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Poetry
and
Partiality
Heather
McHugh
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut
Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459
© 1993 bv Heather McHugh
Revised 1999
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 2
CIP data appear at the end of the book
Originally produced in 1993 by Wesleyan/University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755
Selections from Poems of Paul Celan translated by Michael Hamburger. Copyright © 1972, 1980, 1988 by Michael Hamburger. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc.
“The Course of a Particular” is reprinted from Opus Posthumous by Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Contents
The Still Pool Forgets: A Reminding from the Yoruba
Broken English: What We Make of Fragments
What Dickinson Makes a Dash For: Interpretive Insecurity as Poetic Freedom
Prefatory Note
Most of these essays were delivered as lectures at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C, the University of Cincinnati, and the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Several appeared in the American Poetry Review, and “A Genuine Article” appeared in ZYZZYVA. I'm grateful to Cornell Capa and Magnum Photos for the chance to reprint the Robert Capa diptych here. Ulli Beier's work was my first and best resource for the Yoruba piece. Indeed at every turn I relied on good works already done: Ed Snow's translations of Rilke, the editions of Valéry in the Bollingen Series, the sensitive translations of Celan available to us through Michael Hamburger and Katharine Washburn, Guy Davenport's Archilochus, Stanley Lom-bardo's Parmenides and Empedocles, and more. Tom Phillips's treated texts deserve especially warm mention.
I thank the Creative Writing Program and English Department of the University of Washington in Seattle, for ungrudging grants of leave, during which some of these essays were written and revised; the Guggenheim Foundation, for support during one year of the writing of these essays; and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund for a writer's award that bought me some revising time.
From the encouraging response of people who heard these lectures, or who read the essays in advance, came my determination to collect and finish them. But to my hardest critic and best friend, I owe most of all: Nikolai B. Popov, whose erudition kept me honest, and whose constancy kept me whole. It is to his high standards and intellectual integrity that I owe any refinement this book possesses; its immoderacies are mine.
Introduction
I. The Place of Poetry
I have not extirpated all sentimental attachment from my affections, God help me. Eight now mine tend to collect with lapidary precision around a particular spot on earth, 45 degrees latitude, 67 degrees longitude, where all the addresses end with a ME and an US.
But it is not THAT sense of place, the place of sentimental attachments, the place of literal topographies, I hold poetry answerable to. To be frank, the inevitable panel discussion on the “poetry of place” bores me: it takes place too literally.
Poems take place as time takes it; and they address their object as an attention does. The place of poetry is nothing less than the place of love, for language; the place of shifting ground, for human song; the place of the made, for the moving. Like other loves it cannot be free of the terrible; it is barely dictable at times, certainly not predictable. It verges on unguaranteed domains: the unsayable, even the unspeakable. The place of the poem is the place of our homelessness, our groundlessness. A poem is untoward.
In the field of positions, a passionate position is like a held fire. Robert Creeley opens “The Window” with the line “Position is where you put it…” Given the fire of language, exposition is (etymologically speaking) where you put it out.
Exposition means to mean, mainly. Its language intends to dissolve in the service of its meaning. Exposition's means is its invisibility: it aims elsewhere; you look through it at its object. Exposition is a very windexed window.
It is not itself the place where its ends are inscribed: its means mean nothing, next to its ends. It does not give itself as evidence, as inscription (or conscription); at its closest to its object, it offers description.
That is why poetry is not exposition. It is the place that suffers inscription. It bears the mark or scar of what was seen and what was grasped. Its hand is script (felt, hammered, or quilled). Its eye cannot disappear in service: it fills with shades and shines. Everything moves in it (as everything moves in the mind); its glass is not transparent but is the sign of the seer's own slant. It takes upon itself, into itself, what it sees; the song is of insight. Whether out of joy or grief, it sings us in, and as it does, we are moved—from explication to implication, from ex-to im-position.
For poetry is imposition and self-exposure, urgency and deferral. Its act is tenacious: and its hold can hurt. In me, that hurting place is locable moreorless where God used to be; but you must remember how illocable that is.
The window of Creeley's “The Window” is a place where we hold the world, a place where we take in what took us in. It is a window that can weep (it's an eye), a window that can be beaten (it's a heart); it is a changeable, a perishable place. Poetry isn't made to make you forget the insecurity of its status, or our own: it is not for burying the terror, salving the sorrow, buying a balm. No salesman's music or easy analgesic, it is not in the comforter business. For its regards are not formalities: they require us to notice what we might otherwise most wish to overlook. Imagination isn't needed, says Valéry, to see what isn't; it is needed to see what is. That's what we most deeply miss.
The position of poetry is THAT imposition: it requires you to face the difficulty, the unfathomability, of your life. When Rilke writes “You must change…,” you feel the force of that embrace. It's merciless. Says Creeley, “I can feel my eye breaking.” That brokenness, the broken