There's a nice elegy in the Seattle P-I today marking the 25th anniversary of the death of the poet Richard Hugo.
The author of "The Real West Marginal Way" captured the city in a way that may not be possible now that the area is more grown up. That makes his contribution more worth remembering than ever.
One place that builds on his example is the Hugo House literary center (where I serve on the board). From the P-I piece:
Most of all, Hugo, our hometown poet, tells us that writing matters: "It's a way of saying you and the world have a chance." In these past 25 years, multitudes of writers working in all sorts of genres have gathered in Seattle. We're now not only a bookish city, we're a city where the raw ore of language is formed into literature. All along the ridges and valleys, writers are working away, word by word, creating the drafts that we'll see later caught between the smooth, glimmering covers of books. It's the kind of industry that would have impressed Richard Hugo.