By YVONNE FRENCH
Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky described poets who read for the Library of Congress Literary Series in December as a pinwheel, a pianist, a dancer and a courageous artist.
In opening comments, Mr. Pinsky compared Heather McHugh to a pinwheel. "She takes a word and sets the word whirling to see how many sparks can come out of it."
Ms. McHugh made the Dec. 4 Montpelier Room audience laugh when she called an anagram generator on the World Wide Web "the oracle." For example, the words "English poetry," when typed into the generator, render "nightly repose." "Russian poetry" produces "syrup into ears"; "Hebrew poetry," "thereby power"; and "Bulgarian poetry," "arguably protein."
Ms. McHugh read "What He Thought," from her most recent collection of poetry, Hinge and Sign (1994). The poem is about a group of poets traveling in Italy with a buttoned-down tour guide who turns out to be as sensitive as a poet himself. When the question "what is poetry?" comes up at their last meal together, he tells the story of Giordano Bruno, whose statue stands in the town square Campo dei Fiori, where they are staying.
Bruno was "brought to be burned in the public square/because of his offense against/authority, which is to say/the Church ... The day they brought him/forth to die, they feared he might/incite the crowd ... And so his captors/placed upon his face/an iron mask, in which//he could not speak. That's/how they burned him. That is how/he died: without a word, in front/of everyone./And poetry -- /(we'd all/put down our forks by now, to listen to/the man in gray; he went on/softly) -- poetry is what/he thought, but did not say."
Other poems that Ms. McHugh read hint that she is fascinated by what is left unsaid. Ms. McHugh has been professor of English and Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington (Seattle) for the past decade and is a visiting faculty member in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has translated the work of Jean Follain, and (with her husband, Niko Boris McHugh) collections of poems by Blaga Dimitrova and by Paul Celan. She is also the author of a collection of essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (1993).
Mr. Pinsky called the next reader, Ellen Bryant Voigt, a "classical lyric poet." He mentioned that she plays piano and said: "she writes poems the way a master plays piano at the keyboard. The very name pianoforte, loud and soft, represents the range of both elegance and compression into the most efficient space possible of things that are large."
Ms. Voigt read a new poem in 15 stanzas that she called "a meditation on marriage -- specifically, about the assumption throughout the South of women's chief responsibility for marriage." It is addressed to her sister and set in Baton Rouge, La.
"Soft, sweet, fetching, idle, pliable, whose ideal was that? And how should it fit a childhood reaching under chickens for an egg? Or grown sisters come, with gardens on their heads, who, at the sink, uncorseted, let loose high-pitched complaint and low glissandi as they itemized the women's fellowship pew by pew, the match that each had made. ... I could see the men, leaning against the Packard in the yard, smoking, towing the hard, red dirt, analyzing crops and cash, or politics and war, or what? The world."
Ms. Voigt is the author of five volumes of poetry: Claiming Kin (1976); The Forces of Plenty (1983, reissued 1995); The Lotus Flowers (1987), Two Trees (1992) and Kyrie (1995), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. She is also the co-editor, with Gregory Orr, of Poets Teaching Poets (1996), a collection of craft essays.
A graduate of Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, she founded and directed the M.F.A. writing program at Goddard College and now teaches the program at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C. A recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, Ms. Voigt was a Lila Wallace/Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow in 1993 and 1996 and was the 1997 Elliston Poet at the University of Cincinnati.
Carl Phillips and C.D. Wright read Dec. 11 in the Montpelier Room. Mr. Pinsky, who taught Mr. Phillips, said of his writing: "The order of Carl Phillips's words -- the grammar itself -- does a little dance, like a hand gesture or facial gesture, indicating something about the emotion. It gives the feeling of an extra art, like words accompanied by music or mime, that goes along with the images and the ideas and the colors or smells of the words."
Mr. Phillips read from In the Blood, winner of the 1992 Morse Poetry Prize, and from his new collection of poetry, From the Devotions. He said the book is an effort to explore devotion in a relationship, devotion to the dead, and devotion to a helping force in times of difficulty. He closed with the title poem, reading slowly, with measured pauses "... all travel necessarily ends here, at the sea.//I am back, but only because./As the sun only happens to meet the water/in such a way that the water becomes/a kind of curiass: how each piece takes//and, for nothing, gives back whatever light -- /sun's, moons. ... According to you many have//had the ashes of lovers strewn here,/on this beach on this water that now beats at,//now seems to want just to rest alongside./The dead can't know we miss them Presumably,//we were walking that we are walking upon them."
Mr. Phillips is also the author of Cortege, which was nominated for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Gay Men's Poetry Award. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mr. Phillips is associate professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also directs the Creative Writing Program. Mr. Pinsky recently awarded Mr. Phillips a Witter Bynner Fellowship for poetry from the Library of Congress in conjunction with the Witter Bynner Foundation.
Mr. Pinsky said Ms. Wright has "the courage to use very ordinary phrases, very plain language, and the courage to use arcane and special language and the ability to use them so the distinction dissolves. Mixing those is an artistic accomplishment."
Ms. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She read love poems from her latest book, Tremble (1996). From the prose piece, "Song of the Gourd," she read: "I went out barelegged at dusk and dug and dug and dug: I hit rock my ovaries softened. In gardening ... I could almost forget what happened many swift years ago in arkansas. I felt like a god from down under: chthonian: in gardening I thought this is it body and soul I am home at last ... only in gardening could I press my ear to the ground to hear my soul let out an unyielding noise. "
And from "Key Episodes from an Earthly Life," she read: "Do you like your beets well-cooked and chilled/even if they make your gums itch//Those dark arkansas roads that is the sound/I am after the choiring of crickets."
Ms. Wright is the author of seven books in addition to Tremble. String Light (1991) won the 1992 Poetry Center Book Award. In 1981 she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, which prompted a move to Mexico. She was awarded the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1986, and 1987 fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Bunting Institute. A second NEA fellowship was awarded in 1988. In 1994 she was named State Poet of Rhode Island, a five-year post. With her husband, Forrest Gander, she runs Lost Roads Publishers. She is on the faculty of Brown University.
Ms. French is a public affairs specialist in the Public Affairs Office.