: painting is a self-portrait by the mult-talented Mitchell. For more of her pictures click here
Visit Our Affiliated Art Galleries See Painters Faye and Bob Jones The Poet of Personality, The Poet of Place Notes On Reading Richard Hugo Proudly, Richard Hugo described himself as a regional poet, but he might have added, "So was Frost, Thomas, Pushkin, Hardy, and Williams." So be it. The poet of West Marginal Way (Seattle) was also a poet of Scotland and Italy, not to mention Montana. Thus, he is a poet of the world, and knew it. He may be having us on a little with his emphasis on regionalism. Yet it is there, all along. It is probably best to become acquainted with Hugo's poetry by first reading his prose, which can be found in two volumes: The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (Norton, 1979) and The Real West Marginal Way, A Poet's Autobiography (Norton, 1986.). Also, Donna Gerstenberger's chapbook, Richard Hugo (Boise State University Press, 1983) may be of some help. I say this because Hugo is a difficult modern poet, and it is useful to have a biographical reference to what he is talking about in his poems, which often are intentionally obscure. But the journey through the poems, I assure you, is worth taking. He had a ragged life, unhappy and neglected up until about age 40, writing poetry out of loneliness and despair, drinking a lot, when suddenly the world began to take note of his talent, and he was offered a teaching job at Montana State University. He then became increasingly secure in his personal relationships, his teaching, and his poetry. But there was always a confidence in his poetry, even during those terrible years at what we all called "The Kite Factory," aka Boeing, where they make commercial airplanes and various war and space machines. We crossed paths a few times there, but knew each other slightly from a large amorphous group of friends, writers, and artists living on or near The Ave and associated with the University of Washington. When his first book of poems came out in 1961, A Run of Jacks, I quickly bought it, for I had recognized his talent early; so had most of us. The poems seemed so . . . .Pacific Northwest. . . that we might have dismissed them as only local and, therefore, inferior products, but there was a transcending quality about the familiar sites, the fishing themes, the rain and occasional snow, the lakes and the forests that made him and the poems special. Especially the rivers. I think for a time I would have preferred him to be more "English" in his subjects. He refused, of course, and he was right. He was the poet first of self, and secondly of place. He knew who he was, even if we didn't. The fact that he was growing fat, pasty-faced, scowling, sedentary, and a little more alcoholic than the rest of us who went around with a perpetual cigarette pasted in our face maybe made him stand out a little, but not by much. I thought he was beginning to resemble in terrifying detail his mentor, Ted Roethke, but then so was Poet James Wright, a contemporary and friend of Hugo's. "Papa," they called Roethke, and in true Germanic fashion he loved the appellate, one he used often to describe himself. Hugo's fidelity to his craft and to the life of a poet was astounding. In time it conflicted with the demands teaching gave to his students, and this was a problem he shared with the other two. He always spoke respectfully of his students and what they asked of him. Again like Roethke, he seemed to prefer their company to that of his peers—teachers who did not write anything except dismal scholarly papers. Or nothing at all. His life has been chronicled thoroughly and so I only sketch it here: a grant took him and his first wife to Italy, a place he thought he knew well from military service as a bombardier during World War II, but proved a surprise decades later. On the boat he made an acquaintance with the head of the English department at the University of Montana that resulted—after a letter of recommendation from the UW Provost, Sol Katz—in an astonishing job offer. It seemed too good to be true. He could be a teaching poet, just like Roethke. He seized the opportunity, and his life changed dramatically, though the heavy drinking continued and accompanied him to Bozeman. It caused him many problems there, and so did his mental troubles. (Similarly, James Wright suffered at the University of Minnesota, and was fired.) Teaching poets are cut a lot of slack, depending on the faculty's estimation of the poet's talent. And that of his friends and colleagues in high places; Wright didn't have enough of the latter, but Hugo did, and they picked Hugo up, dusted him off, and dried him out many times. (An interesting instance of the pot calling the kettle black is the remembrance Hugo wrote of his friend, Wright, when Wright preceded him in a long, drawn-out, and unpleasant death. Both in prose and poetry, this has been detailed in Hugo's writing. It bears close examination because there seems to be some maliciousness involved, along with a lot of friendship.) A Run of Jacks was published in 1961. Hugo was 38. It is a little late for a poet's first book, but then he had been away to war as a bombardier during World War II, gone to college, and worked as a technical writer at Boeing (where I got to know him slightly when we worked together on a project). His life up to that point had been difficult; it was not to get any easier. I cannot make a case for the harshness of a poet's life making him a better poet, but if it were so, Hugo could have had no better preparation. Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 1, Poet Robert Sund Issue; Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 2, Iridescent Light Issue Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 3,
Sylvia Plath
Issue; Kingfisher
Journal Vol.1, No. 4, James Wright Issue
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featured POET: Richard Hugo
Since I am no less a fisherman than Hugo, let's start with a favorite of mine, and the first poem in the first book. About it, he says: "Many years later [after his first trout- fishing experience], arranging my first book of poems, I put the poem . . . at the beginning because, though it is not the earliest poem in the book, it seems to me to have grown out of the earliest experience that could rightfully be called an impulse to write." [RWMW, p. 166] Trout I envy dreams that see his curving silver in the weeds. When stiff as snags he blends with certain stones.
call it chrome, say red is on his side like apples in a fog, gold gills. Swirls always looked one way until he carved the water into many kinds
of current with his nerve-edged nose. And I have stared at steelhead teeth to know him, savage his sea-run growth, to drug his facts, catalog his fins with wings and arms, to bleach the black back of the first I saw and frame the cries that sent him snaking to oblivions of cress. A bit hyperbolic, it is nonetheless representative of Hugo's taut, charged line and quite beautiful. The powers of observation are strong and impressive. "How true," I say (like Annie Hall in the movie), and "Just like that! Yes!" The powerful verbs make a writer distinctive. Another fine poem, and one of my favorites, is clearly sited in a place recognized by many of us living in the Pacific Northwest. But it has a larger significance, much greater overtones. The fact that people from all over the world resonate to its rhythms is impressive: Skykomish River Running Aware that summer baked the water clear, today I came to see a fleet of trout. But as I wade the salmon limp away, their dorsal fins like gravestones in the air, on their sides the red that kills the leaves. Only the sun can beat a stream this thin. The
river Sky is running in my ear. Where this river empties into the sea, Trout are waiting for September rain to sting their thirst alive. If they speed upstream behind the kings and eat the eggs the silvers lay, I'll pound the drum for rain. But sunlight drums, the river is the same, running
like old water in my ear. I will cultivate the trout, teach their fins To wave in water like the legs of girls tormented black in pool. I will swim a week to be witness to the spawning, be a trout, eat the eggs of salmon— anything to live until the trout and rain are
running in the river in my ear. The river Sky is running in my hair. I am floating past the troutless pools learning water is the easy way to go. I will reach the sea before December when the Sky is turning gray and wild and rolling heavy from the east to say late autumn was an Oriental child. It is a fisher's poem, while at the same time it belongs to everyone who has marveled at the edge of a stream rich with spawning salmon and leaf-choked riffles. Hugo's persona emerges as a fisherman who wades the stream, full of knowledge of species, run timing, the correlation of fish with seasons, and absence or excesses of rain. He is so impassioned by the sight of the salmon and their nest-building in the stones that in his mind he becomes a trout, one that eats the waste eggs from the spawning process. Nothing in nature is truly wasted, though spawning is a process of great diminishment, looked at uncritically by a mind unaware of the complex biological processes at work. One thing feeds another, so far as the food chain is concerned.
The featured artist’s work—usually a painting positioned
right below the masthead—will change, too, giving Kingfisher
a fresh look from week to week. And there are semi-permanent links to
artists whose life and work we consider important. Note: If you agree or disagree with these OPINIONS, let us know. We want to hear. Write or email us at rcarnold@direcway.com We'll publish the best ones—the ones that make their points most coherently and intelligently. Or don't, if we agree with them.
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THE MOVIES . . .
John Gilbert and Lars Hanson play Leo and Ulrich, childhood friends, and blood-brothers who, as they grow up, spend a suspicious amount of time hugging each other, and lolling around together. Such worries soon calm, when Leo falls for the mysterious beauty, Felicitas. (The name is, of course, ironic; there is no joy for any of them. Soon, she threatens to destroy the men's friendship as a bitter love-triangle develops. The film is a melodramatic tragedy that tries to lift itself onto the epic plane and nearly makes it. It is also a vehicle for Garbo, and Brown loves her face and lights it constantly to everybody's advantage, though towards the end of the movie it would seem that she is taking on falsely angelic characteristics because of her constant halo. Pre-Hayes Office, the
sensual drama (Garbo does nothing much except lie around in languorous dishabille,
having just completed one assignation and waiting for the next) is
intended as a vicarious sexual experience, which is funny because, as time
has proved, the beautiful Garbo does not care much for men, and perhaps
not much for women, either. So we watch knowingly, chuckling up our
sleeve. Yet the movie is so lovingly filmed, the sets so bleak and
hauntingly romantic, that even the most jaded cannot fail to be impressed. Well worth seeing and for a while now available on IFC's small screen.
All
about Death and Dying, Heesh! Kaisa is a Scot, who practices law in London. She does very well, but has developed a cocaine habit that keeps her prettily thin and anxious. Her mother informs her by phone that she is dying; she wants her to bring her father, who may not be, for a last visit and farewell. The ambiguity of the father-daughter relationship remains (with incest overtones) till the end of the picture. He is an oil-rig worker who has been recently fired for drunkenness. So she goes to Norway to find him and bring him home to Aberdeen. A fine pair they make, each with a consuming habit. The movie is a 450-mile
odyssey by car and by boat.
It is a hard, physical trip and a difficult spiritual one, as well. It is
beautifully filmed and the countryside is bleakly splendid, reminiscent of
the collaboration between Bergman and Nykvist (see review below.). Both
films are about approaching death in a dysfunctional family. Made nearly
30 years apart, they have a few similarities and many differences.
Bergman's period is the end of the Twentieth Century, Moland's the
beginning of the century that follows. Thus they are separated by about
100 years, but by much more than that. How times have changed.
There are multiple complications and the trip is chaotic. Just about the time the journey begins to settle down, their rented Volvo breaks down. A love interest appears in the form of unlikely Clive, who fixes the flat and helps them through a number of other futile misadventures. The relationship is highly pragmatic, born of necessity, and at first he simply helps them to move forward, toward Aberdeen, for the couple is nearly helpless. She feeds her father beer and whiskey, rationing it out just enough to keep him functioning. She knows just what he is going through. Kaisa is in need of something other than a fix and sees Clive as a sex object, but Clive is not so easy to fool, and won't let it go at that, which both intrigues and annoys Kaisa. Both want and need more than a simple orgasm. He won't let it go at that. They part, but he reappears, just when all seems lost and she needs him most. So the movie is, among other things, a love story, but it is a modern existential one. The film has unmistakable Homeric overtones complete with a Circe scene. Tomas's total debauchment at the hands of an Aberdeen street gang is climactic. Rather than degrade the film these scenes lift it to a mythic level. It succeeds as much more than a seamy adventure story. Rampling's role is a minor one, yet she is the moral and motivating force behind the actions of the others, a kind of wasting Penelope figure. She tells Kaisa now that, indeed, Tomas is her father, but it is she who long ago spitefully told her that he was not. Having gotten the pair of them to her hospital death bed, she must now undo the lie she cannot stand to die with, even though the lie is one that will make everybody happy. Meanwhile the unrelated pair is involved with angry strangers, who want to kill them. The mother dies, thankfully just off camera, as they scurry about Aberdeen, trying to tidy up the messy old business and get away. Clive again appears and rescues them, just as life seems the darkest. He provides about the only hope for the future for Kaisa, and she knows it is a wan one. Tomas has been sober for nearly a week. This is good news. The movie is such a change from what usually comes out of Hollywood that its contemporary realism seems a shock. I am mentally unprepared to be unchallenged by something so disturbingly arresting. I don't want to face up to the horror, but there it is. It is convincing and deeply moving. Find it on a movie channel and choose to see it. Robert
Arnold, Editor For more recent movie reviews, click here
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