HEATHER McHUGH

"A good laugh is the best pesticide." Nabokov

Have a scruple of poems.

Have a dram of anagrams.

Experience for yourself my (very humble) attempt at an e-poem. Check out the array of more sophisticated offerings at the electronic poetry center at University of Buffalo's UBUweb site.

The Academy of American Poets keeps a far fancier page of info on Heather McHugh at this link. You can zoom from there to the Academy's other estimable sites.

The Fabled Orphic Egg, the one with the necklace of snake..

For Mac Flash users willing to endure a Mick intro to get to the clickable MC anagram page here's an oddball little animation designed for my brief stint as an MC at the Griffin Poetry Prizes in 2003. It conjoins to my usual anagrammatical compulsions a fervor for Flash animation (and a shameless flirtation with my EMCEE-for-a-night status at the Toronto arts bash thrown by the very vervy Griffins). To see the anagrams at work, remember: you have to click on the MASTER OF CEREMONIES page, when it settles into place.

--Presented with a copy of Wilhelm Reich's new book The Function of the Orgasm, Freud remarked "So thick?"

--Oscar Wilde: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

--Allen Grossman: "Art is about something the way a cat is about the house."

--Thomas Mann: "A writer is somebody for whom writing
is more difficult than it is for other people."

CAREGIFTED (http://caregifted.org/) is an initiative to help long-term caregivers of severely disabled family members-- giving breather to people who give up THEIR ambitions, time, vacations, occupations and more, to help those who can't help themselves.

One more thing, cowboys and cowgirls. Anyone who can afford to eat meat, or pay for entertainments, or bring pets into the household, can afford to TREAT KINDLY the animals with whom we all have commerce. Help make MERCY a cultural given, an everyday practice.

Get your pets from shelters not mills. Patronize small and conscientious farms in your area. Make donations to organizations that promote the truly humane treatment of farm animals. And help make a global shift in human sensibility--conceiving life as wonder, not commodity. (Wittgenstein: our lives are endless is precisely the way our visual fields are endless.)