Reading Hugh

by Michael Heller

In 1962, I was working as a tech writer (job title ”Publications Engineer”) for Sperry Gyroscope, then headquartered in the original United Nations building at Lake Success in Nassau County, just over the city line. The irony of writing technical manuals for the B-58 Hustler, the plane specifically designed to deliver nuclear bombs to America’s enemies, in a building originally created to promote world peace, was not lost on me.

I lived in the West Village on Hudson Street, had a car and drove a couple of other tech writers, Rich Sheeler and Ernie Raia, to the job each morning. They were both former engineering students at Brooklyn Poly, both close friends and classmates of Hugh’s in Louis Zukofsky’s poetry class at the school. Together, they had formed a poetry club under Zukofsky’s auspices, and worked on the college literary magazine, Counterweight.

I knew little about contemporary poetry, mostly what was taught in my high school classes in Miami Beach. For I had graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a “land-grant” college, which, under federal law, required all able-bodied students to take the first two years of ROTC, cutting out English literature courses in the process. Rich and Ernie introduced me to the work of Zukofsky and the contemporary poets who were of special interest to him, the Objectivists, particularly Reznikoff and Niedecker, Pound, Olson, the Black Mountain poets, Creeley in particular. On our car rides, books were passed around, poems read and the aesthetics of poets and schools of poetry were discussed. All of it new to me.

Some months after meeting them, they introduced me to Hugh, who had studied with them in Zukofsky’s courses. Hugh was on a break from his graduate work in physics and mathematics at the University of Minnesota. The four of us began to hang around a lot, going to readings, sitting in bars and coffee shops. Ernie and Rich were writing short, exquisite poems in the Zukofskian mode, full of word play and humor. But In the early days of our friendship, mid-sixties, Hugh was already fashioning poems unlike any being written by other American poets. They were born out of psychological pain, failures with the women in his life, and a keen sense of the troubled socio-political world of the Sixties, the exacerbated racial tensions, Vietnam, poverty, the industrialized destruction of the planet. Such subjects were part of the parlance of those days, and in their multiplicity, they found their way into Hugh’s poetry, but in an original and powerful poetic vernacular.

Hugh’s poems also drew on his studies in the sciences, working as he put it “in the mask of a physicist.” The language was hard, exact, cutting through romantic sentimentalities to achieve a kind of novel discreteness. It was metaphoric in the way science itself is at once self-referential and ultimately metaphoric since nothing in the world arrives labeled in milligrams and amperages. Zukofsky had insisted the poet “work with things as they exist.”

Hugh’s task, as he put it to himself, was “to arise. . .to rearrange the discernable.” For Hugh, “the discernable,” the thing that exists, entered the poem as the foundational building block. In the early poems, this led to a metonymic array, a kind of young man’s Cantos, lines and phrases generated out of the chaos of the times to be reordered and re-imagined by the poet. As he put it in his first book, Collecting Evidence (1970), the poet was “watcher of events and men/expressor of disparity.”

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There’s Hugh, in his wife Jayne Holsinger’s painting, on the roof of Westbeth, back to the viewer, binoculars to his eyes, as he gazes downtown at the Twin Towers shortly after the planes have slammed into them. It’s a very bold picture. I have always regarded it as a portrait of Hugh, which makes for its daring. In portraits, the facial features of the main figure are the summum bonum of the genre, the conveyers of psychic life and its relation to station in life or to the surrounding environment. But here, those features are out of the viewer’s sight, turned away, as if the artist were refusing to participate in a cliché.

Still, the painter has not left us in mystery. If we look closely, the picture actually tells us a lot about its subject. She’s caught the tension in Hugh’s back and arms. The cloth on the back of the shirt is stretched, the muscles flexed under the shoulders, the arms tensed with the binoculars, the touches of whitened skin on the knuckles of the right hand signaling the riveting shock of what is being observed. The back of the figure gives us neither the usual ‘personality’ nor, strictly speaking, impersonality. And thus it strikes as a true picture of this poet qua poet and his poetics, poised between contemporary facts and subjective moods, desires and conflicts. The reader of Hugh’s poems will find that positioning in almost all of his work. It’s not so much a testable thematics as an awareness of being caught in certain kinds of impossibilities, some, particularly in the early poems, perhaps overly dramatized.

The art of those early poems occurs at the stanza level and across one stanza into the following one. Look at “Diary of the Revolution,” from Collecting Evidence, in which he notates his experience of the student demonstrations against the administration and the Vietnam War at Columbia in the spring of 1968:
There’s an almost haiku-like effect, the third line of each stanza departing from the previous granular observations, expanding the realm of subject into a wider almost mystical theme. Autobiography suddenly exceeds its limits, the way partaking of a “revolution” involves the taking on and expansion of the pre-existing roles of citizenship.

Hugh and I were both participants in those times, both members of Angry Arts and other protest groups, going to demonstrations, reading anti-war poems. Hugh’s work of that period captures well the mix of anguish and erotic desire. It resembles the complex emotions of Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour of 1959, a film to which Hugh dedicates the poem “Verse Nevers,” its moods and imagery one of the threads in the book. The non-linear mode of Hugh’s poems, with their almost indistinguishable leaps back and forth in time, mirror the Resnais’ crafting of the film, the lovers seen through the scrim of disaster. Collecting Evidence and Hugh’s next book, Blood Lord are questioning, judgmental works, asking and indicting how so much is weighted against desire. They are a kind of lashing out, a response to intolerable knowledge.

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Love and pain as fulcrums, personal and impersonal, modus operandi for comprehending one’s world:
These lines are from Throne/Falcon/Eye in which death’s farewell to life “the shroud I could not leave,” he writes in one poem, something like Lawrence’s “Ship of Death”—become forms of liberation. If the order of poems in the book has any meaning or signaling, “Kaddish,” towards the end, ceremonially the putting to rest of his parents, is followed by poems such as “Out of Egypt” and “Hymn” in which some semblance of compassion and life affirmation gleam through and between the lines. “Hymn,” the last poem in the book, sings of our inextricable entanglement with the death cults of the ancients and of our own time, but is finally a cry “from the human.”

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For encyclopedia.com, a gathering of online entries on American poets, Hugh reflects back on what he learned from Zukofsky and from his own experiments in poem making: “it is pleasurable to make an object, in this case with words . . . . Coherence is a pressure.”

That last sentence can be read two ways: one is the urge to cohere. We remember Pound’s lament at the end of the Cantos: “I cannot make it cohere” (and next to Zukofsky, Pound is Hugh’s most significant teacher)—the “pressure” to combine the disparate elements of existence into a substantial whole, into, to borrow from Zukofsky’s Objectivist terminology, a “rested totality.”

It helps to remember, even as one veers dangerously close to autobiography, that Hugh himself declared that the engine of his poems is “the ongoing tension and paradox of the private heart in the public world. And this is the great excitement, the great adventure.”

To render that tension, to make it “discernable,” is not only a task for craft or technique. The discernable that is to be found in the poems is more than an accurate rendering of the visible world—and this is where Hugh somewhat departs from the advice of his mentors—it is an aura or clinging of meanings and associations that bind each word to consciousness, its personal history including the tone or cadence which it bore at different times. The poet inhabits “the non physical non verbal world,” Hugh insisted, and it is the ungraspable act of re-imagining, which constitutes his art. That rendering of the discernable, unique and inviolable, unlike that of any other poet, marks off Hugh’s poetry and gives it its originality.

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In the later poems in Somebody Stand Up and Sing (2005) and in Status of Mourned (2018), the “private heart” undergoes a kind of transformation into something like an ether or dark matter, all-pervasive throughout the poems. It is hidden in granularity among the lines he writes in “For Jayne,” a poem for his wife, as “words that jar the coma of solitude.” Solitude of souls, solitude of words.

I wrote above about a “metonymic array,” (and Hugh’s poems as possibly defined by such a term), the discreteness of a word as it is placed among others. Not chopped up reality but a recognition that reality is already chopped up, and that thoughts and words are angling in at the poet from all sides. Poem-making as an almost magical receptivity, a giving way to impingements. Finding the “discernable” is as much surrender as motive. We tend to see the poem as the result of the pressure of existence on the poet. But the poem is also a pressure on existence, on our existence as readers, its moral utility speaking from its ingathering of disparate materials. In other words, being perceived as a lessoning.

Somebody Stand Up and Sing is a transitional book. The narrative of anguish of the earlier work is being dismembered. It can make for some jarring poetry. Take this section of the poem entitled “Composition 3” which seems to read like a rebus:
Among all its multiple possibilities of interpretation, I find the poem something of a manifesto against what has come before, a paeon to “rebirth.” The title and the opening line, “rub out who wrote,” aren’t these a re-set in letting things go? Mainly, as distinguished from the poetry which came before, there’s a lot of serious playfulness (those question marks, for instance) to wander in.

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Status of the Mourned. The title is Hugh at his most eloquent. So much comes together in this book—love, family history, the spiritual vocations of poetry and the martial arts, friendships and the abominations of our times. What is the status of these things?—they are farewelled. He writes, “so much to arbitrate without irony.” The loss of irony is the loss of distance, protective distance. And even when the ironical is deployed—and that happens in almost every other line of Hugh’s poetry—it is only to undercut itself, to force the reader face to face with the emotional datum behind the words:
The technique is akin to his training in the martial arts, to his ability to both render and distance himself from his material. As he professes in his discussion of his spiritual journey in karate, “Sometimes when I tell people that I do karate, they express envy at my discipline. Of course, for myself I do not see it as a discipline but rather as a way of being in the world in a way that suits my temperament.” In an unusual reversal of detachment, both the horrors and joys of the world are simultaneously present. In a hilarious poem entitled “Poems” he takes on the whole life-long enterprise he has been engaged in. Here are a few lines:
Etc., and etc.

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Throughout all of Hugh’s poetry, the “red thread” of its animation and force, runs the anguish of love and the joy of love. In the early books of his career, as in his life as I witnessed it, unattainable Beatrice figures populate the poems, and the pain of relationships becomes an enveloping theme in which the rest of the world is enjambed, almost out of place, almost structurally in the poems, beside the point or the only point. From “Love Poem,” in Collecting Evidence:
This is a young man’s condition, early Dante/Beatrice, a bleak Vita Nova, where, as he writes in another poem, “Pattern,” of “Muscles anchored to negation / interminable days” where “she left me with distortion.”

The poetry which follows in later volumes, to stay with the Dantean reference, moves from hell to purgatory, the anguish and love metered out, calibrated by this poet-mathematician, as carefully as sin and sanctity on the journey up through the Divine Comedy. The farewelling I spoke of begins with Hugh’s meeting and finally marrying his wife Jayne. The poems that come after reflect a love that has become unambiguous, a kind of semi-shriving, in which everything, disaster and redemption, remain in sight but are powerless to affect the affection. There are a lot of elegies in Status of the Mourned, to Hugh’s teachers, Zukofsky and his karate master most prominently. But what strikes this reader most powerfully is the energy and inventiveness of the poems. Hugh had fallen in love with Pound’s poems for their power, for Pound’s “uncanny ability to say anything he wanted with enormous energy.”

That compositional power enables Hugh to bring into relation material that traffics in the disparity he claims as poet power, as in these lines from “Vienna,” one of the strongest and most complex of the poems in Status of the Mourned:
Cultures blend, they reify each other, the fabric of “Vienna” is where the Jew meets the anti-Christ, where Freud’s desktop displays the figurines of ancient gods and the dead Mother’s voice forever instructs across the oceans. Of course, as one discovers in poem after poem, Hugh’s way of working has been transposed from another living necropolis, New York and its artifacts. His late work, with its promise of love and attention across time and space, honors both poetry and the imagination. He writes to his wife, but he could also be addressing his readers:
Michael Heller's most recent books are Telescope: Selected Poems (New York Review Books/Poets, 2019) and Within the Inscribed: Selected Prose and Conversations (Shearsman Books, 2021).