Former poet laureate of Washington state and English Department alumnus Sam Green remembers faculty member Robert Huff, who passed away in 1993, and honors a new collection of his poetry, Taking Her Sides on Immortality, published by Good Deed Rain.
“Bob Huff was a key teacher for me during my time at Western. I realize this seems, at one level, ancient history, but the lasting impact of teachers is important, I think, and I’ve kept a soft place for Bob all these years. When he died, I knew that he had an unpublished manuscript of poems that hadn’t found a publisher, but could never find out what happened to it. All these years I hadn’t lost interest. Finally a copy of the manuscript surfaced in the files of his daughter, Ursula, last year, and Allen Frost (who works in the library at WWU) has done yeoman’s work in putting together a nice edition.”
Huff was a member of the department for 25 years, from 1964 to 1989, and Green remembers that “a lot of students benefited from his work as a teacher. Though I know that people often choose to remember the gossipy stuff about his drinking, he was a dedicated, serious, no-nonsense man when it came to his poetry. He took no shortcuts. That attitude came through to me, and has served me well in my own life as a writer.”
For more on Huff, see Allen Frost’s article from 2013 in Poetry Northwest.
