A Few of the Things I Love About Alice
Brenda Coultas
Word count: 126
Paragraphs: 4
The buzz before her readings and the buzz in the East Village that Alice is in town.
St Mark’s church packed with generations of poets.
Her epic poems, like The Descent of Alette, which a hundred or so poets and
performers read at St. Marks’ church on Anti-Inauguration Day 2025.
Her lecture on Allen Ginsberg’s airplane poems and her argument that airplane
poems are a genre, along with a loving and intimate discussion of his work.
That she was bold enough to speak for the dead.
Ambition, not afraid of it.
Alice said that all of Emily Dickinson’s poems can be sung to the tune of The
Yellow Rose of Texas. Not sure if that’s a good thing to know, but it’s too late if you
are reading this.
In the mid-90s, Brenda Coultas moved to New York City to work on the staff of the Poetry Project. Her latest collection, The Writing of an Hour, an ars poetica, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2022.