day 6: Qua Qua Qua, by Heather McHugh

This book of poems (The Father of the Predicaments) was a gift from my poetry professor. In class we had an assignment to "steal syntax" from a poem, which meant - take the sentence structure of a published poem, the order of nouns and verbs, the punctuation, and craft your own poem around that structure. We had four poems we could choose from, and this poem "Qua Qua Qua" was one of the options.

It was no accident that a Heather McHugh poem was an option for that assignment: her biography on the Poetry Foundation website explains that "McHugh's work is noted for its rhetorical gestures, sharp puns and interest in the materials of language itself—her self-described determination is 'to follow every surge of language, every scrap and flotsam.'” The biography continues on to quote a New York Times Book Review that said McHugh “loves the thingness of words—their heft, their shimmy, their slickness and burn..."

That is to say that her poetry is full of really interesting language, and sort of crazily (and really intelligently) twisted, syntactically.


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.

My riff off this poem begins like this:


Gray lady, you need
some jumping active verbs to breathe
your bones to life; right now they’re skulking skull to skull -

yes, a leaping verb, or at least a
stifled interjection. Sh--! Lady, skulking shouldn’t
define you. You run through ditches, you lie in bed,

you struggle heavily higher...



but anyway, this is about "Qua Qua Qua," not my own work. ;)


Here it is: