Esra Cmert-Morishige

Professor Frances McCue

Honors 345 A: Triggering Town
May 11, 2015
Her Story Through The Other Her: On Neighbor and Frying Trout While
Drunk
If a poet were a straightforward storyteller, she wouldnt be
much of a poet. Poets, like all humans to a certain extent, project their
trauma and pain onto those around them. This is a basic coping
mechanism and a way of understanding our experiences. I find it
tender, imaginative, and ultimately human, that Richard Hugo and
Lynn Emanuel create speakers that embed aspects of their trauma into
the central subjects of their narratives.
In Hugos Neighbor and Emanuels Frying Trout While Drunk, I
find myself skeptical of the identity of the speakers in these poems. It
is difficult to discern whether the speakers are telling stories about
someone else (as it seems is the case at first glance), telling stories
about themselves, or a little bit of both. In this essay, I will attempt to
dissect what is fact within the poems and what is rhetorical play or
projection. Both of the speakers in these poems present aspects of
their own characters through their depictions of other people.
Both poems tell stories about drunks who drink to escape
themselves and their circumstances. The central subject in Hugos

Cmert-Morishige 1

poem, the speakers neighbor, is a man whose substance abuse

facilitates his dissociation with his impoverished and lonely life in
White Center, WA. The speaker recounts several memories of finding
this neighbor passed out in various locations around his home, saying,
And Ive carried him home so often / stone to the rain and me, and
cheerful (Hugo 44). The neighbor drinks until he is completely
indifferent to his surroundings. This man uses alcohol as an antidote to
the decrepit landscape of his home; booze and the occasional kindness
of a neighbor are his only companions to whom he remains faithful.
Emanuels speaker recounts anecdotes about her mother, who,
like Hugos neighbor, drank, dedicated to the act itself (Emanuel 79).
This womans only recorded companions are her gin and her abusive
male partner, to whom she dedicates her life, and who are likely
responsible for her attempted suicides. The speaker says that her
mother is drinking to forget a man / who could fill the woods with
invitations (79). Like Hugos neighbor, this mother drinks to escape a
dismal world. She is haunted by a history of depression and a
relationship with a man whose invitations she cannot refuse. Because
the central subjects in both Hugo and Emanuels poems (the neighbor
and the mother) are defined primarily by their alcoholism, the speakers
inherently become entangled in the environment of addiction within
these stories.

Cmert-Morishige 2

In examining the relationship between the speaker and the

neighbor in Hugos work, the first thing I notice is the close physical
proximity between them. The speakers primary recollections of his
neighbor involve picking him up or carrying him home. The speaker
sets the stage for an emotional kinship between himself and his central
subject through this motif of close contact. These instances of
closeness mimic the intimacy between the emotional states of speaker
and central subject.
Besides the close physical proximity between the speaker and
the neighbor in Hugos poem, it is also telling to note the emotional
proximity between them in the speakers rendition of their encounters.
Hugos speaker uses distancing language to dissociate himself from his
neighbor. Yet, despite this attempted distance, there seems to be a
close kinship between them. Hugos speaker asserts himself as a
separate character from his neighbor by identifying himself as the
witness of the neighbors ill fate, stating, Ive found him in salal / and
flat on his face in lettuce (Hugo 44). However, elsewhere in the poem,
the speaker toys with the boundary between himself and the neighbor
when he says, I admit my envy (44). This revelation of envy is telling
about the emotional state of the speaker: namely, that the speaker is
as lonely as the drunk and just as desperate for an escape. One must
keep in mind the identity of the man who is being envied: a drunk,
rumored-to-be-dead man whose primary companion is a liquor bottle.

Cmert-Morishige 3

The empathy associated with the speakers envy here suggests that
the speaker is projecting his own experiences of loneliness, alcoholism,
and depression onto another character. The poem serves as a mode of
escape for the speaker, as does the liquor bottle: a means of denying
his reality by projecting it onto another person. This becomes
especially apparent when I note that almost every stanza begins with
an I statement in a poem that is supposedly about someone else.
Emanuels speaker also clearly distances herself from the
identity of the drunken mother by reciting memories of herself as a
witness to her mothers drinking and depression. In a particularly
gruesome scene the speaker recalls: mother, wrist deep in red water /
laying a trail from the sink / to a glass of gin and back (Emanuel 79).
On this occasion, and several others in the poem, the speaker
reiterates that the scenes of her memories are of her mother, as if to
remind the reader that the real subject of the poem is separate from
the speaker. Yet, later, like Hugos speaker, she interjects a potentially
telling moment of empathy prior to the scene above, when she says,
when I drink its always 1953when I drink I am too much like her - /
The knife in one hand and in the other / The trout with a belly white as
my wrist (79). The speaker divulges her similarity to her mother in her
tendency to drink, with potentially destructive repercussions. I
interpret this moment of confession as a peep hole into the larger

Cmert-Morishige 4

sense of identity that the speaker has with the experiences that she
attributes to her mother.
In addition to the incorporation of these moments of empathy
between speaker and central subject, both of the poems fluctuate
rapidly between past and present tenses, blurring the line between
memories and lived experiences. Often, the poems shift between
recollection in the present tense to the scene of the memory itself,
which resides in the past tense. In Neighbor, Hugos speaker recalls
He had to be helped up and held, / steered home and put into bed,
declaring / we got to have another drink and smile (Hugo 44) before
quickly transitioning into the present tense with I admit my envy
(44), then back into memory with I found him in Salal (44). The
speaker interjects the somber story of the drunk with his own thoughts,
emotions, and ramblings.
Perhaps Hugos teeter-totter shift of tense is reminiscent of the
speakers attempt to empathize with the character of the neighbor: a
rapid fluctuation between his neighbors reality and his own. Or
perhaps Hugo is commenting on the nature of memory by portraying it
in his poems. Memories are flawed, subjective, and under constant
revision and scrutiny by the person doing the remembering. Mimicking
these characteristics, the speaker of Neighbor is recalling and revising
his memories even as he speaks in the poem. The rendition of the
story of the neighbor that we get from the speaker is subject to the

Cmert-Morishige 5

memory of the speaker, which is directly embedded in the experiences

of the speaker himself. By writing the poem as a first person narrative,
Hugo inherently embeds an intimacy between the speaker and his
neighbor.
Emanuels speaker makes similar, and even more rapidly
alternating, shifts between past and present tense, between memory
and the present. Reading Frying Trout While Drunk is like flipping
through a flipbook, with glimpses of different memories and different
places in time and space abbreviated on each page. The speaker says:
Come with me he whispered and she went
In his Nash Rambler, its dash
Where her knees turned green
In the radium dials of the 50s.
When I drink it is always 1953,
Bacon wilting in the pan on Cook Street

She is a beautiful, unlucky woman (Emanuel 79)

The speaker, as if imitating a sense of intoxication while writing the
poem, follows the whim of her conscious thoughts, though they come
to her in a disorganized and non-chronological way. The reader is
tossed from the scene of a woman in the car with her dangerous lover,
told in the past tense, to the confession of the speaker about her own
drinking, told in the present tense. From here, the speaker slips back

Cmert-Morishige 6

into her memory of her mother in the kitchen. The rapid fluctuation
between one scene and the next, between the speaker as narrator and
as confessor, creates a sense of parallel between the story being told
about the mother and the untold story of about the speaker as she
exists in the present. The poem comments on the cyclic nature of
alcoholism, depression, and abuse, both between generations and
within the life of a single person. Though difficult to tease out the
timeline of her mothers experiences or her own, both the speaker and
her mother clearly alternate between periods of youthful innocence
and severe depression and suicide attempts later in adulthood.
Perhaps, Emanuel is mimicking the emotional cycles of her speaker
and character in the structure of her poem. Both are sudden to shift,
unpredictable, and ultimately tragic.
Elements of emotional projection as a means of self-reflection
and a mode of storytelling can be seen throughout the works of both
Hugo and Emanuel. Hugo, most famously, creates speakers who
identify with their loneliness, curiosity, and regret through a sense of
intimacy with the landscapes that reflect these emotions. In poems
such as Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg and Between The Bridges, Hugo
uses poetic language to impart a kinship between his speakers and
their surroundings, taking a new approach to the form of the romantic
poets that preceded him. Emanuel, too, carries the emotional
projection of her speakers into many of her other poems. Poems such

Cmert-Morishige 7

as The Night Man at the Blue Light and What the Keyhole Was are
vividly intimate confessions of a speakers longing to live the
experiences of the other people in the poem. These people serve as
subjects of desire for the speaker, and she projects these desires onto
her characters in order to gain proximity to those she desires. I get to
know the speakers of Hugo and Emanuels poems through the stories
that they tell about other people and other places. As a reader, I feel
invited into the stories in these poems as if I were reading a diary. I
imagine them being read to me in a whisper, as if in confidence, as if
the poems are between only the speaker and myself.

Cmert-Morishige 8

Works Cited
Emanuel, Lynn, and Lynn Emanuel. The Dig ; And, Hotel Fiesta: Two
Volumes of

Poetry. Urbana: U of Illinois, 1995. Print.

Hugo, Richard. Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of

Richard Hugo. New York: Norton, 1984. Print.

Cmert-Morishige 9