The Triggering Town

Thoughts on Good & Poetry

• Eons ago—very late 80s/ the early 90s—when teaching poetry-writing, I’d rely on an old handout from Richard Hugo’s book The Triggering Town that instructed new poets to mine their imagination for words, associations, and obsessions to begin poems. He invited poets not to revisit their actual hometown (filled with the known) but instead to create an imaginary town of improbabilities. After the book’s publication in 1979, it became a poetry instructional standby; however, (hand to forehead emoji), I haven’t heard it mentioned in an eon. He may have been the first to encourage poets to both “write what you know” and also to write from the unconscious.

• If I’m out in the polis or on the phone with a friend, I may hear or overhear “I was triggered,” or “that triggers me” at least once a day. In psychology, as you may know, the word triggered “stems from trauma research, describing a stimulus that causes an involuntary, intense reaction (emotional/physical) re-experiencing a past trauma.” My research shows me that the term was originally linked to PTSD from war veterans and was picked up in online discussions of sexual abuse then gradually spread to colleges in the late 90s (frankly that seems too long ago, but okay internet search) where “trigger warnings” became a phrase to indicate to readers that its material could cause emotional reactions.

• I became aware of how trauma triggers our nervous systems in 2017-2018. I took about 4 months slowly reading Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma after the treefall that destroyed my house and a beam fell on my head and back, and I got up to run into the pelting storm. What we see or hear in the present can cause a cue to the body as if the past threat were happening now. Disassociation is one of the results. When a meaningless storm started brewing, it was helpful to understand what was happening in my mind and body. My copy of the book is like a sculpture now, having once been dropped in the bathtub when my rabbit jumped up and knocked it from my hands. It was a comic scene that made me laugh on and off over the next week. A rare thing during those times.

• Everyone I’ve talked to this past week feels triggered. A man (ICE agent) literally pulled the trigger on a woman in her car who was patiently leaving a protest, and killed her, presumably or according to the President because she was “disrespectful.” More and more has come to the surface about the nature of this violence which I’m sure my readers know about. We’re all on alert now.

• Renee Nicole Good (formerly Macklin) was a poet who wrote an award-winning poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” using, I would posit, Hugo’s method of writing about what she knew and letting the unconscious take the reins. “Solipsist sunsets,” “the hairy legs of cockroaches” hold court with “post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind.” There’s the real and there’s the surreal and all of it a big question about this nation’s indoctrination systems: education and religion. This wasn’t just an imaginary town, though, that prompted Good’s ruminations. It has aspects of the real, solid material universe we find ourselves in. It’s all happening still “at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—” and that specificity takes us into Good’s interior life.

• From Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Your triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words. When you are honest to your feelings, that triggering town chooses you. Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions will lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life. The relation of you to your language gains power. The relation of you to the triggering subject weakens.

• Days ago, my daughter and I were triggered by unpacking a storage locker in a nearby town—all that was left of her deceased father’s possessions. You may have gathered that he was my ex-husband. The nature of his death over a year ago was sudden, unexpected and my daughter, an only child, had to deal with the feelings around his death as well as all the items in the “organized” hoarding of his home, the cleaning and sale of his house and two junker cars. Aunts in Minneapolis helped quite a bit, but ultimately she had to deal with the insurance companies, cleaning company, utility companies, etc., by herself as sole executor and heir.

• I sorted through the bins that were left and threw away sheaves of handouts from old classes, though I did not come across anything from The Triggering Town. Pulled up in front of the Goodwill, I agreed with her that I too didn’t like this town anymore; in fact, we both hated this triggering town. Disposing of the last items meant we’d never have to go back.

• How do you let enough of the world in without breaking? That is the question an artist friend of mine asks. I have back issues that began in 2023.

• Was it the tree or was it the trauma of the tree?

• Was it the actual town or the imagined town that we wanted to leave forever? The town’s out there but we live inside it all the time if we can’t release both: the real and the imagined.

• Words and art live on. And though words and thoughts about freedom may be buried—they eventually rise back to the surface. I am thankful for Good’s poetry. I am thankful for all who still engage in expression of every kind in these precarious moments in history. Over the course the last few days, ICE agents have been creating chaos and using force in Minneapolis. These are precarious moments indeed.

• I leave you with this poem by Cornelius Eady, a wonderful and generous poet whom I met once at a conference. He also wrote the very moving poem “Proof” for Mamdani’s inauguration.

Renee Nicole Good Is Murdered

Cornelius Eady
1954 –

Up rides the super cops,
The cancellation squad.
A dormant virus, melted from
The ice pack,

And the conversation
Is end-stopped when
The shell cracks her
Car window, does its
Dumb duty,
Brings silence
To a poet’s mind.

The President says:
You’re a terror bot
If you don’t comply.
Homeland security
Puts on a ten gallon
Texas size hat,
Says see what fucking
With the bull gets you.

There is a picture of her
Just before it tips rancid,
Just before she’s dragged
Into how they see her.

I wish I could read the words
As they blaze their last, unsuspected
Race through her skull.
A language poem that ends on
The word
Impossible.

A prompt for today: Use “The Cancellation Squad” as the title of your poem.

~~thank you for reading, kindred spirits~~