Well I'm thrilled to have Heather here.
Heather McHugh, poet-- poet, punster, logophile,
metaphysics-fixed, philologist of light,
of sight, lover of lights and roots, plunder of portals.
Patient explorer of all things re: reflection, the mirror,
the glass, the tunnel at the end of the light,
and all that's out of eyeshot.
She's the seer that shadows the looker, eye to eye,
the seeker that makes us see.
Those readers who have a hard time seeing
should look twice, or thrice.
Sight preoccupies her.
She's watching her watch.
I mean the one like the night shift that never ends.
The depths is where she's keeping time,
she's got seconds on the mind, and you must always second
guess yourself if you read her lines for a single meaning.
Rollicking, rowdy, romping, rhythmic rocker, this sass
is a generous boss of words that wrenches
our hearts out when we're wedged down too deeply in our ways.
She wrangles us out of a complacent monotonal
listening in her reification of the word itself.
What does she do?
It's an optical illusion become textual, now sexual,
now ritual, now reverent.
She reinvents the wheel every time,
she revitalizes and recharges context.
What is beheld is merely, and yet also fantastically,
the beholder.
In writing this, and in reviewing her many reviews,
I see that when we all read her, we all
try to riff off her, rip her off, or rhyme
with her, for her wit, rhetoric, music, love, and wisdom, which
her poems are aflame with, are infectious.
Her language can seem oracular but her voice is of this age.
"Language's orders are of means, its disorders are of meaning,"
she writes.
Or "content's a good stay against the uncontainable."
Or how about, "love becomes a set of pet names,
all diminutive.
And as for God, we saw it was the dark that made the stars."
She's got Eckhart and Beckett within earshot, one in each ear
perhaps.
Between opposing poles of abundance and nothing
she tosses her balls, syntax, semantics, and tactics, rhythm,
and a smile, for she is a humorous too.
She's a poet's poet they say, but I'd say she's a pet.
Let's not forget--
[LAUGHTER] Let's not forget the warmth
it takes to put it all down for us mere mortal readers to get.
Reading her work, I get the sense
she has to restrain herself on our behalf.
For the love of whole other meanings
is a calling, a hole down which she could happily
slip, in a tonal cone of surround sound
and multiple rounds of song that could endlessly reflect, echo,
and suggest.
Somewhere a pattern's under-sung, I read her say.
And lucky for us, she frames her partiality
in a perceptible pitch, leaving behind potential alternatives
or alternative motives for next time.
"The artist, in particular, has always
been someone who had to get away to understand
what he was part of," she writes, and somehow I
think that applies.
Heather's honors include two grants
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Griffin Poetry
Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Her books include 10 volumes of original poetry, poetry
and translation, and essays, one a book--
National Book Award finalist, and another Pulitzer Prize
finalist.
This should be the easy part to read but--
[LAUGHTER]
Her translation of the poems of Paul Celan
won the Griffin International Poetry Prize,
and her new book of poems is forthcoming from Copper Canyon.
Please help me welcome Heather McHugh.