Upgraded to Serious, Heather McHugh
by Stephen Yenser

from The Yale Review, July 2010

Like—and by the same token unlike—the most vigorous of our recent and remarkably heterogeneous American poetry, Heather McHugh's verse is marked by its strangeness. By strangeness I want to indicate a condition having the quality of being extraneous ("foreign" or "alien") and to recall that, oddly enough, the Indo-European root of both words is eghs-, a stem meaning "out of" or "away from" that also provides us with the prefix for "extravagant," a term Thoreau sharpened the etymological point of in Walden, where he applauds vagrancies, divagations, veering off the road in one's conduct and literary works alike. Indeed, at least since the late nineteenth century, much of the most durable American poetry has been literally "extravagant," from Whitman's "Song of the Open Road," where the poet sets out down a "long brown path before me leading wherever I choose," through T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which makes its way through "half-deserted streets" and "muttering retreats" that "follow like a tedious argument / of insidious intent," to Richard Wilbur's bracingly unpredictable path in "Walking to Sleep," Elizabeth Bishop's subtly spectacular constitutional in "The End of March," and A. R. Ammons's characteristically heuristic walk in "Corsons Inlet." The ramble is of course an age-old trope and but one metaphor for the pertinent tendency. Hugh Kenner, for his part, implicitly invoked bricolage in the title of A Homemade World, his collection of essays on select American modernists who deviated from tradition, and who needed to discover and tinker rather than follow prescribed means. But regardless of the preferred figure, the unexpected encounter has long been a distinguishing feature of the poets we admire, and it makes sense, for example, that Alice Fulton, herself one of our most exorbitant contemporary poets, should call her collection of idiosyncratic essays Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, in which "eccentricity," "deviance," and "aberrance" are identified as "source[s] of power" and in which the one English poet considered at length is Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, known even in her seventeenth century as "Mad Madge."

When Heather McHugh entitles her splendid new volume of poems Upgraded to Serious, she hints at her particular extravagances, which issue from an obsession on the one hand with the irreducible lubricity of language and on the other hand with the inexorable paradoxes of existence—not that these are really two hands, I suppose, as much as the one hand we must clap with, ever since (as Kenner notes in the text just mentioned) the American linguist Benjamin Whorf demanded that we dwell on the special predicament we are in, where language shapes and reshapes the things we see, discover, and discuss. McHugh's "upgraded" suggests an improvement in a medical condition from "critical" to merely "serious," but at the same time it implies a change from the comic in the direction of the grave. So we have to conceive of the poet's situation as somewhat less dire in one context—even though a "merely" serious medical condition still amounts to an acute illness—yet darker in another. Or rather, we have to conceive of it as each in turn, or even simultaneously. In sum, her—our—condition is potentially ironic though nonetheless perilous. "Despair tinged with whimsy" is a phrase that comes to mind, along with the gaiety of the sages at the end of W. B. Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli." In a mood comparable to the speaker's in many of McHugh's poems, Elizabeth Bishop's Crusoe (in "Crusoe in England"), abandoned on an exotic island, "christened" a volcano alternatively "Mont d'Espoir or Mount Despair." After all, he (or she) had "time enough to play with names."

What else can one do, McHugh seems to ask. Our very language condemns us to mutability and conflict. "One doesn't want / always to be bound / to change," she testifies in "Thanks for That Last Heartthrob," but our expression of yearning for freedom ("One doesn't want / always to be bound") turns itself by way of equivocal extension into an admission of inevitable fugacity (one is yoked precisely "to change"). The human longing for stability, let alone permanence, a longing that drives poets to imagine that they will write sonnets more lasting than gilded monuments, is defeated by the language those poets exploit, the capacity for which makes us human in the first place. In the beginning was the word, but the word was mercurial, and our attempts to arrest its metamorphoses must be futile. Consider the following dense, lovely passage concerning the feckless effort to erect "a stay against confusion," in Robert Frost's seductive phrase. The reader in a hurry to stabilize things may provisionally insert a comma after McHugh's first line and understand the verbs in lines 3 and 5 as parallel to that in line 2 (for example, read "could meander" and "could lend"):

Before a human face
a glance could light without
alighting, gleams meander through
the untagged trees, a stream into the pattern
lend its thread. But then we came affixing
barbs and snags, and until all of us
are done away, a million lilies will be stilled
by some arranger's hands, a billion stones
be hauled and heaped by heart, to stand
for words, where words aren't going
to be kept. The word

must move ...

Indeed an original Heraclitean fluidity is everywhere the issue. Our labeling (following Adam's) of the trees, our puny tags of terminology ("barbs and snags"), right along with our diverse memorial arrangements and mausoleums, are to no avail. The ostensibly firm infinitive "to stand" removes itself in an ineluctable trice by becoming a trace ("to stand / for"), while words pledged cannot be sustained ("kept"), not to mention domesticated (another "kept"). As McHugh puts it in her own collection of maverick essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, "Poetry contradicts itself, is true twice. The forked tongue, second face, double bind got bad press: everyone's from two. And poetry is of two minds; it is language's way of being of two minds." So we write all our names on water. The bereaved lover, to come to the end of "Thanks for That Last Heartthrob," may construct his "frozen frown" at mortality as he will, but "Glowers / by glow are overcome, flowers by flow." The harbor seal in "Nothing Is Too Small" (seemingly cousin to Bishop's seal in "At the Fishhouses":  "He stood up in the water and regarded me / steadily, moving his head a little") raises "his head / out of the current's fastest flow," where the ambivalence of "fastest" (a word of the kind Roland Barthes designated "enantioseme," a word susceptible to opposite definitions) undermines its own meaning, and looks around "As if amazed at how things stand" —which is also to say, precisely, at "how they go" in the world.

McHugh's perfect subliminal pun—"flowers" means both "blossoms" and "things that flow"—was uncovered in our day, as far as I know, by James Merrill (in The Book of Ephraim), and in any case the precedent hints at a limitation that the inveterate wag like McHugh comes up against: while all words are fickle, some words are more vividly so than others and are thus more likely to have their triumphant duplicities repeatedly, and therefore less piquantly, exposed. The once gleaming homophonic equation of sun and son is now well beyond the pale; Sylvia Plath was surely the last respectable poet who would want a reader to hear in an important context "mourning" along with "morning"; and the double-edged sword of "cleave" has been dulled by recent iteration including McHugh's (though the profundities of a given "cleavage" might still be plumbed).  At the same time, if there is some truth to Emerson's claim that all words are fossilized metaphors, there might be no end to revivification. McHugh is a past master.

McHugh's "loved philology," as Dickinson framed her own passion, is confessedly compulsive. One of the more cryptic short poems here is "Myrrha to the Source," which I quote entire:

O fluent one, O muscle full of hydrogen,
O stuff of grief, whom the Greeks
accuse of spoiling souls,

whose destiny is downward,
whose reflecting's up—I think
I must have come from you.

Just one more cup.

Myrrha, who appears in the Metamorphoses and the Divine Comedy but who had been neglected in recent years until Frank Bidart turned his hand to the story in his riveting long poem "The Second Hour of the Night," was a young Greek woman so besotted with her father the king that she deceived him by way of a bed trick into sleeping with her. In McHugh's version, a kind of riddle, "the Source" Myrrha apostrophizes, however paternal, must be (as in Thales' theory) the element of water. The suggestion of incest that comes with the speaker's role in mythology predicts the disastrous outcome of her desire, even though it is in McHugh's poem a desire for a necessity. The speaker, meanwhile, stands in for the poet, addicted to diction, as both the adjective "fluent" and the implicit mirror image tell us.

McHugh cannot give language up—or language will not give her up. Consequently, she finds herself in the venerable bind, destined to be destroyed by her own desideratum. The medium that creates or binds is the medium that breaks or separates. "O stranded earth, O beach of / fellow men, I see you selve and cleave in every / single way you can," she grieves in "Who Needs It," where the "It" is language. (The intransitive verb "selve," hitherto a hapax legomenon coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins, both signifies and represents uniqueness at the same time that "cleave" bifurcates into its now familiar antonymic senses of "clasp" and "divide.") Though the painful dilemma is not just hers but that of Homo loquens, the poet by nature feels it more keenly than most. As she puts the paradox at the end of "Glass House," "If we don't move, we can't be missed." Not to move—not to use language, that tool that is both affective (emotive) and temporal (occuring like music in time)—is not to draw attention to ourselves, but it is also not to escape being struck. The knots cannot be tied much tighter.

In a grim mood, McHugh infers that the world as we can only know it is going to hell in a handbasket woven of wordage, and so there is no point in writing about it. "The world / won't need those seventeen more / poems" she might compose, because there are "so few subjects to be treated." In fact, there are only "Three / / if by subject we mean anyone / submitted to another's will." And then "if by subject we mean / / topic," there are but two, love and death. Furthermore, "if by death we wind up / meaning love," as the loss of self in both cases might prove, there is but one subject remaining. Finally, in this poem entitled "Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork," by virtue of the kinky nature of language, the one subject might be self-devouring and we might be left with "none, / if a subject must entail / / the curlicue's indulgence of itself." Maddening, no?

That poetry makes nothing happen is especially frustrating because the world—for these poems, hardly solipsistic, somehow intuit a world beyond the linguistic fabric—is rife with suffering, as a few of the more straightforward of them lament. (The more immediate of them, including "Tree Farm," "Practice Practice Practice," and "Mourner's Kaddish," are welcome, given the gnomic challenges of others, but must solicit criticisms of being comparatively "easy.") "Creature Crush" focuses on a chained monkey whose conscienceless master demonstrates to a paying street audience in Kathmandu his wordless subject's vivid understanding of the meaning of a knife. The poet, watching the scene on TV, is helpless: "Apparently I neither can / / release the monkey / nor assassinate the man." Even if she were there, would she act, or would she, like the possibly "horrified" onlookers, find herself "gawking" and thus complicit in the sadism? In this poem McHugh can bring herself to think that the onlookers are "not necessarily ... cruel," but elsewhere unadulterated cruelty is inescapably her topic. "And the Greatest of These" (in which, in a characteristic touch to be taken up later, the distinctive phrase "creature crush" also crops up) counters the well-known three cardinal virtues of I Corinthians 13, faith, hope, and charity (which return in the following poem, "For Want of Better Words"), with three deficiencies, stupidity, ugliness, and cruelty, the most egregious of which is the last, also known as "hurt intended." "Nocebo" (Latin for "I shall cause harm," an anti-Hippocratic oath) restates the theme, and "No Sex for Priests" expands it with the observation that "god" is "deaf and blind" to the world's misery, before it turns with a nasty wit on the clerics. However impervious, god is "not dumb: / / to answer for it all, his spokesmen / aren't allowed to come."

When she is not so melancholic, McHugh's sense of the labyrinth of language leads her to imagine a beneficent web of the world. In "Boondocks," her meditation on that Americanized Tagalog word for "mountain" or "remote place" eventuates in a vision of plenitude. Her poetic logic enables her to find in "boon," which by itself can specify a "gift" or a "favor," the "boom" or "weight-bearing pole" that transfers "a load" of goods ("boom" also connotes a sudden prosperity) "from the tottering sky" to the "dock," its "planks and pilings" constituting the "strictness of the structure made / / so we can walk on water." If such "structures" make us think of her poetic inventions, McHugh's note that "the dock's / the bracing that the boat is lashed to" will shore up that connection first by way of the physical tie between dock and boat, and then indirectly by our recollection of "For Want of Better Words," with its concluding triple pun: "You're late in your one-upmanship, / your craft, your / universe ... " (ellipsis McHugh's). If that catenation of images seems super-subtle, or extraordinarily extravagant, we must remember that the peregrinating poet must devise means to "walk on water."

Water—"The Source" in Myrrha's monologue—provides the opportunity for us to create the human world at its margins. Or so I understand the end of "Boondocks":

                the boon's
the rope, the slip, the pilings, and

the sound.  We come from there,
and we want more. Another ton

of sky-stuff winches down.

The "slip," the "pilings," the "sound," in addition to the "rope" we save or hang ourselves with: these terms all have definitions important to the poet, whose multifaceted words make up her world. And such words, like the rain that replenishes the ocean, just keep coming down. Marvell's beautiful lines on imaginative abundance are to the point:

The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find:
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.

Umberto Eco, in his classic text The Role of the Reader, seeks to demystify the relationship between imagination and language by invoking that between apparatus and athlete:

A metaphor can be invented because language, in its process of unlimited semiosis, constitutes a multidimensional network of metonymies, each of which is explained by cultural convention rather than by original resemblance. The imagination would be incapable of inventing (or recognizing) a metaphor if culture, under the form of a possible structure of the Global Semantic System, did not provide it with the subjacent network of arbitrarily stipulated contiguities. The imagination is nothing other than a ratiocination that traverses the paths of the semantic labyrinth in a hurry and, in its haste, loses the sense of their rigid structure. The "creative" imagination can perform such dangerous exercises only because there exist "Swedish stall-bars" which support it and which suggest movements to it, thanks to their grill of parallel and perpendicular bars. The Swedish stall-bars are Language [langue]. On them plays Speech [parole].

McHugh has an inordinately agile imagination, in Eco's interpretation of the term, and in a sanguine moment like that behind "Boondocks," that imagination provokes her to posit the radiant profusion of things.

Even when it does not do so—when her imagination leads her instead to consider our inescapable entanglement with the fallen world—it supplies her modus operandi. The title of "Half Border and Half Lab" prompts the following gymnastic opening:

Customs and chemistry
made a name for themselves
and it was Spot. He's gone to some
ou-topos now, the dirty dog, doctor of
crotches, digger of holes. Your airy
clarities be damned, he loved our must
and even our mistakes—why hit him, then,
who did us good? He's dead, who ought
to be at home. He's damned
put-out, and so am I.

"Border" hence "Customs," "Lab" thus "chemistry." And "dirty dog" from the inversion of the preceding poem's "Good Old God," by way of the old reverse spelling of the noun, and also because God has granted the previous poem's lovers no more than "'a puddle to / come from, a crack and a crotch' "—and so "doctor of / crotches" and the two puns in "digger of holes." Spot is who we have in the absence of God, who absconded like the Deistic divinity in the previous poem, where he last saw him "winding his watch." This poem's watchdog, unlike the absentee God, "saved our sorry / highfalutin souls" as best he could, whereas "the heavens haven't / saved a fly." God, now represented by or downgraded to the dog star, "Sirius," is really "just a Fido joke." Compare as well King Lear's "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods." The other famous quote that opening stanza flirts with is Lady Macbeth's "Out, out, damned spot." These days the powers that be are not jovial—"No laughter shakes / the firmament"—and though not all is right in the world, Spot's in his heaven, "the family dog, the Buddha-dog—son / of a bitch!" —and "he had a funny-bone." At every verbal step, the possibilities jump up like insects in a field of corn stubble and dart off in all directions.

The quirky relationships between these last two poems can stand for the connections throughout the work in Upgraded to Serious. (It is curious to note that the 2007 edition of Best American Poems, which McHugh edited, stands out in its series partly because of the consistently unexpected liaison between adjacent selections—almost as though such links had been a criterion for inclusion.) This volume's prefatory piece adopts the fertilized ovum's organic development as a precursor to and epitome of the proliferation of other "Identical Multiples" in the world's structures as they are here interpreted, including ("god help us all") "the stems of words." "Fastener" then sustains this theme of the enigmatic equation of the many and the one:

                      When the star-shower crosses
the carnival sky, then the blues of the crowd

try to glisten, to match it; and the two
who work late in the butcher-house touch,

reaching just the same moment
for glue and for hatchet.

McHugh adapts the opening sentence of The Emerald Tablet, the seminal hermetical text attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus himself, though copies date only to the Middle Ages: "That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, and the miracle of the one thing is accomplished." She then personifies in the two workers the fundamental principles, union and separation. The exemplifying, buried rhymes—"match it" with "hatchet" and "two" with "glue"—are characteristic of her verse, especially near the ends of poems, though these particular pairings, each of which restates the basic opposition, are notably astute choices.

So, too, the poems converge and ramify, time after time. "The Microscope" ends with the rich proposition that "When we / look into things, we see / / there's space inside," and the next poem begins, "Listening in or looking out, / alert to othernesses," while the phrase "in my mind as now on my TV" in one poem turns into "the eye / of my TV" in the following. If we step back farther, we can see that the phrase "the stems of words," the subject arrived at in the prefatory poem, anticipates the book's final poem, "An Underworldliness," and its "my sleeping head," also identified as a weirdly Emersonian "all-but-seeing / / eye on a stem." Putting those terminal poems together, as we are invited to do, we cannot help but ponder anew the association between language and perception. But most strange, perhaps—though who knows what one is overlooking in this vividly mixogamous wilderness—is the link between the juxtaposed poems "The Song of Skeptomai Lou" and "Missing Meaning." The former poem, whose title plays on the name of the children's song "Skip to My Lou," concerns the overlap in grammatical vocabulary between the terms "understood" and "missing," so that an overt connection is made with the title of the latter poem, and at the same time the initially unaccountable word "Skeptomai," which is Greek for "I think," gets illuminated by the second poem's reference to the "skeptic" (cognate with "skeptomai") who "Backs his watch, watches his back"—and thus by retrospect proves the point as well. And while the chiasmatic "watches" remind us of the terms in "Half Border and Half Lab" and its successor, the word "skeptic" echoes the phrase used by Io, another of McHugh's doubtful surrogates, in the earlier "On Purpose Laid": "That's why I grew / so skeptic of a heavenly landscape."

One point that I hope to make by calling attention to such minutiae is that McHugh has given us in Upgraded to Serious not just a collection of logogriphic lyrics but also an extended, if extremely vagarious, meditation that is both epistemological and ontological. She seems meant, like such previous "scrutinizers of the syllable" as Hopkins and Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas, to write short poems. But like them, too, she can make of the smaller undertakings larger coherent structures. This superb, unique book is not a gathering of poems as much as it is a dense constellation of them, a substantial volume, which is to say, one thing through many, "a collection of printed sheets bound together," or before that "a scroll." The Indo-European root of volume is wel-, meaning "to roll, to turn," and it probably also gives us waltz, the dance, and walk. A. R. Ammons, whose choreographed meanderings helped us get started, wrote a brief essay called "A Poem Is a Walk" in which he enforces his thesis by observing that in both cases, "any tempting side road can be turned into on an impulse, or any wild patch of woods can be explored. The pattern of the walk is to come true, to be recognized, discovered." Heather McHugh is perhaps our most impulsive—or wayward (by which I mean "weighword")—living American poet.

About the Author
Stephen Yenser has written books about Robert Lowell and James Merrill and is coeditor (with J. D. McClatchy) of five volumes of James Merrill's work. His most recent collection of poems is Blue Guide. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Yale Review
New Haven, Connecticut

Editor: J. D. McClatchy
Associate Editor: Susan Bianconi