Storefronts along Broadway in Philipsburg, 2007

Selected Poems: Philipsburg

from “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”

The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is sliver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Hugo, Richard. Selected Poems. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979.

About the Book

Selected Poems

Hugo’s poetry depicts open landscapes, gritty towns, and the marginalized people in them. He encouraged students to “[n]ever write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.” James Dickey wrote that Hugo’s poetry “lifts us into a realm where everything is of consequence.” Selected Poemsby Richard Hugo was Humanities Montana’s One Book Montana selection for 2010.

Several photos for this map were generously provided by renowned photographer Mary Randlett, and originally published in The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs: Revisiting the Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo, by Frances McCue.

While the settings in Hugo’s poems are clearly drawn from actual locales, it is understood that the poems—including the places they depict—are ultimately the product of the author’s imagination. The intent of this literary map is to enrich the reading experience by interpreting those places, not to render them literally or definitively.

About the Author

Richard Hugo

Richard Hugo was born in Washington State in 1923. He served in World War II, earned Creative Writing degrees at the University of Washington, and worked as a technical writer for Boeing. In the 1960s Hugo began a nearly two-decade career of teaching at the University of Montana, and published several volumes of poetry and prose. In 1974 he married poet Ripley Schemm.