Poetic Justice : Heather McHugh and David St. John have labored in obscurity on the West Coast for years. : But not any longer.

Just how poetic is the life of the poet?

For a modern-day bard, poet Kenneth Rexroth summed it up quite succinctly: “Against the ruin of the world, there is only one defense--the creative act.”

Fine-tuning the precise architecture of the long line, intricately crafting little worlds--literary dioramas--the best of poets magnify the briefest of passing moments, dissect the most minute exchange. The prize: the larger, lasting value.

But for the greater world, the pursuit of poetry in this day and age at best appears noble; at the other end, charmingly anachronistic.

Voices that historically have spoken for entire societies, or been lauded as the filament inciting movements, nowadays seldom reap the grand rewards of the best-seller list. And even with the hot revival of the cafe poetry movement, the quaint world of the poet still appears remote and rarefied.

Ironically, far from the East Coast literary locus, poets David St. John of USC and Heather McHugh, currently of UCLA, might beg to differ. In their creative act, they have raged and won.

They are two of the five nominees for this year’s National Book Award in poetry.

McHugh, 46, is visiting professor at UCLA this quarter, part of her Milliman Writer-in-Residence position at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is a finalist for her collection “Hinge & Sign--Poems, 1968-1993” (Wesleyan/New England, 1994).

Editor of the Antioch Review, St. John, 45, grew up in Fresno and is a professor of creative writing at USC, where he has taught for eight years. Awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as the Prix de Rome Fellowship in Literature, St. John is nominated for his collection “Study for the World’s Body” (HarperCollins, 1994).

The honor further animates two hale careers, both would agree. For West Coast poets in the margins, it is more than simply another tasteful validation of their accomplishments, and the importance of their addition to the canon.

The National Book Awards, to be presented in black-tie pomp Wednesday at New York’s Plaza Hotel, are known among literati as the Oscars of the publishing world.

*

But all the fuss upsets the orderly quiet of the writing life--the silent room, the good pen, the blank page.

“The whole thing is something very unlike a poet’s life,” cracks McHugh, sitting in a Westwood Cafe with a bag of manuscripts the size of a week’s worth of groceries, periodically eyeing election returns.

“You spend your life sort of eavesdropping. That is, you get to be the one at the next table who has kind impulses, or will not use the information in any damaging way, but is very curious about how human being is. That, for me, was the whole thing.”

McHugh remembers. “I was incredibly shy. I never talked until I was 16. Finally, in senior high school in English class, I said something . . . and then just what I feared happened,” she pauses, eyes opened wide behind teal-framed glasses. “Everybody turned around and looked. The dream was really to be invisible and love the visible at the same time.”

That attention startles even those less easily rattled.

“Most of all I’ve been really stunned by the response from other poets,” says David St. John over a whistling Santa Monica wind and steaming cup of cappuccino at a sidewalk cafe hidden on the quieter fringes of Main Street. His voice is soft, yet textured. A good storytelling voice. A lover of words, he carefully enunciates each syllable, sparingly lending those with more import the assistance of his hands.

“Notes from poets. People I know casually and haven’t heard from in many years just saying that they wanted me to know how important my work had always been to them . . . writers who I like, but haven’t talked to. . . . Just that they would take that time and make that gesture, that the work has presence and relevance, is really the most important thing.”

Although St. John fancies the erotic tension crackling through interpersonal relationships (“What goes on between men and women in this world fascinates me endlessly”), much of the work found in the earlier pages of “Study” wades through the taut emotional landscape of loss and abandonment--tests the limits of memory. The page becomes emulsion, slowly resurrects the form of a person, or a fragment of remembrance.

But what might at face seem simply a tango of want and need is inhabited by much more. The muted power of the particular was something that St. John explored at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. Beyond the architecture of language, or workshop-speak, St. John began to understand something about the soul that informs the vessel--the soul being the poet; the vessel, the verse.

An International Writers Workshop, also at Iowa, brought St. John into contact with authors who temporarily re-rooted their lives, arriving from Africa, Europe, South America with their trunks, poems and life stories.

Apart from exotic tales of struggle on distant terrain, what most impressed him was a maturity of expression that St. John hadn’t noted in the poems that crossed his desk as editor of the Iowa Review, or in sessions for critique.

“For me it had been a window on the relationship between a kind of political consciousness and how it enters poetry in other cultures,” says St. John.

“It also made me very impatient with a kind of political playacting of many American poets . . . seeing these men and women, say, from China or Eastern Europe, who knew that they were being spied on constantly. What was fascinating to me was . . . even when their work had no overt political agenda, it was so brilliantly an enactment of the voice of individuality and freedom. It really made me think twice about the American poets who had sort of put on a particular political attitude as if it were a coat that could be taken off and changed with whatever the political season or fashion was.”

The encounter, St. John believes, drastically rewrote his ideas about “political” poetry, how the world is seen and how it is “made into language.”

“One of the things that happens is that poems have to be understood not as objects, but as experience. “

And thus, St. John has whittled away this artful distinction: A good poem “is a poem that enacts in language as if the page were its own little stage. Whatever its particular concern is. Nobody wants to be told about anything. Nobody wants to be told how to feel. . . . You have to allow the reader to be part of what it is that you are concerned about. To feel it themselves.”

*

Despite its acute powers of revelation, the poet’s voice, McHugh fears, resounds more like thunder on the wane. As she reflects in “Blue Streak”:

And the poets,

who should have spoken for us, were busy

panning landscape, gunning

their electrics, going

I-I-I-I-I

But of the medium, she keeps her good humor.

“When I speak to classes, people always ask me, ‘Where is poetry going?’--To Chicago?” McHugh suggests with a laugh, then leans forward into the thought. Talk about language warms her, the thoughts shoot up in luminous images, metaphors--like a film montage. As a poet, she says, “it’s not about knowing, it’s about being. You just become a recorder of being--but being in its most affecting or most revealing moments.”

At its best, poetry embodies the act of persistently taking a reader down foreign roads.

“To be startled is sort of what you want in the arts,” says McHugh. “People come at it from different angles. People are startled when Michael Jordan does a great shot. It’s the moment that the thing gets beyond us , when you get beyond yourself, and the reader participates in it. And that’s why we like to read. To get beyond our limits.”

Part of stretching the limits is learning to broaden our definitions and perceptions of poetry.

“Americans are sentimental by nature and poetry can get quite sentimental,” she observes. “That is almost the lay person’s view of what poetry is. It accompanies the Whitman Sampler. The poems I like least are the poems that want to say: ‘This is a sweet world. . . .’ It’s like singles ads: 100 people saying, ‘I want the only other person on Earth who likes candle-lit dinners, wine by the fireplace and a walk on the beach.’ To me that’s boring.

“The interesting thing to me is the thing a person sees that no one else can see. For me that’s the fresh, informing moment. But how to discover that in us? I’m really interested in the strangeness. The strangeness of being alive. Not the thing I want to hear. Not the Good Heaven. I’m more interested in the strange because it strikes me as probably truer.”

*

The craft survives, pushes on in various guises, as does the impetus fueling it.

Although there are purists who wring their hands at the very suggestion of the scruffy, rough-and-tumble cafe poetry scene with its poetry slams and open mikes, that tenacity St. John sees as prime evidence of the written word’s fluidity.

“I have a lot of friends who really object to the coffeehouse scene . . . who feel that it is just sort of an exercise in indulgence,” says St. John. “My own feeling is . . . I’m for any occasion when people try to join what they’re thinking and feeling to language.”

St. John translates it as a coming-of-age process: The journey toward self-discovery should include pressing toward new language “that’s separate from the official language they’ve been given by their culture and their parents.” The problem is, “the way we use language in our daily lives is completely pragmatic and it is also reductive, and it’s therefore antithetical to everything poetry wants to do. The world is frozen by its names.”

Aside from breaking down artificial barriers, distinctions, if a poet has a singular mission, it is this: “To free the world from the names that have petrified it. This is what a poem is. A poem is a little model of consciousness. It’s how someone sees the world made in language.

“And so that is what I try to tell (my students). What we don’t have, especially in our culture, is a vocabulary to talk about the things that matter to us most. So it’s trying to help these students begin to locate . . . a kind of poetic language and poetic voice, that they can begin to represent some idea of themselves that is themselves.”