Journal Three - Triggering Town - Tricia

In the last two chapters of The Triggering Town, I enjoyed the glimpse into Hugo's experiences and how this context offers more insight into his writing method. The experience he recounts that resonates the most with me is the period of time he spent in that field outside of Spinazzola in his "moment of surrender" during which he felt he would "sit [t]here forever and watch the grass bend in the wind and the war would end without me and I would not go home, ever"(84). In this passage, it becomes obvious how stressful his experience in Italy had been; his brain could no longer handle the pressure and more or less shut down. It's striking that even though it was a stress reaction, he regards the feeling as beautiful and believes that his poetic attempts to describe it come no where near doing it justice. Knowing the historical context of the experience--that Spinnazola had been on the Roman Road--puts another lens over the experience. Imagining how long people had been lying in the field or other fields in the area, watching others go by, and wondering if anyone else had had similar moments of surrender grants another sense to Hugo's experience that I don't have the words to describe. Of course, all of Hugo's experiences in Italy provide a greater understanding of his writing and deeply impacted him.

The first of my two biggest takeaways from the book is that "if you are not risking sentimentality, you  are not close to your inner self" (7). I think that this summarizes many other points throughout the book. The final two chapters and parts of several others are about Hugo's experiences, and he mentions repeatedly that it is his feelings about these things that inform his poetry. It is necessary for a poet to draw from their own experiences and use their feelings in writing. Though this may seem obvious, he recounts a young writing professor who thought writers didn't use their own experiences. Using personal feelings and experiences make writing real and relatable. The second of my takeaways is the tool of setting up arbitrary rules and assumptions for yourself. He mentions a rule he set up when he was young that if he liked a particular sound he wrote, he would "make a similar sound three to eight syllables later" (10). He also dedicates a chapter to assumptions as, he claims, they underlie the work of all writers. I think that actively developing assumptions could be a way to increase creativity and to ensure that there is never a  shortage of things to write about. After all, Hugo creates an entire chapter of just assumptions this way. It's important to not doubt these as "you have to be silly to write poems at all" (10).