Richard Hague is author or editor of 25 volumes of prose and poetry and editor emeritus of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. Awards include: Ohio Co-Poet of the Year (1984), Appalachian Poetry Book of the Year (2003), and Weatherford Prize for Poetry (2012). In 2019, he was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. His Earnest Occupations: Teaching, Writing, Gardening & Other Local Work was “recommended” by the US Review of Books in 2018. His most recent poetry collection, Continued Cases, was published in 2023.
What past event do you often reflect upon, and how did that event change you?
I grew up in the coal and steel town of Steubenville, Ohio, before the foundation of the Environmental Protection Agency, thus at an early crucial point in the nation’s industrial misbehavior. My town’s air quality was judged the worst in the United States by the famous Six Cities Study. So even before being told by my doctor, decades later, that I had “nodules” on my lungs, I had tangled with the consequences — cultural, literary, physical — of coming from there and acting as one witness to our suicidal greed for fossil fuels.
How does your work add to the quality of your life?
I would say that my accumulated poems and essays and stories are an ongoing witness to what it is like to live in a world that is burning itself up. “May you live in interesting times” — it’s an old Chinese curse. So, if chronicling the possible end of creation as we know it is a worthy (if sobering) subject, then I would say that in the midst of this cataclysm, to be able to witness it and comment on it is a privilege of the gravest kind.
Tell us a story you would like to share with the world.
The Air We Ate
The air we ate tasted of iron ore,
ten-penny nails, gutter sand.
Tardidgrades were our cousins in survival.
Our sneezes clattered like kicked trashcans.
Our tears were cinders and clinkers,
as if we wept grit or kidney stones. But weep
We didn’t often, because we were
tough guys and our air, by god,
was the worst in the country. And daily
on high school tracks and cracked sidewalks
we ran and leaped, our lungs
blackening like the acid-rained
towers of churches.
Years later, when doctors warned us
Of “nodules” on our chest x-rays,
we snorted. Sure enough, doc,
they’re pieces of rust and metal,
the air we sucked and chewed.
So much that some of us
still swear we’re magnetic,
able to make our ways back like
homing pigeons
half a wrecked world off course.
Author photo: Scott Goebel
Side bar image: Pixabay/Edar
