Ah look, you started reading. Cool.

You know something strange is happening to you when you find yourself reading poetry at the gym. Especially if you’re usually sort of hostile to poetry. I’d forgotten how much I love Heather McHugh’s poems. Then I caught her reading at the close of the Seattle Poetry Festival last weekend (recapped in this week’s Nightstand). The next day I was talking with a friend who was looking through the new New Yorker and said, “I don’t like poetry,” and I said, “Have you ever read Heather McHugh?” And because he hadn’t, I spent part of the next day typing her poem “Intensive Care” into the body of an email. “Intensive Care” is the one that begins: “As if intensity were a virtue we say/good and. Good and drunk. Good and dead.” And ends: “Today we were bad/and together; tonight/we’ll be good and alone.”

The reason I was typing that into an email—typing it straight out of my hardcover The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal… and Everything Else in the World Since 1953—is because “Intensive Care” isn’t anywhere to be found online. Makes sense, since it’s copyrighted. But the Poetry Foundation—as I learned in that NYer article that pissed everyone off—has something called the Poetry Tool, a searchable online library of poets’ “best and most representative poems,” and they have eight poems by McHugh.

But, uh, Poetry Foundation: on what planet are these Heather McHugh’s best poems? These are okay, totally fine, but you have so many to choose from! Can’t you put up some more? For the sake of poetry? What about “Intensive Care”? Where is “Where,” the one that starts: “I leave the drink and cigarette/where the music is, and go/outdoors where nothing/is the whole idea.//The winter zeros in on eyes and/orphans everyone, and clear//is not a kind of thought./Outside you’re not/as gone as in a house…”

And where’s her sense of humor in these eight poems you’ve chosen, Poetry Foundation? What about, like, “20/200 on 747”? From near the beginning: “Given an airplane, chance//encounters always ask, So what/are your poems about? They’re about/their business, and their father’s business, and their/monkey’s uncle, they’re about/how nothing is about, they’re not/about about. This answer drives them/back to the snack tray every time./Phil Fenstermacher, for example, turns up/perfectly clear in my memory, perfectly attentive to/his Vache Qui Rit, that saddest cheese.” And it gets better, plus there’s even more making-fun-of-Phil: “Mister Fenstermacher is relieved/to fill his mind with the immediate/and masterable challenge of the cheese/after his brief and chastening foray/into the social arts.”

What about one of the fucked up love ones, like “The Most”? (“We are, for your comfort, far from the town/of your friends, of mates and mistresses, and of/amends.”) Or “Preferences,” which pretends to be about Antarctica (where “the plain truth oversimplifies/the human state”) but isn’t (suddenly, outta nowhere: “The heart’s two-timing, thicketed and wrong/but reason doesn’t simply make us single”).

Most of these are in the National Book Award finalist Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, the book I’ve been reading at the gym, pedaling a bike to its rhythms, because she has the best rhythms, like “one by one the winters nailed/more cold into her house.” Or like:

The fruit is heavier to bear
than flowers seem to be.
But that’s a lover talking
not a tree.

Here’s a picture of her back:

And here’s an audience review she wrote for The Stranger after a reading she did in 2004.

Heather McHugh is the bomb, the shizzle, the kahuna, the mack, the tits, the g. She’s dope. Sweet. Tight. Phat. All that. And she lives in the same city you do, if you live in Seattle.