from “With Kathy in Wisdom”
I only dreamed that high cliff we were on
overlooking Wisdom and the Big Hole drain.
I dreamed us high enough to not see men,
dreamed old land behind us better left
and we were vagabond.
Hugo, Richard. Selected Poems. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979.
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.
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.