One of the most celebrated poets in America right now, Danez Smith, came to my college to read last week. My job, as a utility infielder on Clark College’s creative writing committee who happens to live near the airport, was to pick up Danez and drive them to their hotel downtown.

The pick-up was a breeze–Danez has clearly done this kind of thing many times–and I was pleased when they got in the car at how easygoing they seemed, as well as how I was not coming off (in my own mind, anyway) as too star-struck.

As I drove, we chatted about America’s two main Portlands–Danez is living in Portland, ME right now–and they pressed me on my mixed feelings about my own Portland (i.e. a great American city driven to a terminally twee nonconformity by, among other things, the show Portlandia). We talked about the amazing restaurant town that Portland, OR, has become, and I was overjoyed to hear that Danez would be eating at Gado Gado, a brilliant Indonesian place in my neighborhood.

And then, while describing to Danez what the gado gado dish consists of, I took the wrong exit on to I-84–instead of the westbound, towards downtown, I took the eastbound, towards Utah. I’ve driven from the airport to I-84 hundreds of times, so I am not sure what made me take the wrong exit just then: maybe my poor memory for foods was taxing my brain as I tried to remember what was in gado gado, or maybe I was more star-struck than I realized.

In any event, the wrong exit I took was one of the worst wrong exits I could take in the whole benighted Portland metro freeway system. Exits do exist on I-84 eastbound between Portland and Utah, but really there are a lot fewer than you would think. I got off the freeway at 122nd street and started making a loop down to the butt end of Sandy Boulevard, where I knew I could get back on to I-205 and thence to westbound I-84. We talked about family, about the trouble that comes for our loved ones at the end of their lives (and, by extension, for us one day). I navigated expertly after my breathtaking blunder back to the freeway, got us back on, and we were back on the track. Danez looked up at one of the exit signs and said “Wait, wasn’t that where we got off the freeway last time?”

Indeed it was, Danez Smith, indeed it was. I’ve just taken 15 minutes of your life force at the end of a very long travel day for you. Forgive me.

The next day, Danez read like a dream. They came up in the slam tradition, and they have a theater background to boot, and it shows: each poem was like some incantation, a crazy pile-up of language that blew us all away. Part of me wished that I was one of the shell-shocked 19 year-olds from Intro to Literature sitting in the audience, encountering their first poetry reading the way I took in mine from William Stafford in 1989. You poor suckers, I wanted to say to them, it’s never going to get better than this. If you go to a thousand more readings, you’ll always be thinking about this one.

Danez is a better and younger poet than me. I had to remind myself of something I tell my creative writing students every term to help them get past the anxiety and professional jealously that comes from reading the work of someone better than you: that both Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young were at Woodstock–in fact, they arrived together in the same hot-wired truck–and that not one of the 500,000 people at Woodstock would have said that Neil Young was the more talented guitarist of the two. But Jimi Hendrix’s greatness does not make Neil Young less great, and Neil Young is no less singular a talent just because he had to share the stage with someone as incandescent as Jimi Hendrix. (Of course, in this extended analogy, I am neither Jimi Hendrix nor Neil Young, but rather an accomplished and nearly unknown player like Dave Schramm or, even more aptly, like a member of the fictional band the Late Greats from the Wilco song).

Here’s Danez’s most famous poem, one they didn’t read last week, but one that will give you a taste of what we heard. Good Jimi Hendrix energy–we were lucky to catch it at Clark College, “The Harvard of Two-Year Colleges,” in scenic Vancouver, Washington: