Derek Robbins, creative writing doctoral student, visited Missoula, MT, as part of his epistolary poem project on Richard Hugo.
Derek Robbins, creative writing doctoral student
He was awarded a competitive scholarship from Ohio University’s English Department, one of eight to students who are conducting research for their respective dissertations and projects.
ABSTRACT: For the last few years, I’ve been writing epistolary poems addressed to the late poet, Richard Hugo. Hugo’s 1977 poetry collection 31 Letters and 13 Dreams provides the model and inspiration for this work. In Hugo’s letter poems, he drives his car to a small town in the West, usually in Montana, and writes a poem from that town in which he addresses a fellow poet (e.g. “Letter to Levertov from Butte”). My poems addressed to Hugo follow this tradition of writing from a particular place and using the mood (or the perceived mood) of the place in order to interrogate some aspect of the self. I have been writing to Hugo from a variety of places such as Nederland, CO; Friday Harbor, Washington; and even here in Athens, Ohio.
My summer scholarship will help to fund the next phase of my research in Missoula, Montana, the town where I was born and raised, and where Hugo lived and taught until his death in 1982. I will be examining the Richard Hugo archives at the University of Montana and investigating Hugo’s relationship to place. This research will form the basis of a new poem, “Letter to Hugo from Missoula,” in which I plan to address the concepts of “home” and “place.” I will be discussing heritage and inheritance, both familial and literary.
When Hugo drove his car to the small towns of Montana in the 1960’s and ’70’s, they were untouched by poets. Now, in the wake of his career, I must reckon with the visions, images, and characterizations he has assigned to the places I call home.
Ultimately, however, it is not Hugo I am challenging. The pretense of an exchange with Hugo creates the opportunity for an interrogation of the self, and the resulting poems aim to resonate beyond the self. What is at stake is an understanding of our relationship to (and our duty toward) the places we claim as our own and to the communities that share those places.
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