Heather McHugh: Ars Poetica (July 2007)

Heather McHugh reflects on how the Ars Poetica is both a poetic and critical device. “I wanted Ars Poetica to heal a wound,” she says, “because when two contraries are suggested in a single gesture one might come back …into some restorative sense of the actual universe.”  While drawing on examples by Archibald MacLeish, Pinsky, Dickinson, Valery, Celan, and others, McHugh devotes the majority of her attention to poems by Wallace Stevens, considering how these poems can both “mean” and “be.”