Reprinted below is a news article and biographical overview from the Missoulian’s 1999 series on The 100 Most Influential Montanans of the Century.

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At Richard Hugo’s memorial service, a longtime friend described Hugo’s poetry as “too damn honest.”

Hugo, a world-renowned poet and University of Montana professor, died in 1982.

By Kurt Wilson
Missoulian Staff Writer

It was something a lonely child could do without making noise after his working-class grandparents had gone early to bed each evening.

Teacher and poet Richard Hugo later recalled those days when he was 9 years old and writing his first poems.

“My grandfather’s job at the Seattle Gas Plant was a menial one and his hours fit the schedule he and grandmother had out of necessity assumed for themselves over a lifetime. And there I’d be, alone, not daring to play the radio for fear it would keep them awake in the small house, nothing to do to amuse myself but to either draw pictures, which I did, or to put works on paper, which is, if your definitions are fairly fluid, called writing. My art work showed no promise, so I kept on with the words.

“It was a good world in many ways, I felt no responsibility for anything. It was wonderful. I was alone, breathing a marvelous silence, in the most enviable position a poet can find himself: alone with just paper and pencil. I was, in the best sense of the word, or at least a most attractive sense of the word: free.”

Fatherless, and abandoned by his teen-age mother, Hugo was raised by his elderly and strict maternal grandparents in White Center, Wash., then a semi-rural, poor suburb of Seattle.

He’d been born Richard Franklin Hogan, Dec. 21, 1923. When he was 19 he became Richard Franklin Hugo, taking the name of a Navy career man his mother had married. Not until he was an adult was Hugo told that his mother, after her remarriage, had tried without success to reclaim him from his grandparents’ care when he was 4 years old.

Writing in his introduction to “The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet’s Autobiography,” published after Hugo’s death, William Matthews describes a young Hugo:

“Enforced churchgoing left him feeling he owed something, that he was spiritually dunned all his life. Shy, awkward, and isolated, he believed himself not only the cause of his ill fortunes but also unregenerately weak, worthless, and ever ‘a wrong thing in a right world.’ He grew up admiring local toughs for their violent courage.

He feared, hated, and coveted girls and compensated by making himself a skilled baseball player, fisherman and dreamer. His tutelary spirits appeared early and never abandoned him: waters, sky, hills, ocean, fish, birds and drunks. All meant unimpeachable and continuous acceptance, private dignity, and sweet, if unrecognized, belonging.”

At age 20, Hugo joined the Army Air Corps and flew 35 missions as a bombardier in World War II. Before his discharge in 1945, he had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, and five bronze battle stars. He returned to Seattle and received a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from the University of Washington in 1948 and a master’s degree from the same school in 1952. While at the University of Washington, Hugo studied under the poet Theodore Roethke, picking up what he later called an “ear for sounds.”

In 1951, Hugo took a job at Seattle’s Boeing Aircraft Co., where he worked for the next 13 years, all the time writing poetry at night. By October 1963 he and his first wife, Barbara, had had enough of Seattle. They emptied their savings, quit their jobs and left for Italy, a place Hugo had grown fond of during the war. A year later, low on money, Hugo needed a job.

“I wrote one letter, to the University of Montana, and I got the job,” Hugo told the Missoulian in an interview in 1976. It was his first time teaching.

Hugo arrived in Missoula in September 1964. Soon after, Barbara returned to Seattle and they later divorced. He had begun drinking excessively in Italy and continued in Missoula.

“There was a long, dreadful scene in the Missoula railroad station when my wife left for good,” he writes. “We sat and cried for hours. We had been close and it was over. Then she was gone and I was walking alone down Higgins Avenue, for some reason unusually aware of my shoes each step I took. Then, I was sitting in a bar near the station, tears pouring down my face, and the bartender sophisticated enough to say nothing. He had seen drunks cry before.”

Despite his personal difficulties, Hugo came to love his new career. “It became the only job I ever took seriously. I am doing what I love most, helping people write poems,” he said. He taught himself to be a great teacher and by 1971 had been named the director of the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English at UM.

His work “brought contemporary poetry to the University of Montana and to Montana,” according to Missoula writer James Welch. “The issues and technique of poetry were brought into the 20th century here by Dick Hugo. He brought a tough kind of poetry. It looks at Montana and tells it like it is. Indians, life in small towns, relationships, sometimes the picture isn’t very pretty.”

“He writes about things and about people and about situations that are very common,” writer and friend Annick Smith once explained.

“He made us look at ourselves in a different way,” says Welch. “A good, honest look at ourselves.”

“Too damn honest,” said his friend of 45 years, John Mitchell, at Hugo’s memorial service in 1982. “Hugo was so damned honest it wasn’t even right.”

Honest poems, even honest tries, were to be rewarded in his classroom. “Write what you know about,” he demanded. The titles to Hugo’s poems, “The Milltown Union Bar,” “Indian Graves at Jocko,” “Missoula Softball Tournament,” “Driving Montana,” tell what he knew about.

“I am a regionalist,” Hugo said, “and I don’t care for writers who are not. I find it hard to write unless I have a sense of where the speaker is, and I have a hard time appreciating writing if I sense the author has no clear idea of where the things in his work are happening.”

“He allowed students to see that anybody from anywhere has something to write about,” points out Kate Gadbow, current director of the program. “He went about making poets from all the tiny corners of Montana.”

Always, he discouraged “fashionable writing, even when it was well done.”

“He was the least fashionable person I ever knew,” said writer Rick DeMarinis at Hugo’s memorial.

He loved jazz, mostly Dixieland, drove a long Buick convertible, wore a pair of lime-green colored sunglasses, played softball with a red, white and blue mitt, and fished with a bobber and worm from a folding lawn chair. “He used a number six hook,” DeMarinis said, “and loaded it with half a pound of night crawlers.”

“One of the living things he had no sympathy for,” said his brother-in-law, George Schemm, “were the fish once he was out after them.”

The English department had two phone numbers on file for Hugo. One, his Missoula home, the other at the Milltown Union Bar where he drank often with workers from the Bonner Mill, the railroad and the woods. “Though I lived in Missoula,” Hugo wrote, “I headed east to Milltown every chance I had.”

Just his presence, says Welch, may have been his greatest influence among Montanans. “He would give readings all around the state and people would say, ‘God, this is just an ordinary guy.’ You can’t describe what it was that made him so powerful.”

By the early 1970s, Hugo had quit drinking. He remarried – to poet Ripley Schemm Hansen – in 1974. By his own account, he was on a roll.

“When I stopped drinking … it was almost like poems had piled up in me, and I just started writing and writing and writing. The old feelings about writing came back. I was enjoying it the way when I was a young poet. I mean I was really getting a kick, just discovering ways to move and things to say, which is a lot of the fun of writing, surprising yourself on the page.”

Hugo and his poems about place became famous. Thirteen books of his works were published, including a book of essays on writing and a mystery novel. Two were nominated for the National Book Award. One was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. His awards included the Roethke Poetry Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Visiting Distinguished Professor Chair at the University of Arkansas, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an honorary doctorate from Montana State University and a Distinguished Scholar Award at the University of Montana.

“I love those prizes and the awards and the honors,” Hugo once told an interviewer, “but finally, they’re not very durable. Tomorrow they all go away. I worry more about writing a good poem.”

On Oct. 22, 1982, he died of leukemia at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle.

(Copyright 1999 Missoulian. All Rights Reserved. For reprint information, email [email protected].)