Free The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo

the risk of sounding self-righteous, I’ve found that in schools where such hostility runs deep, it usually originates with the academics. The old explanations are easy to hop on: the professor of literature always dreamed of being a poet, academics are jealous of the psychic energy of writers, academics feel that creative writers don’t work hard enough. Whatever there is to these explanations, I find them wanting. I’ve come to believe that the hostility between academics and creative writers is simply the result of small-mindedness on both parts. It is failure to recognize and grant each other’s worth. It is a xenophobia not worthy of people who call themselves educated.
    I started teaching at the age of forty. In the fourteen years I’ve been at it I’ve talked to many students and faculty, and I’ve reluctantly come to a few conclusions. It hurts to state why I believe students are turning away from literature courses because even at fifty-four maturity is not my strong point, and polemic tends to make me either nervous or bored and withdrawn. I do not like a fight, and I hope what I say doesn’t start one.
    A young recent Ph.D. asked me to attend his class to discuss some of my poems with his students. I like the young man and was pleased he wanted to teach my work. It was a good class. The teacher had done his work well. That was obvious from the enthusiastic attention the students brought to the work being discussed and the intelligent way they made points.
    One student asked how I’d come to write “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir,” one of the poems they were studying. My answer was straightforward. I’d had a love affair. The woman dumped me for someone else. I was brokenhearted and vengeful, but cowardly. So in real life I suffered but in the poem I had my revenge—at least early in the poem.
    A few days after the class, the teacher told me he had been very surprised at my answer, that he didn’t know poets used life that way. I was surprised at his surprise and asked him where he’d assumed poems came from. He replied that he’d believed a writer sits alone in a room and makes things up.
    Understand this is a bright young man. A good teacher. He has a Ph.D. in literature from one of our very best universities. Where did he get such ideas about writers? The answer is obvious. He got them from the same place he got his education.
    One of my reluctant conclusions is that the Ph.D. system tends to train people to teach literature as if it is some grand, mysterious system that has little or nothing to do with human existence. Obviously enough good teachers come out of the system to justify it. But I fear such a system attracts its fair share of people who are eager to put knowledge between themselves and their lives. To put it bluntly, dull people. As the punch line of the old joke goes, “I’ve been going through my notes and it turns out I have read Hamlet .”
    I’ve even heard academics refer to popular teachers as “entertainers.” To have interest in literature and to communicate that interest is of secondary value at best. True integrity is often willfully equated with dullness. That’s not a recent development, either. If anything, it was worse when I was a student.
    Another reason for declining student interest in literature courses is a tendency of academic professors to establish and maintain emotional advantages over the students. They seem to have acquired knowledge in order to feel superior to those without it. A strange attitude for a teacher—not wanting to give and share. They’re not as good at this as business executives are. Maybe that’s why they must limit their victims to the young. One rule for all who want the advantage over others: never show your feelings. The capacity to hide feelings is the one trait I found common to all high-level corporation executives during my thirteen years in industry. Of course, it helps if you don’t have any feelings to hide.
    This