The Triggering Town | The Poetry Foundation
Richard Hugo was a Pacific Northwest poet whose work often used frayed landscapes—real and imagined, external and internal—as a base from which to explore themes of memory, loss, and obsession. His book of poetics, The Triggering Town (1979), contains a series of essays arguing against the idea that a poet should “write what you know,” advocating instead an approach to poetry based on triggering subjects and words. In this title essay to the collection, Hugo explains triggering subjects, using the example of towns, as points of entry into the realm of the imagination. Hugo suggests that new poets take emotional ownership of an imagined, or barely-known, town, rather than trying to convey the actual hometown in which “the imagination cannot free itself to seek the unknowns.” Once a triggering subject is located as a base from which to write, Hugo argues that a poet should turn his attention to the play and music of the language, allowing a private language—a personal connection, and p