Volume 24 273
clinical, or removed, or clever about these lin-
guistic observations; it’s just the way it is, for this
group of people watching this beloved person go
out of existence. It also prepares you for the most
wrenching moment of the poem, which is not the
moment of death, but a farewell to a dear friend
in which the shattered mind musters itself for a fi-
nal leap into intelligibility:
the voice of Martha in the cellphone saying tinnily:
“We love you, dearest friend; we love your love of
life,”
and leaning back I saw upon that listening face
some wild emotions, efforts, tearings of intent,
attempts to speak—and then
there burst out from her voicebox
words—or rather, one word cried
three times—so loud
the others all came running from
their rooms: GOODBYE
GOODBYE GOODBYE
Phrases like “tearings of intent” and the line-
break that creates a hesitation just before “words”
in the second stanza show McHugh’s hallmark:
precision. If, as Wilson said, the “work of the imag-
ination” is “the recreation, in the harmony and logic
of words, of the cruel confusion of life,” then this
is work of a high order.
It is interesting to see why, when she uses prose
passages, McHugh’s language remains under pres-
sure, powerful. The sentence “We talked our time
away around her figure in the silent chair, we
missed our Madame Raconteuse,” is obviously
iambic, and could be rewritten as decasyllabic
lines. This is even true of later poems in the book,
where McHugh falls back into her usual concep-
tual mode, for example, “Nano-Knowledge,”
whose opening, “There, a little right / of Ursus Ma-
jor, is / the Milky Way,” is chopped up on the page
but strikes the ear as—dare one say it?—quite reg-
ular verse.
Source:Bruce F. Murphy, “Verse Versus Poetry,” in Po-
etry, Vol. 177, No. 3, January 2001, pp. 279–86.
Peter Turchi
In the following essay, Turchi provides back-
ground on McHugh’s life and career and examines
her “stress-testing of our language” in her poetry.
Heather McHugh is wired. She is also wireless
(see laptop, below), wry, and webbed (spondee
.com). She speaks in passionate flurries, seriocomic
riffs that only begin to reflect her speed of thought.
She annotates as she speaks, offering first and sec-
ond answers, embellishing and revising and pun-
ning. Words are her sparks and her flame.
“As the world’s shyest child” she has written,
“I was the one who never spoke in school but who
registered, with uncalled-for intensity, every twist
of tone and talk; who, at home, went directly to her
room to write, because writing proposed a fellow
listener, though things seemed quite unspeakable.”
Listening to McHugh, one has the sense that
she must constantly slow herself down for the sake
of others, or, more often, leave her words behind
for readers and audiences to unpack. Asked about
her earliest ambitions and expectations, she replies:
“Ambitions and expectations are different creatures
entirely. I expected to be a writer for five years;
then, starting at age five, I was a writer. Ambition
comes, if I’m not losing my etymological marbles,
from going around. I never went around. I went
straight, even when stoned.”
Born to Canadian parents in San Diego in
1948, McHugh was raised in “rural saltwater Vir-
ginia.” The writing produced at age five was po-
etry, which the author bound with ribbon and
cardboard covers. Soon after, she attended a four-
room primary school (complete with outhouse),
then a parochial school. One imagines a young
McHugh in the back of the room, intellectual mo-
tor revving, barely contained by anything so con-
ventional as a classroom, but she claims otherwise:
“Suffice it to say it sometimes seems I am the only
writer in America who loved the nuns.” She con-
fesses that one of her early influential teachers was
“Sister Cletus, who, in her innocence and love of
grammar, and despite all snickerers, persisted in her
use of the term ‘suspended period: We preferred to
think of suspended periods as resembling those as-
terisks in Victorian literature that were followed—
nine months later—by babies.” From there,
McHugh went to a suburban high school that did,
in fact, fail to contain her. When a ninth-grade ge-
ography teacher advised her against anything so
presumptuous as applying to Radcliffe, she deter-
mined to get in, ASAP. With near-perfect SATs,
she entered the college at age sixteen and gradu-
ated cum laude.
At about the same time, The New Yorker’s
Howard Moss “saw something to like” in a poemThree To’s and an OiWords are her sparks
and her flame.”