from A Field of Telephones
HUGO SCENE, 1
the ventriloquist requests a volunteer...
no, no: he insists...you in the front...let’s see what you have to say for yourself...what’s your name...
Brad...let’s hear it for Brad...
now Brad put this on...yes the straps and...you can still see his eyes folks but what can his eyes see...the less the better he’ll probably be thinking...
the nose over the nose...cheeks over his cheeks...
I’d say you’re looking pretty presidential Brad... maybe even professorial...
(strokes Brad’s head)...I’ve always thought education should be about making energy intellectual...that’s different from making intellectuality intellectual...
and yes the mouth over the mouth...dangling...it talks when I pump it like this...
how ya feeling Brad...
(Brad voice, ventriloquized, the mouth of the mask flapping as the ventriloquist talks for Brad and pumps) at last I can live like a human...
what were you before...
(Brad voice, deflatingly but also a little to-be-so-bold) I couldn’t say...
HUGO SCENE, 3
this is our critical pageant...a variety show...little scummy...starting any minute now...consider the mask Brad’s fellowship...a real honor...
our subject tonight is Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town...our title is “The Triggering Town: Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town at Forty”...snappy right...
forty refers to me...I’m about to turn...the book’s a little older, a classic...if forty is old enough for that...I read it first...who cares when...I lived in towns he knew...the wind bled coupons into earth... and the milk ran out with the spoon...Aberdeen, La Push...
it’s just that easy folks...poetry is mostly tone...a dial tone...pretending to be speech...like how you used to be able to record payphones...certain tones... and there was this one sequence you could record then hold up to the copy machines at Kinko’s...a hack...boop boop beep beep beep boop...and then print your zine for free...
I chaperoned the prom...I bought asparagus in the rain...this is Methodist and there is no air...art is what keeps you...I won’t say whole...art is what keeps you...perishable...and the trout ran out...it’s all right to applaud...
our sponsor tonight is the new university run by firefighters...mostly calendars...safe for work... they’re great...they have this new firesuit we’ll be showing off tonight...it’s not just for firefighters... little girl, would you like one...
the new firesuit also helps when we need Brad to go to sleep...do you all think Brad would like to go to sleep...
audience: NAP! THAT! BRAD!
OK Brad get ready...here comes the firesuit...
(pale blue sheet put over Brad, mouth pucker/suckle effect comedically visible through the sheet, cartoon snoring sounds, Brad acting like a parrot being put to sleep, a sheet over its cage, which counteracts any more sinister associations though not enough)
speaking of turning forty...you know that poem by Donald Justice, “Men at Forty”...you know it, don’t you Brad...
(Brad wakes, suckles/puckers mouth until sheet chomps off)
(Brad voice, reciting) Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to
is it just me or is the changing understanding of great literature over the course of one’s life absolutely amazing...a round of applause...I guess my philosophy is you run until you feel the leash and then you hope your head is smaller than your neck...slip through...that’s why we need to be careful about learning...hey, Brad...do you ever wonder if it’s easier to make your head smaller or your neck larger...
(Brad voice) why not both...
do you ever feel like you’re at the end of your rope...
(Brad voice) think how the rope feels...
HUGO SCENE, 5
Hugo’s problem, I think, in The Triggering Town, is he’s trying to explain...should I stop there...
(Brad nods bigly)
Hugo’s problem is he’s trying to explain...period...
Hugo’s problem is he’s trying to explain a feeling he must have felt enough to feel he should explain it...but having felt it so much he knows...he can’t... that is, why’d he spend his life on poems...what’s wrong with him...what was he hoping for...why’d he feel like that was the best or only thing to do...and to keep doing...he doesn’t know why...his explaining doesn’t get it...he knows that...so why is he trying...I don’t think birds particularly like their nests...they just live there...they make them...it’s no critique of the nest if...the bird doesn’t like it and...it fits the bird...
like Hugo says...a writer can feel bad when they’re not writing...so then they think whenever they feel bad...it’s from not writing...here’s a drug that can cause madness or...if you are currently mad...cures it...
his title’s “triggering” isn’t triggering in the contemporary sense...like a trigger warning...he means things that catalyze, inspire...for him, a “small town that has seen better days often works”...but anything can do...“our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to”...and I thought poets mostly submitted to magazines...
yet Hugo seems to mean most...he’s talking about any subject seen as though it’s a town...move around your subject, he says...see who’s up...you can show them around...you could have any triggering subject, as he says...but he’s also asking you to look at any subject like it’s a town...a locus of lives, real or imagined or our own...a triggering town, a brigadier clown, a Frigidaire swan...therefore, and this is the real critical thing...however private he claims his poems are, ideally, their craft’s a civic vision...you can find plenty of essays about it I’m sure...
tourists in a non-tourist spot...Hawthorne’s “Wakefield”...Whitman after manifest destiny has passed him by...cohesive regionalism of the defunct...loading docks...Panera now has fried chicken and cheap pizza and there’s this hack where you put the hashbrowns from McDonald’s and the fish from Wendy’s on the pizza from Panera...Tom Petty on every station...the team apparel just shows us what was in the donation box...the accent is dental...two hot dogs for a dollar no matter what you might be about to do...say what you will...
A Field of Telephones is forthcoming from 53rd State Press.
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Zach Savich is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Momently (Black Ocean, 2024), and several chapbooks, limited-edition volumes, and books of prose. His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the CSU Poetry Center’s Open Book Award, and other honors, including residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, ArtPark, and the Chautauqua Institution. His writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Savich teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art and serves as co-editor of Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series.