274 Poetry for Students
she had written. She says, “My bet is this: to that
early acceptance I owe the whole trail of profes-
sional fortuities that followed. The grad-school ad-
missions people [at the University of Denver] loved
The New Yorkeracceptance and put me in a class-
room. I learned as I taught. Galassi at Houghton
Mifflin liked the inference of forms in my perver-
sities, and didn’t mind The New Yorkercredential,
either. I was lucky. Sending something over the
transom is like entering a lottery.” Soon after grad-
uation from Denver in 1972, she was awarded a
MacDowell Colony fellowship and the first of three
NEA fellowship grants, which allowed her to com-
plete the book Jonathan Galassi published in 1977.
Dangersfeatured on its cover a photo of the
twenty-nine-year-old poet, who with her high
cheekbones and dark coat might have stepped out
of a European thriller, standing at the edge of a
manhole, and was dedicated “For my lovers.” The
epigraph, from Browning, is “Our interest’s on the
dangerous edge of things... ,” and that focus on
the dangerous, the threatening, the unspoken and
nearly unspeakable, continues. Although McHugh
spends many of her days standing in the front of a
classroom, she sometimes sounds like the wicked
wit of the back row, the bad girl you’d dare your-
self to sit beside.
Just four years after her first collection came
her second, A World of Difference(Houghton,
1981). One sign of difference was in the acknowl-
edgments: McHugh recognized her mother and her
aunts, the source of her “strong will and sense of
independence,” and her father, a marine biologist,
for passing down “his passion for work.” Not yet
thirty-five, she was publishing regularly in the New
Yorker, APR, the Paris Review, the Atlantic
Monthly,the Nation,and a host of literary journals,
including Ploughshares;she was also being an-
thologized. James Tate called her “a wickedly as-
tute critic of our times,” while Richard Howard
noted that her poems contained “a compassion that
is more nearly perfect for it has nothing to do with
pity.” What keeps McHugh’s work from being
merely brilliant in its linguistic dexterity and wit is
that she marries criticism with compassion and self-
reproach; she is no cynic, no simply clever quip-
per. In the poem “Unspeakable” she moves from
observing the death of a close friend to the poten-
tially exotic distraction of a circus, in which an ele-
phant defecates voluminously:... half the audience, by turns,
is treated to the sight
of how the stuff emerges,
where it lands. The snickers
are the language of
the animal the animal offends,
the one that thinks
it’s different. We can’t
contain ourselves: the laughs
burst out in spatters from the stands...
McHugh is one of our most honored writers,
a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets,
a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship,
a Lila Wallace–Reader’s DigestWriting Award,
the PEN/Voelcker Award, and the Folger Library’s
O. B. Hardison Prize for a poet excelling in teach-
ing. She has received The Boston Book Review’s
Bingham Poetry Prize and the Pollack–Harvard
Review Prize and has been a finalist for the Na-
tional Book Award. She has done service as board
member of AWP, panelist selecting the New York
State poet, and judge for prizes and awards from
the National Poetry Series and Laughlin Prize to,
this year, the first Electronic Literature Organiza-
tion Poetry Prize.
She is also one of our most prolific writers. In
addition to her six books of poems, a collection of
essays (and another completed), a collaboration
with collage artist Tom Phillips, and four volumes
of translation—including last year’s Glottal Stop:
IO Poems of Paul Celan,co-translated with her
husband, Nikolai Popov, and this year’s Euripides’
Cyclops,co-translated with David Konstan—she is
one of the great literary correspondents. Her faxes
look like ransom notes, with capitalizations and
boldface, exuberant arrows and illustrations, and
her e-mails are legendary. “I’ll send her a mes-
sage;” one of her many correspondents recently
said, “and I have an answer two minutes later. One
day we must have exchanged twenty messages.”
McHugh claims, “I’m a hermit. I’d rather send an
e-mail than myself, but poetry readings pay me
more than e-mail does.” She is a poet of the twenty-
first century, more likely to give a reading from her
laptop than from the printed page, but she is also
an old-fashioned woman of letters, deeply inter-
ested in the world around her, quick to discuss Mc-
Donald’s (where she often writes) and etymology,
orgasms and Epictetus.
When she needs seclusion, she retreats to an
island oasis in Maine. Otherwise, she is very much
in the world. In addition to her ongoing ap-
pointment as Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-
Residence at the University of Washington in Seattte,
she is a core faculty member of the low-residency
M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson Col-
lege, and a visitor to other writing programs around
the country. Last summer, she wowed the crowdsThree To’s and an Oi