Good and Gouged
"As if intensity were a virtue we say
good and. Good and drunk. Good and dead."
--Heather McHugh, "Intensive Care"
Last week, Michael Wells, the careful and always appropriately dressed owner of Bailey/Coy Books, exited his taxicab in the 500 block of Boren Avenue North stone-cold sober and promptly fell to the stone-cold sidewalk. Consolidated Works--whose walls were lined with portraits of various geniuses from history (Confucius, George Elliot, Gertrude Stein) as well as the local geniuses selected this year by The Stranger (including Matt Briggs, winner of the Genius Award in the writing category)--was crammed with tables in black linen and women in black dresses and food-service stations heaped with scallops and venison and oysters on the half shell, and Wells walked in bleeding. An artful way to go, I thought. Here is a man for entrances. "Do you want to see my knee? Look at my knee," he said, lifting his leg to show me a huge gash torn in his black slacks, through which you could see a huge gash torn in his leg. A bright, dripping wound. "You need a Band-Aid," I said and turned to a doctor standing nearby. "Do you think he needs a Band-Aid?" The doctor said, "I think he needs a drink."
I never can pull off bleeding at parties. Though I did, in a manner of speaking, fall all over myself when Heather McHugh walked in. She of several outstanding books of poetry including Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993, The Father of the Predicaments, and, most recently, Eyeshot. She of the smart, sad, sinking poem "Intensive Care" (the first two lines of which are at the top of this column), which ends thus: "Today we were bad/and together; tonight/we'll be good and alone." It goes without saying (or at least it should) that McHugh is among the greatest poets at work today in America (how the English department at UW has retained her for so long is beyond me), and as she and I brushed shoulders in line for the braised short ribs over whipped yams--savory, sweet, simple--I ventured: "Is it okay if I grab the microphone and tell everyone that the greatest poet in America is in the room?" She laughed nervously and said no and lunged toward the food. She is, in short, like most poets: hungry and shy.
Matt Briggs may be a genius, but Heather McHugh is a giant. (The Genius Awards are given to writers and artists who are not yet giants.) I'm guessing that the guy near the cocktail counter who showed McHugh "a metal bar he had put through his cock," as she put it the next day in an e-mail, had no idea who she was.
