Richard Hugo, whom Carolyn Kizer called "one of the most passionate, energetic and honest poets living," was that rare phenomenon-a distinguished poet who was also an inspiring teacher. The Triggering Town is Hugo's classic collection of lectures, essays, and reflections, all "directed toward helping with that silly, absurd, maddening, futile, enormously rewarding activity: writing poems." From pieces that include "Writing off the Subject" and "How Poets Make a Living," anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, will benefit greatly from Hugo's playful and profound insights into the mysteries of literary creation.

Richard Hugo was, in James Wright's words, "a great poet, true to our difficult life." Making Certain It Goes On brings together, as Hugo wished, the poems published in book form during his lifetime, together with the new poems he wrote in his last years. It is the definitive collection of a major American poet's enduring work.

"The poetry of Richard Hugo is one of the most profound and moving documents that our period of American literature has produced. Hugo's uncompromising imagination, his powerful concern with the world of nature and of people, combined with his absolute dedication to the craft of poetry, result in writing which, at its best, lifts us into a realm where everything is of consequence, which we always knew it was, and never found the means to say it."—James Dickey

"His collected poems show Hugo turning toward a calm peace that would mark his best work. . . . If we had not noticed before that his great gift was the elegy, we see it now. . . . Richard Hugo died in 1982. He did not doubt that his work would go on. It will."—Dave Smith, New York Times Book Review

In an essay on Richard Hugo, the poet James Wright called him one of the precious few poets of our age . . . who has, and sustains, an abiding vision. Hugo took that vision to Skye with him: he makes Scottish history, legends, and triggering towns his own in these new poems, just as he has earlier done in poems of the American West. And in making them his own, he makes them our own as well. He continues to be, in Wright s words, a great poet, true to our difficult life. "

Edited by Ripley S. Hugo, Lois Welch, and James Welch, with an Introduction by William Matthews

Of Richard Hugo's Making Certain It Goes On, David Wagoner has written: "Richard Hugo spared himself (and us) no pains or joys in making the wonderful, vigorous original poems brought together in this single collection. His was and is a very important voice in modern American poetry."

Hugo was also an editor of the Yale Younger Poets series and a distinguished teacher and master of the personal essay. Now many of his essays have been assembled and arranged by Ripley Hugo, the poet's widow and a writer and teacher, and Lois and James Welch, writers and close friends of the poet. Together the essays constitute a compelling autobiographical narrative that takes Hugo from his lonely childhood through the war years and his working and creative life to an interview just before his death in 1982. William Matthews, also a friend of Hugo's, has written an introduction.

"A rare glimpse into the poet's creative process." —Library Journal

"That Richard Hugo's poetry creates in his readers an almost indistinguishable desire for more," writes the critic and poet Dave Smith, "is the mark of his ability to reach those deep pools in us where we wait for passionate engagement. What Hugo gives us is the chance to begin again and a world where that beginning is ever possible." Here, for his ever-growing body of readers, are more of those opportunities.

The poems in this volume were selected by the poet in 1978 from his first three books—A Run of Jacks, Death of the Kapowsin Tavern, and Good Luck in Cracked Italian—and from his three more recent books, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, What Thou Lovest Well Remains American, and 31 Letters and 13 Dreams. The result easily demonstrated, then as now, the massive achievement of the writer whom Carolyn Kizer called "one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living."

Richard Hugo, whom Carolyn Kizer has called one of the most passionate, energetic, and honest poets living, here offers an extraordinary collection of new poems, each one a letter or a dream. Both letters and dreams are special manifestations of alone-ness; Hugo s special senses of alone-ness, of places, and of other people are the forces behind his distinctively American and increasingly authoritative poetic voice."

Hugo's most important subject is the American West. In the present volume, people, places, dreams, and memories are explored again--always in search of the poet's self.

Upon publication of The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir in 1973, Richard Howard wrote, "Richard Hugo's concern is the unenviable, the unenviable, the unvisited, even the univiting, which he must invest with his own deprivation, his own private war. . . . Each poem adds its incisive particulars to the general stoic wreck; but what startles, then reassures in all this canon of the inconsolable, the unsanctified, the dispossessed, is Hugo's poetics, the analogy of language to experience. . . . Richard Hugo is such an important poet because the difficulties inherent in his art provide him a means of saying what he has to say. It is no accident that he must develop a negative in order to produce a true image."

"Richard Hugo's concern is the unenviable, the unvisited, even the uninviting, which he must invest with his own deprivations, his own private war. The distinctiveness of impulse int he language, the movement organized in single syllables by the craving mind, this credible richness is related to, is even derived from, the poverty of the places, local emanations, free (or freed) to be the poet's own." --Richard Howard

Passion, energy, and honesty characterize a collection of verses by an award-winning poet.

"Richard Hugo's free-swinging, go-for-it remarks on poetry and the teaching of poetry are exactly what are needed in classrooms and in the world." —James Dickey

Richard Hugo was that rare phenomenon of American letters—a distinguished poet who was also an inspiring teacher. The Triggering Town is Hugo's now-classic collection of lectures, essays, and reflections, all "directed toward helping with that silly, absurd, maddening, futile, enormously rewarding activity: writing poems." Anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, will benefit greatly from Hugo's sayd, playful, profound insights and advice concerning the mysteries of literary creation.