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Heather McHugh

Visiting Poet

Heather McHugh

Heather McHugh is the author of six books of poetry, a book of essays, and translations from several languages. Called a “postmodern metaphysician” by Booklist, McHugh is widely praised for her attention to and fascination with language itself. Her poems, which have won many awards, often revolve around complicated wordplay and etymological games. Robert Hass describes her as “a poet for whom wit is a form of spiritual survival.” The Voice Literary Supplement declares that McHugh’s poems “are honest and essential as a blood count.”

Born in California and raised in Virginia, McHugh entered Harvard at the age of sixteen and later did graduate work at the University of Denver. Her first book of poems, Dangers, was published in 1977. Subsequent volumes include To the QuickHinge & SignThe Father of the Predicaments, and Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, a collection of essays. Her translation work includes Euripides’ Cyclops and Glottal Stop: Poems of Paul Celan (with her husband, Nikolai Popov).

McHugh has taught at many universities, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College M.F.A. program and is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Select Poems

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear.

Calm comes from burning.

Tall comes from fast.

Comely doesn’t come from come.

Person comes from mask.

The kin of charity is whore,

the root of charity is dear.

Incentive has its source in song

and winning in the sufferer.

Afford yourself what you can carry out.

A coward and a coda share a word.

We get our ugliness from fear.

We get our danger from the lord.

From THE FATHER OF THE PREDICAMENTS (Wesleyan University Press, 1999)

There, a little right

of Ursus Major, is

the Milky Way:

a man can point it out,

the biggest billionfold of all

predicaments he’s in:

his planet’s street address.

What gives? What looks

a stripe a hundred million

miles away from here

is where we live.

*

Let’s keep it clear. The Northern Lights

are not the North Star. Being but

a blur, they cannot reassure us.

They keep moving – I think far

too easily. September spills

some glimmers of

the boreals to come:

they’re modest pools

of horizontal haze, where later

they’ll appear as foldings in the vertical,

a work of curtains, throbbing dim

or bright. (One wonders at

one’s eyes.) The very sight

will angle off in glances or in shoots

of something brilliant, something

bigger than we know, its hints uncatchable

in shifts of mind … So there

it is again, the mind, with its

old bluster, its self-centered

question: what

is dimming, what is bright?

The spirit sinks and swells, which cannot tell

itself from any little luster.

From THE FATHER OF THE PREDICAMENTS (Wesleyan University Press, 1999)

The literate are ill-prepared for this

snap in the line of life:

the day turns a trick

of twisted tongues and is

untiable, the month by no mere root

moon-ridden, and the yearly eloquences yielding more

than summer’s part of speech times four. We better learn

the buried meaning in the grave: here

all we see of its alphabet is tracks

of predators, all we know of its tense

the slow seconds and quick centuries

of sex. Unletter the past and then

the future comes to terms. One late fall day

I stumbled from the study and I found

the easy symbols of the living room revised:

my shocked senses flocked to the window’s reference

where now all backyard attitudes were deep

in memory: the landscapes I had known too well-

the picnic table and the hoe, the tricycle, the stubborn

shrub-the homegrown syllables

of shapely living-all

lay sanded and camelled by foreign snow …

From HINGE & SIGN, POEMS 1968-1993 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994)

About Heather

Poetry Center Reading Dates: October 2001