Two newly inducted Fellows from Class IV (Literature) made brief remarks and read from their work: Heather McHugh of the University of Washington and Paul Muldoon of Princeton University.
Heather McHugh
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In Cambridge this June, I had occasion to read a commencement poem observing that among the bird songs translated into English at the back of the Audubon bird book, the chachalaca's is the saddest: the male sings "Keep it up," and the female sings "Cut it out." Now I find myself again turning, for rhetorical assistance, to a feathered friend.
These past few years of my life have been the hardest on the heart. My great friend and soulmate, the cellist Raya Garbousova, died while I sat there for two days and nights and watched. And then my father did the same thing in 1999, breathing his last the day I turned 51. I'll spare you the other entries in my litany of intermillennial woes. The first poem in the book that came out of that year is called "Not a Prayer." Part of what got me through these griefs was reading the long-dead-especially the long-dead Greeks and Romans. The Stoics were peculiarly apt consultants, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Plato, too, in another sense-for giving us such a poignant account of Socrates' physical process of dying. It feels very alive; he's telling us a truth at once confiding and abiding. Aristotle was, oddly enough, very heartening, with his "being qua being" and "knowing qua knowing" and "being qua knowing" and "knowing qua being" and so on. (By the way, what is it with these translators—they can't do that one last word, qua?)
Anyway, there comes a moment when you put the book down, wanting to go back into the gorgeous indifferences of nature. Because I was at my urban home in Seattle at the time, that meant settling for Gasworks Park. I was walking along the lapping edge of Lake Union, feeling a lot better and thanking God for a dearth of logophiles and philosophers. And then I came upon the ducks. The poem is called:
Qua Qua Qua
Philosophical duck, it takes
some fine conjunctive paste to put
this nothing back together, gluing glue to glue –
a fine conjunction, and a weakness too
inside the nature of the noun. O duck, it doesn't
bother you. You live in a dive, you daub the lawn,
you dabble bodily aloft: more wakes
awake, where sheerness shares
its force. The hot air moves
you up, and then
the cool removes. There's no
such thing as things, and as for as:
it's just an alias, a form of time,
a self of other, something between thinking
and a thought (one minds his mom,
one brains his brother). You seem
so calm, o Cain of the corpus callosum,
o fondler of pondlife's fallopian gore,
knowing nowheres the way we don't
dare to, your web-message
subjectless (nothing a person could
pray or pry predicates from). From a log
to a logos and back, you go flinging
the thing that you are – and you sing
as you dare – on a current of
nerve. On a wing
and a wing.
Paul Muldoon
This is a poem about academic inquiry. It was written in the ninth century of the common era by an Irish monk—a Christian monk at work in a monastery in what is now Austria. While writing a commentary on Virgil, he decided to write, in the margin, a little poem about his pet cat.
We know almost as much about the cat as we do about the monk. We suspect that the cat was Welsh. The monk might have picked him up on the way across Europe. Pangur means "a fuller of cloth" in Welsh. The name is a terrific description of the action of fulling a cloth with fullers' earth and cleaning it, a wonderful description of the cat's kneading.
In the poem, the monk describes himself and his cat and the ways in which their lives are very similar.
Anonymous: Myself and Pangur
Myself and Pangur, my white cat,
have much the same calling, in that
much as Pangur goes after mice
I go hunting for the precise
word. He and I are much the same
in that I'm gladly "lost to fame"
when on the Georgics, say, I'm bent
while he seems perfectly content
with his lot. Life in the cloister
can't possibly lose its luster
so long as there's some crucial point
with which he might by leaps and bounds
yet grapple, into which yet sink
our teeth. The bold Pangur will think
through mouse snagging much as I muse
on something naggingly abstruse,
then fix his clear, unflinching eye
on our lime-white cell wall, while I
focus, insofar as I can,
on the limits of what a man
may know. Something of his rapture
at his most recent mouse capture
I share when I, too, get to grips
with what has given me the slip.
And so we while away our whiles,
never cramping each other's styles
but practicing the noble arts
that so lift and lighten our hearts,
Pangur going in for the kill
with all his customary skill
while I, sharp-witted, swift, and sure,
shed light on what has seemed obscure.