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Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968 1993Heather McHugh Wesleyan /University Press of New England $35.00 cloth $14.95 paper by Joshua WeinerHeather McHugh's selected poems opens with a kind of parable that strikes the major chord of her work to date. In it the poet describes a trip she made to Italy with other "Poets of America," to shmooze officially among Italian literati and administrators. In her pensione room the poet discovers a volume of poetry written by one of the bureaucrats, who on the previous day had "with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated / sights and histories . . ." But not knowing Italian the poet puts the book "back into the wardrobe's dark." That night, at dinner, someone asks "What's poetry? Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or the statue there?" Because I was the glib one, I identified the answer instantly, I didn't have to think --" The truth is both, it's both," I blurted out. But that was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty, for our underestimated host spoke out, all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said: The statue represents Girodano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square because of his offense against authority, which is to say the Church [. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] The day they brought him forth to die, they feared he might incite the crowd (the man was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors placed upon his face an iron mask, in which he could not speak. That's how they buried him. That is how he died: without a word, in front of everyone. And poetry-- (we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to the man in gray; he went on softly)-- poetry is what he thought, but did not say. ("What He Thought") McHugh's poems ask "what's poetry?" deliberately and repeatedly. In this poem, what is never said suggests that the saying and the poetry are somehow mutually exclusive, an equation refuting Auden's definition of poetry as memorable speech. In McHugh's overture, the not-saying gets said, as Bruno's very power of speech is acknowledged by the Church hell-bent on silencing him. The paradox of eloquence lies in the bureaucrat's passionate outburst and the poems he himself has written in a language made mute by McHugh's confessed ignorance. McHugh takes such intellectual ironies and makes them felt by structuring them dramatically and by using narrative as a springboard for meditations on God, sex, death, animality, disease, time, and the sedimentary layering of language itself. Sassy and darting rather than stately and measured, her work is as sensitive to the built-in ironies of speech and as committed to song as Elvis Costello's. I didn't love a shape and later find you fit it-- every day your sight was a surprise. You made my taste, made sense, made eyes. But when you set me up in high esteem, I was a star that's bound, in time, to fall. The bound's the sorrow of the song. I loved you to no end, and when you said "So far," I knew the idiom: it meant So long. ("The Trouble with 'In'") Boundaries are binding, love limitless; yet in the idiom of lovers, expressions of devotion or ambivalence vibrate with hidden meanings. For McHugh, the deepest intimacies give rise to a language frought with duplicity. The attraction of such writing is in the voicing of bitterness, regret, and lament coupled with a verbal exuberance that plays endlessly with stock phrases, double entendres, root meanings, and puns. McHugh's ear is uniquely tuned to a frequency of contradiction and multiplicity. Taking a mere scrap of speech as an indication of metaphysical complexity, she sees that the phrase "to have to" is an odd infinitive, in which compulsion and possession meet and share a word together. Both propose, and both accept; to have, because it wants to hold; have to, because it has no will. But then there is no past or present, either: coming's going, in this match. It's odd because they're two at one but endless, in the end, in their capacity to be attached . . . ("To Have To") McHugh's verbal twisting here is certainly the kind of interrogation of "individual will" one could expect from the post-modern school of "Language" poetry associated with poets like Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman, with its syntactic disruptions and its obsessions with the ideological complicities embedded in the process of reading and writing; yet McHugh's sense of grammar's elasticity has more in common with the Earl of Rochester's energetic and conceptually dazzling poem about the paradoxical nature of Nothing than it does with more current experimental procedures. Like Dickinson, a poet she greatly admires (and about whom she has written brilliantly in her recent book of essays, Broken English, Wesleyan 1993) McHugh's strengths are rooted in a technical monomania -- but one that sometimes leads her to wildly comic effects: A name's another thing in dog-dom. Fido the Uberpooch is dead, some singing's overcome the underhund. The underhund's no private nose or eye. Smell's well, sights bound. He cops his swill from the bar's back door, scopes kibble out in big denominations; even his birthday suit is finest furs; you'll have no other dog before me, he rebarks; I'll be boygone. I'll be downhome, awaiting his arrival. What I mean by home is totally upgussied: I've got five pink weenies in the microwave (he loves paw-long hot-men) ("My Shepherd") The word-play lights up the poem, ringing bells and whizzers like a silver ball striking hot in a pinball machine. One of the dangers for such a poet is simply showing off: Deep Thoughts and Wit Aplenty, Inquire Within. So when in another poem McHugh replys to a fellow air traveler's polite inquiry "So what/are your poems about?" with "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" one can't help feeling sorry for the strawman -- poor guy, with poetry he's just out of his league. . . . In her better poems, however, the occasion to be clever opens to a genuine richness, as it does in "Language Lesson, 1976": When Americans say a man takes liberties, they mean he's gone too far. In Philadelphia today I saw a kid on a leash look mom-ward and announce his fondest wish: one bicentennial burger, hold the relish. Hold is forget, in American. On the courts of Philadephia the rich prepare to serve, to fault. The language is a game as well, in which love can mean nothing, doubletalk mean lie. I'm saying doubletalk with me. I'm saying go so far the customs are untold. Make nothing without words, and let me be the one you never hold. Although she favors the iamb, McHugh is committed to the improvisation of intellect as it leads her down a zig-zagging path of associations. Likewise, one can count on her to rhyme a poem's last word without being able to predict oneself the placement of the first word in the pair, as rhymes fall unexpectedly through the poem's score. For McHugh, rhyme often becomes another element in her "centrifugal spray" rather than a necessary ordering principle. The full rhyme "untold/hold" paradoxically sounds a coupling that negates itself. To be "the one you never hold" is to be the one not forgotten; to make "nothing without words" is to make love: the poem says two things at once, insisting on its ability to do so. This lack of resolution puts rhyme to an unusual purpose -- that of open-ended suspension -- and deepens McHugh's wit, bringing it close to Celan's dictum, "speak, but don't split yes from no." The irresolvable is a common enough state in the country of romantic catastrophe. It is less common, perhaps, in the elegy, where resolution and ending become subjects for despair. In McHugh's poems, death comes in the shape of a question mark, an existential uncertainty. In "What Hell Is," the poet describes the predicament of dying in a household stocked with modern conveniences: * The man who used to love his looks is sunk in bone and looking out. Framed by immunities of telephone and lamp his mouth is shut, his eyes are dark. While we discuss despair he is it, somewhere in the house. Increasingly he's spoken of, not with. In kitchen conferences, we come to terms that we can bear. But where is he? In hell, which is the living room. In hell, which has an easy chair. For a poet who rarely resists any opportunity for a paranthetical aside, there is a concentration of vision here that poignantly and sparely highlights the terror of a diseased alienation. Sometimes McHugh's "will to be peculiar" (her own phrase for Dickinson) encourages a syntactic and semantic contraction into enigma; sometimes her jokes overkill. Such faults have developed among persistent strengths: in these formally distinctive, deeply felt, and intellectually challenging poems, McHugh has invented a style for herself that acknowledges the materials and contingencies of language without sacrificing poetry's primal resource in song.
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