Pining for Heather McHugh

• Published in: The Sewanee review Vol. 127; no. 1; pp. 66 - 77
• Main Author: Chiasson, Dan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.12.2019
• Subjects: 21st century; American literature; Cognates; Literary criticism; McHugh, Heather; Meaning; Poetry; Space; Women; Writers
• ISSN: 0037-3052; 1934-421X; 1934-421X
• DOI: 10.1353/sew.2019.0009

(McHugh's toggling between the self as a subject and the self as an object, seeing as a thing-seen, is everywhere rapid and surprising.) It's a poem about vision trouble, in part, and its magnificent blur begins with its title, two identically weighted words — almost, to the naked eye, cognates: they would sit level upon a set of scales, the way a pair of glasses or a View-Master sits upon the bridge of your nose. "Missing Meaning" is missing meaning, but in the "Space Bar" in McHugh's poem of that name, one of many that discover keyboards in the world to reflect the world on her keyboard, we find "the meaning of it all" in "the vessels / marked with letters, numbers, signs" behind "the space bartender." ("Dingbats" are, among other things, the asterisks and pound signs used to represent obscenity in formal writing.) In "Space Bar," or "Moving Walkway," a poem about grieving ingeniously rendered as an ode to those horizontal escalators in airports, or "Tree Farm," the named subject is immediately estranged, in ways that confound the distinctions between means and ends, vehicles and tenors, our imagination's disposition toward the world and the world itself. According to the legend in Ovid, Daphne is transformed into "the single splendor" of the laurel tree: