Pining for Heather McHugh

The situation of the critic often depends on a kind of muteness in his subject, a refusal to speak other than "through the work." Ideally, the author of one of the essential bodies of poems in contemporary American literature would never have thought about what she might have meant by those poems of hers, or how and why she made them. My words would be as light in the darkness, a revelation: the first wary, astonished steps outside the structure, built by her hand, brick-by-brick, that closed around her. Alas this advantage is canceled by Heather McHugh, a writer whose own criticism has meant so much to me, over the years, almost as much her poems; and whose poems are so fantastically responsive to themselves that they are their own truest and most reliable guides. In interviews, as well, McHugh is unfailingly incisive and weirdly nonpossessive about her poems: grateful, as though they were given to her; curious, as though they were creatures in nature, their features wonderful and strange, perhaps a little comical; appreciative that they give evidence of the larger marvels, and that their adaptations, necessary for survival, manifest as beauty.

But not hers, exactly — and so, whose?

This is where it helps to greet a writer face-to-face, as we did last February in Sewanee. Or to behold her meeting others, as in a fine interview with Seattle Voices I watched while preparing to write these remarks (would one say "this morning" or "last week"? — a point about time I will return to in a moment, a point McHugh's poems force us to confront). You can find the interview on YouTube: McHugh sits at a round table, amiably, winningly fielding her interviewer's thoughtful questions, surprising herself by a choice of word or inflection, running down interpretive leads and then pivoting forcefully to some new possibility. A command performance, and, I suspect, nothing in it recycled from any prior formulation. (One of the challenges in writing about McHugh is that she brings a fresh attack to every poem — not that she doesn't have "themes" and "preoccupations" and so on, but they're forever being undermined by entirely novel actions of mind.) Here's an exchange from the interview:

… The natural world is so rich with figures for responsiveness. The enormous whale screening huge volumes of water to get krill … plankton as the nourishment for the largest animal … there are so many things I resisted as a kid, among them the dimension of proportion that was imposed upon us by a sort of human chauvinism … it was just a quirk of where our eyes were stuck in our heads; everything, wavelengths of sound were just quirks of having two ears. We were just schmucks with two ears! Time drove me crazy. I couldn't learn time. I was an idiot child by many standards: I just didn't want them putting that imprint on my head …

The hardiness of this performance, its delight in its own robust "responsiveness" and riches of figure and phrase, recalls, to me, Emily Dickinson's own little arias of introduction in her letters to Colonel Higginson. For Dickinson, as for McHugh, any thorough accounting a person might make of herself must include the history of her consciousness of her body in space and time; those moments she felt small, large, central or peripheral; when, in time, she felt herself to be ahead or behind, early or late. "My business is circumference," Dickinson writes, suggesting how, often, she operates most economically at the farthest fringe of her senses. The cause, and also the consequence, of this talent for the faraway is also suggested in a letter to Higginson: "The mind is so near itself." (McHugh's version, from "20-200 on 747," an early poem: "the here and now is clear, I mean, so we / can't see it.") This is the confusion of near and far, the estrangement or blurriness or deadness of the near compared to the supernatural vividness and clarity of the distant. In a letter, Dickinson writes of "springing to the window...