- Richard Hugo
Find it in Missoula
“Eat Stone and Go On,” a double CD of Richard Hugo reading his poetry, is available at the Missoula Public Library, the Mansfield and UM College of Technology libraries, all Missoula high schools, Willard Alternative, Target Range, the Missoula Art Museum and the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula. Find teaching materials and more information about the recordings at http://eatstone.org.Not in terms of human biology - he was only 57 when he died of leukemia in 1982. But he lived tough, and he lived large, and he lived enough to know that he wasn't so much
better than other people. Hugo was a man you shared drinks with - lots of them back in his drinking days, if there was room around him at the Milltown bar as he sucked 'em down with the laborers he made his friends.
But a genius poet he was - Montana gritty, Seattle-born green, a journeyman, a
fisherman and World War II hero whose egalitarian sentiments were firmly rooted in the verdant landscape of the Northwest. He found voice in the men of booze, in softball (which he excelled at), in the ghosts of dead and barren Montana cities. Hugo was a man of people and shared experiences, his words tilled from the dust and made human.
Not many people, though, are aware of Hugo's talents as an orator of his own works. For years after he climbed success' ladder with his poems, Hugo - a professor at the University of Montana for 18 years and eventually the director of the creative writing program - traveled the country on the poetry circuits, finding audiences thirsting for his tales of dirty softball players and reflections on dead rivers, slippery and elusive trout, hardscrabble guys with soft gals and this life of “tremendous democracy,” as he called our collective existence.
Ripley Hugo remembers her husband and his voice, which she trailed on those tours during most of the 1970s at college campuses and high schools from shore to shore.
“He had a great sense of (oration),” says Hugo, who still lives in Missoula. “He once confided in me that, when he was a very young man, he wanted to be a stand-up comic. He had a great sense of delivery, even just telling a story or a joke. And I'm not alone in thinking that.”
Most of those speeches are now stowed memories, while more than a few of them ended up as a scratchy voice on old audiotape. Campus cassettes found the pockets of thieves. But there is a small ore vein of material out there that's good - recordings with Hugo's clear, rising voice shining through the hiss of lecture halls.
And Mark Ratledge found them.
Thanks to the Missoula writer and construction worker's efforts, two hours of those recordings have now been collected onto a double CD, titled “Eat Stone and Go On,” and donated to college and high school libraries around the state, as well as all public libraries, art and cultural centers and other public-access facilities.
Ratledge, a Hugo fan who emphasizes “I'm no Hugo scholar,” dreamed the project around 1999 when he was an adjunct in the UM English Department teaching introductory literature courses.
“I figure it was my last chance to corrupt them before they left the university,” he says, laughing. “Some of the poems they could really get a grip on - especially the ones that mentioned the small towns they were from.”
As the idea blossomed in Ratledge's mind, it grew bigger and bolder than a mere teaching aid for his students. With the aid of Ripley Hugo - and armed with a $3,000 grant from the Montana Committee for the Humanities - Ratledge scoured the land in his search for choice Hugo recordings.
Recalls Ripley Hugo: “I remember one winter afternoon, I was talking about what a fine reader Dick was. And then we got to talking about the tapes. There were lots made by many in the audiences, but they were very fuzzy. Well, (Mark) just decided to go ahead with it, and I helped him find all the tapes he could.”
In the end, they found five - five good ones, five that could be mined. One from the Library of Congress, one from the University of Montana, one from Lower Columbia College. One here and one there, culled from the mountains of tape available - “just hours and hours” of it.
From there, Ratledge used his laptop to tweak the recordings, balancing them and distilling the voice from the white noise. Ratledge also wrote the liner notes and even designed the CD cover. It was, he said, a learning-on-the-fly experience: Photoshop and sound-editing software were his new friends.
“I ended up doing all the work myself over the years,” he says, “in between my own work to make a living.”
Ratledge doesn't claim to have a catalogue of Hugo's work on tape. Who could? But he whittled out what he considers the best - not only of Hugo's poems, but of the voice that delivered them to the public. He mailed nearly 400 in all, a digital addition to Montana history, to the libraries and schools and cultural institutions around the state.
“It turned out to be more of a greatest hits than a full collection,” he says. “A full collection - with four CDs - would just intimidate anyone who picked them up at the library.”
The public can check them out at most of the institutions, and Ratledge is no dummy about the technology of ripping. Though he doesn't necessarily condone it, he knows the recordings will find their way onto computer hard drives and iPods
“I assume they will be ripped, and that's OK,” he says.
Either way, they will live long enough. The collection is a joy to listen to, and a gift to the state of Montana.
Reach Entertainer editor Jamie Kelly at 523-5254 or at jkelly@missoulian.com.
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