Photo@Heather McHugh

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”
—Francis Bacon

My childhood getaway was always in the way.  It was the fourth step up, out of a case of six. And that step mattered. Every step was different, because of woodgrain, windows and particularities of altitude: at neither top nor bottom. And in the larger scheme of things, whether horizons are considered vertical or horizontal (duh), such preferences are liminal. Both literally and figuratively, I felt at home when I was neither here nor there. 

But avidly I had to see. From my position in the passageway I was halfway from the living room to kitchen, heart of all interiors, having the range).  In consequence, more ominously (as it happened) I was forced to face the clock.

It hung above the farther doorway, somewhere near the Frigidaire, and was a dull idea designed to tick the mysteries away into enumerations. It went the whole day long and then presumably the night as well in that pursuit; it had a set of hands I had to understand, not just a face I had to face. My mother seemed to think its meaning was important, or its processes were worth internalizing. As far as I could see it wasn’t making sense.

It kept twelve times but kept them twice each day: one set of times was bright, one dark. It had to have in mind some fashion of duplicity, demanding we conduct our thoughts in some concordance with its crazy countings-out. And now my parents were insisting this idea would govern not only for a little while, but all of social life.

It irked me more than I could say, that they were pressing such a dull design so hard. I saw that there were instrumental insufficiencies; but soon enough first grade befell whatever hours or senses I imagined I could keep. My life in schools since then has been a lifelong effort, just to wrestle presence back from representing.

***

The only riches in my family were in studies of the arts and silences. And yet each time somebody opened up a mouth, they put a foot in it. What saved me from despair at my allotment were the twin alternatives, of love and laughter. And if I had to choose between the two, I'd say that laughter’s faster, less expensive, and the more restorative. But letters were my love. 

I loved their cadences and curiosities; I loved the secrets of compression and the quirks of echo-work. I loved the oddballs who survived to occupy a canon, and eventually I loved the poems of the women coming up, not just because they doubled down on senses or because they played an R & B that gave me signal consolation in my twenties. It wasn't just the licks or asterisks or tears. They understood a belly laugh, a sun dance, or the weather-patterns of a high romance.

***

The lines in poetry not only weave some foregone textures out of letters, but invite us to meander back and forth and be surprised at every turn, since turns can reveal a lot intention can't. A sentence by its nature secretly desires to be convincing. But letters bring some liberty to play against their words, as lines bring liberty to play against their sentences; can move not only down the road (from past to future, or from gambit to addiction) but also into airs. They leap or dive toward freedoms: change the axes, see things from another angle.

Here are loves and leaps and laughs from some contemporary women poets.  Where there is humor, sometimes it is black. But there will always be a leap, beyond the rules of either/or.

ARS POETICA

I keep rifles in the front closet.
         Trespassing can be a glance.

A good shot,
         I practice with bottles, bull’s eyes.

I cross the line where the fence breaks,
         where the wood falls in unintended directions,

and prepare an offensive
         before any repair.

I know the value of my property.
Ungloved, I place the barbed wire.

Before you’re halfway in, you know the poem's not just anybody's ars poetica. The poet who appropriates that title into English has to play with— or, more cannily, against— its Latinate high code, its usual authority, the claims of two domains—of art and criticism both. So Francis starts the proof of her engagement in line 1, by simply rolling out her cannons from the realms of the canonical. If looks can kill, she aims to shoot a bull’s-eye.

She knows full well the many senses of a looker here—she sees the target-practices, the angry armaments on porches, thugs in trucks. Her bull’s eye is, in part, her skill in literary marksmanship. It knows to highlight vulnerable live regard, the fear that plays out in the news.

She’s sharp enough to know how unintended things befall our tendencies… She’s hip enough to know the thing you shoot from, if you’re quick. She crafts a sequence of projections, but will end by turning her trajectories back home. The last line brings the danger intimately close, where object can’t be told from subject. (That’s a poet’s own acutest insight, to remind us that we cannot always only speak—or tell—the differences.)

She leaves a trail that hints at all narration's trespasses, as she herself becomes the character who crosses at the broken fence, and enters the forbidding territory.

In narrating, she turns the tables, and becomes the one whose aim was to construct a damage not a salvage, one who would stave off, with her own threats, the outer world. But in the end her own proprietary efforts are what reinforce the line, and they become (at last) precisely what could cause the nearer hurt, a hurt at hand.

A poet’s feel for words goes two ways, from the start. In a word like “hurt” you feel both noun and verb; both transitive and not. You stand to visit hurt on trespassers; you also stand to hurt in the reflexive. Laying out the barbs of her intentions, taking up those weapons for her self-defense, the poem's own persona cannot keep (from harm) the senses now exposed, when she throws down the glove.  It makes a killer ultimatum, emblematic of a Vievee Francis skill. In taking on the larger human risks, you stand to hurt yourself.

***

For studies of the Truth, what traits may best equip discernment? Francis Bacon posits these:

“having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things . . . , and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; . . . being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose or set in order; . . . neither pretending only to what is new nor admiring only what is old, but hating... every kind of imposture.”

"Hating fraud" is what that last credential means to say— and hating all misrepresenting. The precious gifts of observation we’re invested with, so fashioned for the deepening of insight, can turn to lesser enterprises if we lack some subtle qualities of mind and generous attention: we turn instead to merest amplifying epithets or winging quick remarks, inflamed or flaming.

Women I'm collecting in this little pantheon I prize not only for the sting in all their settings of occasion, but for breadth in observation too (capacities to see both sides of fences, and discern presumable from the presumptive).

***

It seems some shakti “practices” are purchasable, packaged for Americans by metaphysics salesmen. One website promises us “tremendous power in harnessing the rhythmicity of the moon to manifest.” I've no idea what this might mean. The “teacher” (nonetheless) goes on: “Whether you want to improve your health, your career, or your relationships, the eight phases of the moon are an intelligent and straightforward roadmap."

OK, now I get it. So the man in the moon is after all intelligent and honest; furthermore he is intent on neighborhood improvement.

Thank heaven that was clarified.

***

To an assortment of 200th episodes from some popular TV series, one journal editor invited writers to respond. The poet Morgan Parker was assigned "The Good Life" (Episode 200 of The Jeffersons) which featured Gladys Knight in guest appearance.  Parker in response contributed the following (which would be poem #607 in her collection Magical Negro). It puts to work the double edges on a lot of means—the languages of “show,” “appearance,” “manifest,” and more—and turns the tables on productions and projections, not just as they operate in theaters but in our psyches, self-conceptions.  Here's that piece in its entirety:

Privilege is asking other people
to look at you. I like everything
in my apartment except me.
What is the point of something
that only does one thing.
I mean I need to buy a toaster.
My life is a kind of reality.
When I get bored, I close the window.
By the way what is a yuppie.
Here I am, two landscapes.
My tattoo artist says I’m a warrior
with pain. I tell her we can manifest
this new moon in six months.
When I’m rich I will still be Black.
You can’t take the girl out of the ghetto
ever. It’s too much to ask to be
satisfied. Of course I sing
through the struggle. My problem is
I’m too glamorous to be seen.
How will I know when I’ve made it.
In the mirror will I have a face.
How long does a good thing last.
Sometimes eating a guilty salad
I become a wife. Let me be the woman
who takes care of you.
Weezy and George in drapes
and crystal silverware.
By the way predominantly white
means white. I want to be the first
Black woman to live her life
exclusively from the bathtub.
Making toast, enjoying success
despite my cultural and systemic
setbacks. I was raised to be
a nigger you can trust.
I was raised to be better
than my parents. In a small house
with a swamp cooler
I touched myself. I wanted to be
in the white mom’s carpool.
My cheek against something new
and clean. I clean my apartment
when I am afraid of being
the only noise.
Everyone I know is a Black man.
Me I’m a Black man too.
Tragically, I win. It is a joke.
I always require explanation:
Life, Dope. I am so lucky to be you.
When something dies,
I buy a new one.

The poem’s passages won't let a reader get the customary footings. For one thing, premises and their identifications are all so quirky in their grounds (“Here I am, two landscapes” and “I am so lucky to be you”). And how we move from point to point is complicated by assertive sarcasm.

We see that Parker works by undermining overdub: Not arguing the grounds so much as occupying them; exposing the lacunae, contradictions, paradoxes, and deferments; and satirizing (stylizing) implicit hierarchies, binaries, predispositions, questionable forms of logic. She’s out, partly, just to poly-vocalize the premises.

The upshot can restore to discourse something of its etymology: If you can't stand it, run with it. The episode (already called “The Good Life") gave a kick to Parker’s act of satire too: “How will I know when I’ve made it…”.  Are we doing life yet?

The “movin’ on up” of the theme song of "The Jeffersons" bespoke the vexed ambitions of mid-twentieth century American lower classes working toward the middle class, embodied by that dream of the “deluxe apartment in the sky.”  The vexed ambition has its allegorical utility in every social order where an individual or private life is caught up in the meat-grinders of media. Most twelve-year-olds in North America would ask for some celebrity or fame, above all other fates.  We climb inside the elevator's glass box of an always-dreamed-of public view, and can begin to see the truer grounds for comfort fall away.

For every flash of new success, one's old invisibility attempts a restitution, putting on the shiny mask to cover up the tears. A writer when solicited to publish, will attempt to come to terms, implicitly or outright, with the way he shows, or how she looks, how words will then appear. 

Add race to that, and gender, and the mirrors turn subjective life to object lessons: What’s a self? In what ways is it visible to others? And in what ways to itself?  Some crucial otherness becomes too much the issue. How does a person ever look in halls of mirrors, vis a vis herself? What do you claim for your inspection’s oddly oppositional self-service? It's harder than we thought, to be a looker, unless in the eyes of just the right admirer.  So:  "How will I know?" the song inquires.  ("Respect yourself!" another song commands.)

The etymology in all respects:  Look twice.

***

Musicians listen (among other things) for variations in the tones of instruments. Performances are compositions, since they must decide among so many variables: unforeseeabilities in tuning, engineering, natures of materials. What I appreciate in the self-styling of the Parker poem is its wrestling with the challenges of “meaning something,” using any instrument so transitively sensitive to tone, a lot of which is neither stable nor transparent.

From a poet's point of view this insecurity can help, in that it will diminish any hold of mere intentionality. Attention can interrogate more territories than intention can. Intention knows it needs a vision, but attention knows it needs revision. 

Your convictions may invigorate a diatribe, or curiosities may animate the words.  In any nervous posing of the question to oneself (what are my views?) the double senses help enrich your answer. And this splintering or many-sidedness can be what artists set about embodying. Communities aren’t only built on commonplaces. Doubletalk can be descriptive, not deceptive.

And in Parker’s practices, the gripe is instrumental; it’s a style, a sense of humor, leaving space for spasm. She knows how class has triple senses, maybe more. It’s not just lectured on. It is inhabited: a glass house littered with banana peels.

The poem’s cutaway reveals so many social circumstances it cannot be reduced to only one. It mocks the glam it vamps; it parodies the old clichés about success, who gets it, how at risk we are from the rewards we seek or other people’s views of us; how asymmetrically a “fair share” or a “just desert” is reconceived as "carnival investment" or "just a dessert."  A lot of tables can be turned (when “By the way, predominantly white means white” or “I’m a Black man too” takes man for Man; or number's not an increment of numb.)

Moreover: artistry must weigh how much will turn out merciless, and how much funny; often it is both. The floating narrator tries on her costumes of identity, to showcase lots of cultural commodity and commerce. All eventuating in the questions— Do I want to be you? Do you want me, or am I just wishing? If I see myself at all, how do I like what I can see?  How much will be enough?  How visible is the desirable, and how desirable is visibility? Are we alone?  Can things be said to keep us company?

How much is real in episodic views? In single episodes? In time?  Is life a choice? How long is  femme an operative fatality?  Is this the life?

Does explanation (or a mirror) make the sense we need? What kind of real is in the window? In the mirror? In the language?  And to what must art be true?  To what can art be true?

***

By breaking out (and breaking up) the slogans and contemporary fashions of cliché, the poet makes the shards reflect a privilege’s merchandizing of the color-wheel identities. And there’s a complex range of privilege: the privilege of characters within the story lines, the privilege of the invited “guest” (not only Gladys Knight who'd have to reconstruct herself as “true” inside a story line, but also of “the poet who is Morgan Parker,” when answering a publisher’s construction). A woman’s view of what is marketable (even separable, given others and a self) may differ from a man’s. And with the chances to perform it, what do the commercial versions of a new “Black visibility” entail?  A brand of names?  An upper case, or cases?

These are some ways that Parker satirizes not only the forms of privilege in characters (as well as in the writers of them (who construct the TV stories or the poems we see published), but the privilege of watchers (those with leisure to remark, or time to feel, or taste to feed), the privilege of lookers (those construed as glamorous by watchers or consumers), the privilege of seekers who can buy life-coaching sessions, and acquire new jargons (“centering” and “manifest").  

Explanatory tags—like “life” and “dope” and even “man”—have several meanings each, and all (you might consider) could participate in penal terms as well. How dope is anyone’s reality show? In the amenities “shown off” by social climbers, Morgan Parker highlights where the broken places are. She knows:  Her own (and every art’s) performance can’t escape the pressures. Art is examination of the stresses, as Kintsugi artisans can take a broken pottery and glue it back together—now with gold. The gold lines show where breakages have happened and can illustrate a saving grace: a study of the forces (time and uses) that could make things crack. Parker makes use of the broken places, stylizes and heightens them, in her annealments. 

She doesn't merely settle for revisiting intentions; at its very premises, this is an ex-post-facto art. After the occupying and surrounding forces have had their say in it, the art can do recuperations—focus on the places where a streak of oddity in the materials or irregularity in the artist's touch had unplanned hands in outcomes, or the audience in unexpected artful readings. Thinking Kintsugistically, you focus not on the originality of some intention but on the discoveries for an attention.  You attempt to move with the exacting resolutions of a mist, about the sharpnesses of thrust. A fencing master knows to improvise—not only memorize—her art.

***

Check out this record of remarkabilities, from poet Rachel Long.

HOTEL ART, BARCELONA

We’re eating roses on a rooftop. The Med beneath us. 
They serve clouds here too, I say.
Light starter? Wink.

Are they fluffy or black?
The waiter doesn’t answer.

Every table is white except ours.
We sit at a naked woodblock. Antique;
There’s enough of an age gap here,
need they have added 200 years?

The razor clams arrive in straight lines.
What’s the matter?

We discuss kids. Maybe it’s the wine,
or because my belly is beginning to push
against the bones of my dress. You say,
I don’t think I’ll identify with a brown son.

Excuse me, I stand,
spill your sparkling water.
You only notice your steak.

Contorting myself three ways in the toilet mirror,
I decide I won’t look like this forever.
I don’t even look like this now.

Dessert is air from a porcelain pump.
What if he has your eyes? I dare,
after another glass.

Back in our borrowed bathroom, I throw up rose foam, 
a blade of grass. Who says he isn’t a daughter?
I join you on the balcony. You hold me from behind, 
lean us over, count . . .
We’re as many storeys up as our age gap.

Why do you always have to—
Shhh. You lift my dress. I shoulder-width my legs,
is love not this? – gripping a fence in the sky.

We start off at a date, some haute cuisine romances, high-class trappings, rooftop patio. (Note all the variations on a theme of altitude!)  The food is served in fanciful organic shapes, the narrator engages in some banter, but can see (by gradual degrees) the limits of the cultivated sheen. The waiter seems to miss the joust in conversation; theirs is the only table having no white tablecloth. Is that a sign?  If so, of what?  A disregard? A chopping block palmed off as the exceptional in stage-design? The high-falutin by degrees begins to wear a little thin.

The more the narrator will document her growing wariness about pretensions, more will be revealed about her place in all of this. The partner's older than herself: The age gap’s almost a misgiving now. And mocking how the fancy restaurant makes sustenance seem secondary to design, the clams arrive lined up in parallels upon the plate. The moment when the partner utters one big bubble-burster of aside (about identity), the man seems not to understand his overstep (or undertone). Appearances are suddenly more personal and painful: Baby soon enough will show them up.

Thereafter the dessert is an inflated nothing; the spills of sparkling water and the three-way mirror spread the sense of emptiness, where multiples are just inflationary. And where once appearances were everything, now the decorative veneers shear off into vertiginous subtexts: the borrowed condo, thrown-up foam. The gaps are gulfs, he aims to shush her up and fuck, and suddenly a penthouse railing seems no great support.

But look! Obligingly (or just to keep her balance?) she has spread her legs. How tell the kinds of life and love apart? How tell the two at once? What might have been a tender touch seems now a need to get a grip. Where once light-hearted, even televisable, romance was in the cards, now there are hints of fear inhering in the situation.  Is love not this?

***

The fence marks out or names some boundaries for grazing or for property.  But still a fence is not a wall: intrinsic to its structure is the way it occupies another element—the space, or air, or sight's transparency. Its fashion of security will weave some gaps within.

It calls for care in all its framings, juxtaposing far and near in grids or strips: what you cannot contain or can’t control is made immediate to what you claim. It interlaces picketing and playground, pine and sky, steel mesh and boundless sea.

Its footings disappear in earth, and yet its standings can appear conspicuous against a sky. It holds you up but you can tumble off; it stands you down or sticks you up.

It helps to hurt, or else it hurts to help. 

Or both.

***

I find myself recurring, time and time again, to this one wondrous moment from Paul Valéry’s short novel Monsieur Teste, when Madame tries to frame her husband’s looks in words. She says “His eyes are a little larger than visible things.”

Where else but in the eyes would visibility reside? Where else but from embraces would an eye appear so large? A symptom of enchantment is exaggeration of details.

I called my own first essay book Broken English, not as an allusion to the world of music or of politics, but chiefly for the literality of the qualities in all poetic lineation. I meant to prompt my subtitle (“Poetry and Partiality”) to emphasize the way a poem must be partly art, and partly air. 

Whatever we may think we love, we can’t see all of it. The closer we engage with it, the blinder we become.  And, once you use your words, imagining you're out of touch, a poem stands to be as close to touching as is possible.

Weighed down by others, lonely by ourselves—we yearn to set the feeling free, the one by which we felt possessed, the furor and the fever, womanizing fathers, or the mothers with their mannerisms, selves we fix in mirrors, races we are running in, or running from. We live on borrowed meaning if we don’t revise the signs.

Our senses are essential: they are the riches we live down, or follow up, in solid calling or in spilled-out cry.

Is love not this? Where we are moved to fall.

Where we may learn to fly.

***

Heather McHugh, recipient of a 2009 MacArthur fellowship, is the author of thirteen books of poetry, translation, and literary essays. Her prize-winning translations include a Griffin International Poetry Prize selection, and her books of original poetry have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. McHugh has taught literature and writing for over three decades, most regularly at the University of Washington in Seattle and in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville. From 1999 to 2005 she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 2011 to 2018 she hosted respite getaways for full-time family caregivers. *** This essay is part of the "Teaching..." series launched by The Montreal Review in 2024 and edited by Stephen Haven and Laura Ann Reed. The series publishes essays by scholars, writers, and artists on teaching and interpreting the work, ideas, and lives of prominent authors, philosophers, artists, and political figures.

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MORE FROM HEATHER MCHUGH

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The Montréal Review, February 2025

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