By Catherine Barnett

A few summers ago I got it into my head that I to build a physical model of a poem that would show the way a poem can move, can resist closure. The image of a “hinge” kept coming to mind. I found myself in various hardware stores, trying to locate in the physical world an example of the kind of hinge I think of when I write, revise, and read poems.

At Stoneway Hardware in Seattle I asked the salesman for “the hingey-est thing” he had in the store. He gave me a blank stare. I asked him if he had any kind of hinge that was itself composed of serial hinges. He looked at me quizzically and then, like any good hardware salesman, asked me how I was going to use it.

I had to admit that I wasn’t building or repairing anything but that I was a poet. I told him I thought perhaps a hinge could be a metaphor for the way a poem works, for the way a poem can move. The quizzical look turned into a look of recognition. He said he was a poet, too, and that he’d just taken a workshop with Heather McHugh.

McHugh—whose Selected is called Hinge & Sign! McHugh, who said in her essay, “What We Make of Fragments,” that “The poem is not only a piece, like other pieces of art; it is a piece full of pieces.”

He pulled out a paint stick and said I could cut that up and hinge the pieces together any way I liked. He brought me over to the metal tubing and showed me how I could make my own hinges. He showed me concealed hinges, butt hinges, piano hinges.

During the next week I gathered hinges and tried various configurations. I’d sit down and read and reread the opening stanzas of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose,” which I first tried to reconstruct solely out of hinges; then out of wood and hinge; then cardboard, twist-ties, and hinges. Nothing exactly worked but it was fascinating to try to get inside language so deeply and crazily. My sister stayed up past midnight trying to figure it out with me. Eventually we gave up. “Hinges,” she said, “are only physics. Language is magic.”

“Hinges,” [my sister] said, “are only physics. Language is magic.” Of course she was right; as far as I know—there’s no mention of “hinge” in the entire New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—and yet it seems to be a useful analogy for the possibilities of movement and turn and transition that enliven poems.

Of course she was right; as far as I know—there’s no mention of “hinge” in the entire New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics—and yet it seems to be a useful analogy for the possibilities of movement and turn and transition that enliven poems.

As a poet, what interests me about a hinge is its two defining qualities: a hinge—like other devices—connects objects; it serves as a point of connection, a joining, a joint. But so is glue, a screw, a nail, a hasp, a clasp, a knot, a lock. What distinguishes a hinge from most other forms of connecting is the fact that it allows relative movement between two (or more) solid objects that share an axis.

In a poem, a hinge word or moment or gesture allows you to have both continuity and gap; unity and difference; such “hinges” keep the parts of the poem in some working relationship to one another and at the same time allow the poem to retain some of what Aristotle calls the unities of time and place.

How radically or loosely you want the hinge to open is a matter of temperament. There’s Heather McHugh’s passion for the fragment; there’s E.M. Forster’s “Only connect….Live in fragments no longer.”

I’m not arguing against a poetry of fragment nor against a poetry of leaping—these kinds of poems thrill me. And I’m not trying to make a case for narrow clarity, for shutting down the poem. I simply think that a language “hinge” is a useful way to think about keeping the poem open without letting it scatter to pieces.

Eventually I ended up with a few literal hinges that could show, in the most basic way, what I was trying to get at. A door hinge with a removable hinge pin is a useful model for the making and revising of poems; the hinge pin serves to connect the parts. But I wanted more movement than just this simple hinge, so I ended up at yet another hardware store, where I bought two stainless removable-pin hinges and a long nail. Once I took out their hinge pins, I could stack the hinges on the nail and thus have many different types of relative movements.

Heather McHugh’s wonderful essay on Emily Dickinson’s poems (“What Dickinson Makes a Dash For” in Broken English), makes a beautiful argument for a poetics of indeterminancy and describes the points of connection/juncture that make Dickinson’s poems so wildly open and expansive. Dickinson’s dashes literalize the “hinge” notion; each dash functions in at least two directions. Like such dashes, rhyme, repetition, lists, and syntactical subordination—and dozens of other linguistic strategies—can provide the connections that make poems such capacious and energetic vehicles for expressing the shape of human feeling.