Trenton Hickman, English
Several months ago, the Office of Research and Creative Work accepted my proposal to prove poet Richard Hugo’s concept of the poetic “triggering town” by spending two weeks in Venezuela and then letting the sensory data I gathered “trigger” a substantial body of poetry. The research grant would enable me to 1) make the information-gathering trip to Venezuela, 2) write a body of Venezuela poems (I estimated 40), and 3) revise the poems for Fall 1994 submission to literary magazines around the country.
I am happy to report that my experiment yielded exciting results. First, I was able to reach every city on my itinerary. I visited six major locations in two weeks, and several sites a day in each location. I traveled between most cities by bus so that I could see the countryside, the empty spaces between the urban centers. In these visits, I was able to see a different side of Venezuela than I had seen in my mission; my perceptions were not that of a man engaged in saving souls, only of the poet piecing together the collective psyche of the Venezuelan people. In each location, I took written notes and an extensive photographic record. When I returned home, these became invaluable, and in fact provided the better part of the poetic triggers that generated the creative work. I was able to recall specific thoughts and feelings as I studied these records. The resulting poetry is full of place names, of visual imagery, and of the irony that I saw on the street. It did not matter that when I wrote I was thousands of miles away; I could still feel the tensions of Venezuelan life. More importantly, I found that I could write about them. Though I find it difficult to declare any poem “finished,” I have almost twenty poems that I will begin submitting to literary journals al the beginning of September. Besides these successes, I reaped an unexpected benefit from this research opportunity by meeting with Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas. In his country, he has won the National Literary Award.
Internationally, he received both the prestigious Perez Bonalde International Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Foundation Grant to study for a time at Harvard University. Dr. Brian Evenson of BYU asked me to take a packet of his translations of Cadenas’ poetry to Venezuela for Cadenas’ review. As a result, I spent over a hour talking with Mr. Cadenas about his craft, his love for Whitman and Keats, and his work at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. As we ended our meeting in the hotel, he authorized me to work on the translation of his poetry into English. Dr. Evenson was kind enough to let me form a translation partnership with him, and over the summer we each translated eleven of Cadenas’ more famous poems. Additionally, I wrote the critical introduction to these translations. Pyx Press is negotiating the publication of these poems and the corresponding introduction in a chapbook slated for a possible December 1994 release. Most importantly, though, my interaction with Cadenas’ text made me reexamine my own Venezuela poems throughout the composition process.
In contrast to these successes, my difficulties in this project were few. Besides the inaccessibility of a few sites on my Venezuela trip, my major challenge arose in the poetry composition section of the process. Because a major part of my research was an experiment with Hugo’s theory, I discovered that the triggering process he describes does work but on a slower timetable than he alludes to in The Triggering Town. I found that I was often triggered quickly on what I needed to say, but the means of saying it did not come as rapidly. For example, on my poem about visiting the home where Simon Bolivar was born (“Casa Natal”), I found myself false-starting all summer. Only in these last few weeks have I found the words to say what I saw and felt there, to comment on the elaborate construction of myth and the revision of history at play on the walls of that building. Other poems, like “Lament of a Fruit Vendor,” came much more easily, perhaps because they dealt with subjects of a simpler nature. The net effect of this struggle, combined with the opportunity to translate and publish the chapbook of Cadenas’ poetry, cut my personal poetic output in half. In one sense, I am disappointed that each poem took me longer to write than I anticipated. On the other hand, I feel that the quality of the twenty poems I did write exceeded my expectations of my own poetic capabilities. In retrospect, I find two problems with Richard Hugo’s triggering theory. First, I feel that Hugo expected that the poetic trigger would be unfettered by the burdensome details of observed reality, that “fact” would only be the springboard for some greater truth that may or may not actually exist.
The very nature of my proposed project probably interfered with this element of the trigger, because I aimed to portrayed various facets of the Venezuelan character. I could not completely divorce myself from what I had seen, though in many instances poetic license allowed me to say what “reality” would not. Second, Hugo seems less worried about the ability of language to signify what it represents that I was. That which triggers is expendable in Hugo’s process; if the language doesn’t convey “reality” then that’s all right As a poet, I had a harder time than Hugo seeing my language fall short of the experiences I lived while on my trip through Venezuela.
Without the Undergraduate Research and Creative Work Scholarship given me by BYU, I would have been unable to experiment with Hugo’s poetic theories in a place like Venezuela. Nor would I have passed through these degrees of maturation as a poet. I have sharpened my own skills and had my only opportunity at translating a prominent foreign poet’s work. I emphasize that this process of discovery has not ended-daily I uncover the words I need to vent the ideas trapped inside me. I cannot determine for sure when I will completely exhaust the:: “triggers”that wait within me