Heather McHugh
Heather McHugh lives in Eastport, Maine and Seattle, Washington. She teaches in the non-residential M.F.A. Program at Warren Wilson College. Her most recent books are Shades, To The Quick (from Wesleyan) and with Nico Boris, a translation of Blaga Dimitrovna, Because The Sea Is Black.
Working Notes, Heather McHugh:
Once I loved the snap of a clasp, the shut of a box. Poem with gem in it, encased, in case. These days, perhaps because I can no longer toy with death, it having toyed with me, such closures feel coy. Or maybe it's the coincidental influence of the scroll: the mechanisms of word processing which free the poem from its former fields, nine by eleven. Whyever. The poem's a longing: it's a cording, a recording. I seem less able to step out of it to stop it, less interested in claiming to see anything from outside. It used to be in me; now I'm in it.
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