The Loose Fish

With trepidation (and that, with good cause), I opened Heather McHugh's book of essays, "Broken English." In January, I had the great pleasure of seeing her read and participate in a notable poetry panel at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, so I already knew this brilliant, humorous and inspiring poet was going to be a challenge for me. She has the kind of mind that you don't often meet. A true wordsmith, language-play being a second language to her, she is special beyond her literary talents which are huge. She is that rarity, the true abstract thinker--and to an uneducated, linear mind like mine--a giant.

I had another thought after posting this. In trying to choose quotes and excerpts for this blog, I had more difficulty with McHugh than others. I realized that it is because of the way she puts these essays together, one premise building on another, layer by layer, so that understanding is reached "sort of sideways" instead of being thrust at you directly. There is much nuance and space in her own descriptions of poetry, much as she insists there should be in poetry itself. So it is difficult for me to 'grasp' a direct link to each essay to share with you. This is a book that must be read and re-read and savored.


Introduction

--When I call poetry a form of partiality, I mean its economies operate by powers of intimation: glimmering and glints, rather than exhaustible sums. It is a broken language from the begiining, brimming with nonwords; al that white welled up to keep the line from surrendering to the margin; all that quiet, to keep the musics marked.

--Poetry is a declared partiality, a love of (not entirely in) words. The line is by definition broken. If you yearn for wholeness, maybe you need fiction. Unadulterated feeling is a freak of reason or intent: in the chemistries of real life, feelings are always being mixed. How to set off the reaction in the reader--with its whiffs of the ineffable, its shifts of solubility, its dusts and distillates? The work of poetry, the poet's work, takes its place in the reader.

"The Store"

--The "store" which I take for my title here is, first and foremost, that store or warehouse of prescriptions or recapitulations we bring to the experience of a moment. Underlining, mine

--Rilke's art, like Emily Dickenson's, lies in making the constructions that best embody the paradox, or are the most impressed, rhetorically, with the dilemma, and most inexhaustibly insist on the limits of reference. Such poems set up structures which operate like perpetual motion machines, enacting poised antinomies--opposites equally charged, abiding no exclusive resolution, and operating to create fields of force. The polarities or terminals, in other words, do not annihilate each other's meanings; and we live in the charged field between them, so instead of the vertigo of neither we can have the electricity of both. That is not, as some theorists would have it, the failure of language, but its power.

You must read the essay and see the pictures of the Tour de France by Robert Capa which McHugh uses as her metaphor to illustrate the "missing" subject/object in past/future. It's inspired.

"The Still Pool Forgets"

McHugh celebrates the unique and lively poetry of the Western African people: The Yoruba. With commentary on the poems, her enthusiasm also conveys a clear warning to our own poets:

--Consider the disinclination of so many contemporary American poems either to commedies of bravado or to the savor of a joyous carnality, and you realize why Yoruba poems can so much refresh us. To the extent that they are most interested in private emotion and personal nostalgia, our poets have forgotten how to move; and to the extent that they've lost that capacity to transport and to be transported, lost trans-generational contact, they've forgotten how to swing beyond the singular, and sing.

"A Stranger's Way of Looking"

Well, I've read and re-read. Philosophical, metaphysical, and literary, this essay deals with "seeing" the world, but also discusses "who" is the looker? And then too it imparts many insights from Nietzche, Paul Valery, and examples from Agamemmnon to get McHugh's points across about "other" (and echoes her woes in the previous essay about the European/American tradition in poetry of me, me, me, ignoring "other" rather than embracing it.

--The unsaid shapes itself in our imagination only at its boundary, where the said reaches its limits. To us the unsaid seems to surround the said and to extend endlessly outward from it. We feel that the said explies the unsaid, rather than implies it. Any poem, any work of art, negotiates this dubious relation. For part of the unsaid (part of its endless extent) is the world of non-words referred to by the said, a corresponding world, a matching world (just as for extent of space there is thought to be a space of anti-matter, exactly matter's match). And although part of the said is a world of non-things, words with no match in the material world nevertheless intuitively we feel the unsaid is bigger than the said, and must contain not only the world to which the said refers, but more things than thinking knows, more worlds than words conceive.

--"I do not know what is my own," writes Valery, "I am not even sure of this smile, nor its consequence which is half thought...Whatever makes me unique is mixed with the vast body and passing plenty of this place: over there, people, the grist of politics, flow among a few persons, and across my reflections a flame of air and men, endlessly reproducing itself, blows, wavers, anticipates and sometimes precisely consititutes my thought..." (italics McHugh's). This is a looking somewhat alien to to an American temperment, which sentimentalizes the story of the individual, and suspects the coolness of a surmounting or over-arching intellect.
But it is this thought--this sensual, spiritual, physical, metaphysical, metamorphical fluid-fire of thinking--that makes Valery the astonishing writer he is...

"Broken English"

This essay about fragments was a major challenge for me. I can't pretend to understand it all because my mind could not stay focused on it. But I came away with an idea that McHugh's intellectual integrity is something beyond anyone I have read. Her concern for language, words, syllables, fragments, meaning and transparency of the larger truths is awe inspiring. There are pages of 'word art' which illustrate her subject--and the acknowledgment of the value of "not knowing." I believe she is once again showing us (as in the first essay) that that which is 'missing' from the poem is what's important. The understated, the mysterious, the fragment that triggers the whole. Read it yourself. I could be wrong.

"A Genuine Article"

McHugh's discussion of our tiniest words, the articles "a," and "the," is one of my favorite essays. Charming and insightful, she uses Finnegan's Wake's opening and closing lines plus some work by Beckett and Wallace Stevens to illustrate once again her specificity in language. Beneath her probing nothing goes unturned; no word, no letter, no partiality in language does she consider unimportant. Her essays are a lesson in consciousness as well as acuity. Her intelligence is inspiring and affecting.

--"The," by its very nature, is famous; "a," by all that is holy, is not.

"What Dickinson Makes A Dash For"

--To read Dickinson is to be reminded that the largest flash does not necessarily represent the greatest power, that form can be as rich in flux as in fixity, that craft is precisely NOT inert structure or coy connivance, but an energy outbounding its visible materials, and referring through every domineering struction (in-,con-,de-, and decon-) to the uncontainable, that intuited spirit or gist or Geist we sense as living's ungraspable essential.

--Dickinson's poems don't argue the coincidence of opposites; they embody that coincidence, in acts of poised equivocation. Here equivocation is the great truth. A Dickenson text defies the simpler, more exclusive truth of dualism, and so must the reader's attention. It makes no sens to seek the point of such a poem; one's work as a reader is to hold the more-than-one (and often more importantly, the more than two) in mind--to be of many minds. In this sense, Dickinson's gift is the gift of broadmindedness.

"Essay at Saying" (Paul Celan)

A moving and very intriguing exploration of the poet Paul Celan (who McHugh has translated) with a lot of analysis of his work. Truly deeply insightful analysis, I might add. I would have read these poems twice, shrugged, and moved on with never a clue. How I wish I had her mind!

--Celan's verbal pieces or parts suggest not so much horizontal logics as vertical relations (just as musical parts do). Forgoing the usual bonds, he suspends the meaning of individual words--meaning to be recovered by the reader in a charge of implications. (In contemporary physics, one discovers the invisible body in space by reading the motion patterns visible bodies describe around it.

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