Heather McHugh

Heather McHugh was guest teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop
several years ago when her father died. Her brother delivered their dad’s
ashes to her in a Crown Royal bag. McHugh couldn’t resist the
opportunity. She brought the ashes to class. She plunked the bag down
and announced to her graduate students: “Look, here’s the big chance,
for once I can show you a mortal moment. This is what human beings are
made of.” Only one of the students in the classroom would touch it; he
raked the ashes with his fingers. “He was interested in it as matter,
which is what I was interested in it as,” McHugh recalled. “I always
liked that kid for doing that.”

Then she flew the ashes to Seattle—where she has taught at the
University of Washington since 1984—and from Seattle to Victoria,
BC, to scatter the stuff. The deed done, she and her husband (she calls
him “the Bulgarian”) were walking up from the beach when a sign caught
her eye, an advertisement for an apartment with a water view. She’s
owned it ever since. It’s the apartment we were sitting in a couple
weeks ago.

“My dad fished these waters,” she said, waving toward the sea,
choppy and British-looking. On the table between us sat a galley of
The Best American Poetry 2007, which she guest edited. “That’s
going to sell more than any book of mine ever did,” she said. Victoria
is her escape from being a notable American poet, from teaching, from
“po-biz” (her word). In Victoria, she doesn’t have any students to
encourage or MFA programs to oversee or grants to accept (she has won
two NEAs and a Guggenheim) or prizes to judge or readings to give.
“You’re the scariest guest in a long time,” she said, smiling, as I
scribbled notes. “I don’t want to be known. To me, being known is the
loss of liberty.”

Escape has been her MO since the beginning. She was raised in rural
Virginia by parents who fought a lot. She was morbidly shy. She credits
a piano teacher from Vienna for introducing her to the arts. “This
woman was like the witch in the woods. I would go to pee in the
outhouse and come back in and there’d be a roaring fire and bowls of
soup.” She listened to records of famous English actors reading
Shakespeare, Yeats, and Donne. At 16, she enrolled at Harvard
University—she’d skipped a grade; she wanted like hell to get out
of Virginia—where her workshop professors included Robert Lowell.
(“That meant more to other people than to me. I was mostly concerned
with not turning green smoking a cigarette in front of the graduate
students.”) At 17, she sold her first poem to the New Yorker.
She chose the New Yorker because “I knew that it was my escape
and I knew I better choose well if I wanted escape.”

We watched a seaplane flying in. She had insisted I come by
seaplane. On the ride, I read the plane poem that begins her third
collection, Shades, called “20-200 on 747” (later republished
in her greatest-hits collection Hinge & Sign, a National
Book Award finalist). “20-200 on 747” begins: “There is rain on the
glass but it all disappears/when I look toward the curve on the
world./(The here and now is clear, I mean, so we/can’t see it.) In an
airplane, chance/encounters always ask, So what/are your poems about?
They’re about/their business, and their father’s business and
their/monkey’s uncle, they’re about/how nothing is about, they’re
not/about about. This answer drives them/back to the snack tray every
time./Phil Fenstermacher, for example, turns up/perfectly clear in my
memory, perfectly attentive to/his Vache Qui Rit, that saddest cheese.”
It’s a piece of comedy, this poem, satisfying and narrative, perfect
reading for a roaring ride on a 10-seater. The narrator thinks of the
French philosophers and hopes they’re not in the cockpit “undermining
meaning as they do”: “They think/we’re sunk, we’re sunk, in our
little/container, our story/of starting and stopping. Just/whose story
is this anyway? Out of my mind/whose words emerge? Is there a self the
self/surpasses?”

Many of McHugh’s poems are like this—dense, startling stories
that could be published as paragraphs, as prose, although she doesn’t
take to the suggestion. “I like lines,” she told me, and then paused
and said, “She snorted.”

Her lines are packed and bright and good, and they like space. They
have a way of meaning more than you think, of going deeper than you can
see. Take the marriage poem “Anniversary Song,” stacked with lines
stacked with meaning like: “I have a man/in mind, he’s out of sight.”
And: “I’m at home/with these clockwork birds, the time/I kill, the
stew/I’m in. He’s come/to matter, as the island/comes to mind. The
world/of doubles loves itself.” It’s impressive without seeming hard,
it’s friendly, it’s colloquial, it’s truly miserable, it’s
self-conscious, it’s language as material, and it’s funny. (One way to
read that last line—and there are at least four ways to read
it—is as a joke about the poem’s own duplicities.)

McHugh exploits the split personalities of words, building phrases
that contradict themselves. When I mentioned this, she said, “I’m drawn
to finding the grammar that can make the thing that can’t happen
happen.” She added, “Frankly, that’s what’s not interesting to me about
politics. It’s about containment. Containing people.” I asked if she is
fucking with people with her ambiguous, uncontainable stuff, and she
said, “I’m not so much fucking with people as trying to escape them. I
can’t bear to think of being nailed into place.” When I asked about
being funny, she said, “I make people laugh so they don’t look at
me—make them have a little seizure.”

She has a genius for ambiguity and the vertiginous little joke,
evident even in the poems she considers throwaways. Her recent poem
“Song for the Men of the Pennsylvania Hills” gets thunderous applause
at readings, although she thinks of it as a “barroom jingle.” She did
it for me from memory:

It was not because the heavens
didn’t shine upon the match
nor for want of indication
that he thought himself a catch.
He was able, he was stable
as a Harvard running back;
of the requisite credentials
there was surely not a lack.
Lack of coulda? Lack of shoulda?
Lack of spermicidal foam? No,
it was just for Lackawanna
that I didn’t take him home.

She wrote it for her father because “he always wanted a poem that
was understandable and funny and rhymed,” but he died before she could
show it to him.