Ashes & Stars

Foreword

The poet Daniel Hughes, a radiant presence, left behind an enormous hole when he died in October 2003, at the age of seventy-four. He lived the majority of his adult life in Detroit, where for twenty-four years he had been a professor of English at Wayne State University. I would say that Hughes was deterred but not defeated by the debilitating illness of multiple sclerosis, from which he suffered for forty years. All through his illness, he lived a pure life of the mind. Art—English Romantic poetry, Renaissance Italian painting, European classical music—was for him a kind of religion. Hughes and I taught at Wayne in the late seventies and early eighties. I have vivid memories of meeting him on the top floor of State Hall—first on his cane, then on his walker, finally in a wheelchair—and stopping to talk about poetry. He was a marvelous Shelley scholar, and the Romantics were always our touchstone. All his life he pursued the figures of Romanticism —what he calls here “the long chase of the Romantics”— with a kind of wild personal zeal. He took the deepest lessons of Romantic poetry to heart. He was an adept of Emily Dickinson ’s work. He also loved Robert Lowell’s poetry and had been good friends with John Berryman. Indeed, Berryman’s dream Foreword He is survived by a welter of words. Daniel Hughes ix x song #35, “MLA,” was dedicated to Dan and his wife, Mary, and I often used to call out the first stanza when I saw him: Hey out there!—assistant professors, full, associates—instructors—others—any— I have a sing to shay. We are assembled here in the capital city for Dull—and one professor’s wife is Mary— at Christmastide, hey! The poem ends on a delicious note—“forget your footnotes on the old gentleman; / dance around Mary”—which I felt should be our theme song. Sometimes my conversations with Dan about poetry were so intense they had to be continued at his apartment in Palmer Park, which vibrated with the sound of opera blasting from the stereo. We also pored over art books and dwelled for a while together in the Italy of the mind. Daniel Hughes published four individual collections during his lifetime—Waking in a Tree, Lost Title & Other Poems , Falling, and Spirit-Traps—which were distilled and gathered into You Are Not Stendhal: New and Selected Poems. This posthumous work, Ashes & Stars, may be his finest individual collection of all. His poems are filled with crafty ironies and witty refusals, with exact and exacting observations about the disappointments of life in a fallen time, yet they also present us with a singer who slipped through the side door onto the main stage and sounded the flaming, reckless, operatic notes of high splendor. One of my favorite previous pieces, the poem “Too Noble ,” strikes a characteristic chord: xi “Too noble,” Rick said, so we shut off the Beethoven but still the sound lingered about us, and lifted us above the croissants and the jokes we tried before we were awake. No one’s noble now— we thought of the death of words, the slipping, the history of disappointment, but the sound stayed, as though the walls claimed it. We went for a walk in the bright morning. The air was clarified, renewed, noble. Hughes’s poems often begin in disappointment but end on a note of noble attainment. It is as if the poet needed to overcome his own ironies to reach the state of rapture, which so called him. He needed to be lifted up. In “The Problem with Bliss,” for example, he wonders if “bliss” was “one of those words gone forever.” But Campbell used it, the Upanishads use it, and you ache toward it and speak it to yourself, its sibilants rowing you out to the egoless sea. Daniel Hughes’s final work shimmers between the earth and the sky, between the grayness of ashes and the brightness xii of stars. One feels in reading him both the downward pressure of mortality and the upward swell of transcendence. Reading these last poems, I recognize that my old friend had a kind of epigrammatic mortal wisdom. He also had a spark of divinity in him. He believed that poetry itself could not be slain by time, and his own poems are filled with what Shelley called...