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at the Dodge Poetry Festival. She is a frequent
crowd-wower (and received the International Po-
etry Forum’s Charity Randall citation for excel-
lence at public reading), thanks to her verbal agility
and wit, her passionate delivery, and her generos-
ity. While she might easily pay the bills lecturing
and giving readings, she truly teaches, reading and
responding to hundreds of student poems each year,
with kindness and modesty born, perhaps, of wari-
ness. Asked about the pros and cons of teaching,
she says, “No pro at all. That’s not to tout the con.
I don’t mind fessing. It’s prefixing I hate. One of
the Waughs, if I remember rightly, is said to have
said that the natural enemy of any subject is the
professor thereof.”
Her new and selected poems, Hinge & Sign
(Wesleyan, 1994), demonstrates depth well beyond
the early virtuosity, as well as humility, evidence
of a writer who is still listening, still learning, still,
as McHugh says, “finding life strange (this is the
extent, and intent, of spirituality in me).” The first
of that book’s new poems tells of traveling as a Fa-
mous Poet in Italy, speaking glibly, and being
sobered by the story of Giordano Bruno, “famous
/ for his eloquence,” burned in an iron mask so that
he could not speak.
Forced muteness, and the loss of speech and
thought that comes with death, is chronicled even
more chillingly in the extraordinary first poem of
McHugh’s most recent collection, The Father of
the Predicaments(Wesleyan, 1999). “Not a Prayer”
tells the story of the death of cellist Raya Gar-
bousova, whom McHugh has called her “soul’s
mother.” Here, the unspeakable takes on new
meaning, as Raya loses the ability to communicate,
and her family and closest friends lose the ability
to understand.
The struggle against the inevitable muting of
the individual voice inspires McHugh’s stress-
testing of our language; and the limitations of
words lead her, increasingly, to examinations of the
spirit. The keys to both are intelligence, honesty,
and precise expression.
“There’s a nice story I heard somewhere about
Samuel Beckett attending a performance of one of
his pieces,” McHugh says. “The stage manager was
nervously trying to be precise about all the details,
desperate to please the famously exacting author.
In view of one particular stage direction about a
door (that it should be ‘imperceptibly ajar’), he was
fussing with the aperture, moving the door a half-
inch this way, a half-inch that, when he felt the
shadow of the master fall across his shoulder. It
was Beckett who had walked up behind him and
was watching his exertions. Said Beckett, ‘The
door should be shut:’
The stage manager stammered, “But the stage direc-
tion says ‘ajar.’”
“Yes,” replied Beckett, “but it also says ‘imper-
ceptibly.’”
This exquisite moment amounts, paradoxi-
cally, rather to a confidence in, than a correction
of, the hapless manager. For as an act of language
within the script of a play, an act in which the ad-
verb effectively erases the adjective, that stage di-
rection was a secret gift to be delivered only to
readers (stage managers themselves, among oth-
ers): it will never be heard aloud in the theatrical
performance, nor is it manifest in the object-life of
the stage, except as a double negative (the absence
of an aperture!).
“That’s the kind of language-love I want to be
in as long as I can work, a love in which passion
and precision conspire, and in which a quiet thrill is
communicated from one witting reader to another.”
Source: Peter Turchi, “About Heather McHugh,” in
Ploughshares, Vol. 27, No. 1, Spring 2001, pp. 210–16.Jane Satterfield
In the following review, Satterfield finds the
poems in The Father of Predicamentsto be “rooted
in a wealth of wit and etymological musings.”“I have a secret theory,” said Heather McHugh,
speaking of Ezra Pound’s “The Lake Isle” to fellow
poets in a recent Harper’sForum on poetry, “that
most poets, at one time or another, write into their
poems their own self-criticism.” Much of what
McHugh finds worthy in this fractious forebear,
“high reference and low irreverence” (for McHugh
the “great conjunction” in Pound), is apparent also
in her verse. Poetry as secret theory, poetry as self-
criticism, poetry as linguistic feast—all are central
to McHugh’s most recent collection. In this wel-
come fourth compilation, incidents of dramatic and
seemingly random stature implode to reveal sur-
prising insights. Whatever their triggering subject—
a loved one’s last days spent in a hospital room
fluttering in and out of consciousness, a mother who
“propels a babystroller,” loss, love, doubt, the work-
ings of mind and spirit—the poems are rooted in a
wealth of wit and etymological musings; they up-
end linguistic bedrock, moving toward “radical
rewrite, therootretort.” The poem as map, then, a
tracery of language’s historicity. Once the trigger-
ing subjects have “plunged beyond” her viewpoint,
the poet, “the brooder on / the bench” is promptedThree To’s and an Oi