About Hugh
Hugh was a poet, teacher, brother, father, builder, and friend. He died Sunday December 31, 2006 after falling through the ice at his cabin at Rangeley Lake, Maine. He was a man of giant reach, a teacher who connected with the undergraduates in his classroom just as easily as the inmates of a prison, the failing residents of a nursing home, or the adolescents of an uneasy modern world. To his children, Hugh was a parent of rare genius, a man who guided them through the trials of childhood while sharing extraordinary gifts for language. Born in Erie, PA in 1937, Hugh was the son of Ethel Yokes Ogden and Harold S. Ogden. He was a 1959 graduate of Haverford College, and earned his master's degree from New York University in 1961 and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967. A professor at Trinity College for 40 years, Hugh co-founded the creative writing program there and at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts in Hartford. He was a Quaker and a member of the Hartford Monthly Meeting of Religious Society of Friends. A renowned poet, Hugh's work has been published in over 300 periodicals. He published seven books of poetry, including Looking for History (1991), Two Roads and this Spring (1993), Gift (1998), Bringing a Fir Straight Down (2005), and most recently, Turtle island, Tree Psalms (2006). He won a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship (1993), three Connecticut Commission on the Arts grants (2003, 1993, and 1974), and during the last ten years, residencies at the MacDowell Colony (twice), Djerassi, Hawthornden Castle in Scotland, the Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and many others. He lived or spent time on Reservations and Pueblos throughout the West, and in 2006 was nominated to be Poet Laureate of Connecticut.
Hugh in his own words
"Music and the wind first led me to words and poems: Lyric cries, then simple little narratives. My own language went hand in hand with the language and imaginations of those who have mastered the art (the Greeks, the Romans, the English, the Americans, and poets from across the globe). I taught high school and college students as I learned my own skills and lived out my obsessions. Now, after thirty years and five books, my poems are focused on the mountains and lakes of northern Maine along the Canadian border and the people who live and work in that locality. But, as I also spend time in Alaska, New Mexico, Wyoming, and California (on or near Pueblos and Native American reservations), my recent poems reflect the land contours, rivers, and life in those states (and especially spirit animals) and the richness and variety of the weather of the natural world.
I’ve built three cabins on an island in Rangeley Lake in Maine where I often live in winter as well as summer when I’m not teaching. Construction, the machine shop, human labor as well as loons, moose, and bear provide the subjects and imagery of recent poems. That island provides the solitude I require for my writing, a liquid place of mountains and fierce shifts of weather and temperature, an isolation in which I hear the voices that call me to poems."
