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Emily Allaway
Professor Frances McCue
Honors 345A
11 May 2015
Time and Place
When examining the poetry of Lynn Emanuel and Richard Hugo, there is a
notable difference in the structure of their work. While vivid characters and actions are
what make Emanuels poetry exciting, Hugo uses emotions and the overall landscape to
draw the reader more subtly into his poetry. In the context of art genres, this translates
Emanuels poetry as similar to portraits or action shots while Hugos aligns with
expansive landscape paintings. The semblance to the frozen moments of time captured in
portraits, or paintings of specific actions, in Emanuel is further enhanced by her use of an
emotional perspective, focusing on actions and characters in an attempt to convey the
overall emotion of the poem. Conversely, the lounging presence of landscape painting is
accentuated in Hugos poetry through the use of a physical perspective that details
emotions and the overall landscape to illustrate an idea of the physical setting of the
poem. Through the use of definite perspectives and contrasting senses of time, Emanuels
A Red Kimono and What Did You Expect? and Hugos Between the Bridges and
The Only Bar In Dixon illustrate how Emanuel and Hugo utilize place and character
respectively to initiate an entire world for the reader through a single poem.
Emanuels poems use a compilation of concrete images and characters to convey
an emotional perspective to the reader. In a single stanza, A Red Kimono uses explicit
images of poverty, the speaker wringing/ every cent from every dollar, and her mother

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in a housecoat/ the landlady lent with her hair tied in a rag (Emanuel 29), to paint a
poor mother and child. These actions, in combination with the household duties such as
setting the empties on the step (29) that the mother continues to perform, create a
emotional snapshot of a family struggling over and over (29) again with poverty that
the reader experiences as if he/she were in the particular moment. Similarly, What Did
You Expect? establishes an emotional perspective through definite characters and the
physical reality of death populated by gnats and fungus (64) that is connected to the
reader. The reader is clearly placed as a character through Emanuels repeated use you
and question marks. However, these questions in combination with the title and the
speakers address of the reader as my wretched brat, my darling (64) also convey a
reprimanding tone. When united with the use of italics, which are used elsewhere in The
Dig in specifically reflective poems, a rhetorical sense is added to the many questions,
making the yous address both the reader and the speaker. As a result, these double
pointed questions and the mock formality of quatrains that dont contain neat packages of
ideas convey an emotional lesson felt by both the speaker and the reader: you should
have known better than to expect such formality and niceness as The Heavenly Father
(64) in death. Through the construction of noticeable characters and specific actions,
Emanuel forces the reader to view her poems from an emotional perspective, as if the
reader were directly inside the action, feeling the emotions of the characters.
Hugos poems, take a more scenic approach. Between the Bridges is, like A
Red Kimono, a painting of poverty. However, the poems division into three stanzas,
with ideas secluded by periods, offers changing views of the landscape instead of a single
scene. Hugo starts with shacks and unpainted doors before zooming in to fruit-

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spiked bourbon []/ on roofs and women who preserve river cod and finally to the
empty heart of the landscape, Money [that] is for life (Hugo 60-61). Even when
focused on the central topic of poverty, however, the reader is kept at a distance by
Hugos return to shacks (61), as though he/she were still viewing an expansive
landscape. The broad zoom combined with the harsh sounds of shacks, cracked,
stacks and broken (61) used throughout the poem convey a physical impression of
the grim, lonely landscape of forgotten poverty. Similarly, although The Only Bar in
Dixon explicitly evokes a sense of home through Hugos repetition of the word home,
the perspective stays oriented towards the physical through the focus on setting, wanted
posters and a brand new concrete block P.O., and the feelings of the place where the
air/ is fat with gangsters (212). Additionally, the sandwich structure of the three
stanzas, circling back to the phrase I knew it entering which becomes I new it
entering at the end, helps Hugo convey both meanings, that of knew and of new,
since the reader expects knew as a repetition of the opening line. As a result, Hugos
focus on the dual emotions of familiarity and unfamiliarity frees the speakers perspective
to wander not only the physical landscape of the bar in Dixon, but also other bars that the
reader may remember. Hugos focus of emotions and overall setting in his poems creates
a wide physical perspective that includes not only the landscapes described, but also
similarly associated locations of the reader.
The differing perspectives of Emanuel and Hugo also affect the timing of the
poems. While Emanuels focus on physicality conveys an emotional perspective, it also
creates a quicker pace, in contrast to the wandering, contemplative pace of Hugo. As an
example, consider the variety of actions in A Red Kimono and The Only Bar in

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Dixon. Emanuels speaker stare[s] at [] brass, tape unrolls, and the mother ticks
her teeth and swab[s] up dust (Emanuel 29). Thus, the pace feels almost like watching
a movie, where mostly actions and characters are depicted to tell the story (since thoughts
are difficult to portray without cheesy omniscient narrators) and emotional responses are
inferred by the reader. Conversely, Hugos speaker sees emotions rather than actions: an
Indian depressed/ on Thunderbird and trying to revive through a choice of bars
(Hugo 212), which constructs a much more relaxed pace, similar to that of reading
Proust. This difference in pace and perspective allows Emanuels poems to occupy more
defined spaces of time, while Hugos have a tendency to sit and muse.
To see a difference in the occupation of time consider Emanuels What Did You
Expect? where, although she uses future tense, actions of being enclosed/ in [] a
crypt and being in the raptures of the gnats (Emanuel 64) still proceed in a
chronological fashion, from being buried to decaying. As a result, the poem occupies a
defined space of time, from death to the present moment of looking back on death. Hugo
on the other hand, creates a space that paradoxically occupies no time and all time
simultaneously. The caved [] robbers skull, Greeks/ [] counting money with their
arms and stacks of tens (Hugo 61) could all be occurring in a specific time. However,
the musing tone of the poem and purposeful vagueness, such as through Greeks (61)
versus the Greeks in the house on Elm Street (for example), allows these events to occur
at any point in time as well. The definite versus vague possessions of time in Emanuel
and Hugo allows the poems to mirror their perspectives, the emotional being in the
moment like emotions and the physical changing more slowly like physical processes. As
a result, Emanuel and Hugo construct differently empty worlds for the reader to fill.

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Take as an example the overall lack of setting in Emanuels poems compared with
the absence of specific characters and actions in Hugo. The physical focus, quick pace,
and defined time of A Red Kimono and What Did You Expect? create structural
mimicry that prompts the reader for emotional responses and ideas about setting. As a
result, Emanuel is able to present to the reader an uncolored page of a coloring book
depicting a mother with naked feet or a body swaddl[ed] [in a] crypt (Emanuel 29,
64), ready to be detailed with the emotional scenery and color of the reader. Hugo,
however, presents a different challenge to the reader. Instead of allowing the reader to
create the scenery, Hugo utilizes the broad time, slow pace, and description to prompt the
reader to bring characters and actions from their experience with, or ideas of, real
poverty in winter and bars with Green cheap plaster (Hugo 61, 212) into the poem.
The result is that Hugos poems construct a world through the addition of the readers
characters, while Emanuels poems complete a world with the readers imagined scenery.
Although both Emanuel and Hugo leave space for the reader to insert their
personality, boundaries are defined like lines in a coloring book. The places incited by
Emanuels poems must fit the actions and characters described: a poor neighborhood
somewhere hot for A Red Kimono and a grave for What Did You Expect?. Similarly,
the characters the reader creates to fill the scene in Between the Bridges must contain
the half-afraid poverty of the poem while those in The Only Bar in Dixon must fit
into the category of the bar-goers described, running and grim (61, 212). By allowing
the reader to imagine from prompts but within limits, both Emanuel and Hugo trigger an
entire world for the reader through a single poem.

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The inhabitation of time and shaping of place that Emanuel and Hugo disparately
use also gives a sense of time and place to their larger bodies of work, The Dig and
Making Certain It Goes On respectively. The defined unit of time in Emanuels poems
allows her to formulate The Dig as a chronological exploration of the speakers life. By
utilizing the speaker and characters to create the world inhabited by the mentally
excavated speaker, Emanuel manipulates the reader to create a world that, instead of
showing a reality about the poet, is complete fiction. In doing so, she illustrates how the
natural tendency to extend the speaker back to the poet, and thus gain some wisdom
about the poet, can be beguiled by misguiding the readers creation of place. Thereby,
Emanuel illustrates the essential role of place in the meaning and perception of poems.
Contrarily, Hugos poems convey a more unified sense of place among readers through
their physical perspective and broad time, which bring in the readers characters instead of
setting. However, the result is that Hugos poems also exemplify the importance of an
anchoring location in conveying a more allied meaning to the reader. Although it could be
argued that the characters Hugo readers bring may act and feel in diverse manners, thus
disturbing the perception of the poem, the set location in Hugo confines the ideas
transmitted to the reader. Just as medieval knights who act accordingly with the feudal
system will likely inhabit a castle in 13th century Europe, the characters incited by Hugo
will convey ideas accordingly with their setting. So, although Hugo and Emanuel
approach the concept in different manners, they both ultimately convey to the reader the
importance of place in poetry.

Works Cited

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Emanuel, Lynn. The Dig and Hotel Fiesta: Two volumes of poetry by Lynn Emanuel.
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995. 3-73. Print.
Hugo, Richard. Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Print.