The Brooklyn Rail

The morning I learned that Alice had died the night before I was in my car on east third street and I felt I was sitting in a giant gong. The whole neighborhood tolled for Alice (and I think that would make her giggle) and even though I’m not still there I feel like it’s tolling still. I miss Alice in Paris and I don’t entirely believe she’s not still there & I can’t go and have lunch with her in her favorite restaurant (Metro stop, Poissonniere) where she shared such warm smiles with the people who ran it but it’s New York I think that feels her absence the most. There were many Alices and I cherish one described in a story by Jane DeLynn about when she was at Iowa and they tripped together and she was the beautiful young poet Jane had a mad crush on but probably the gong in the neighborhood still knows the time from the 70s and the 80s and perhaps into the 90s I’m not a historian of Alice but the years when she lived on St Marks Place with Ted and Anselm and Eddie and later Doug but particularly in that early time when I was describing to a friend the way a small town (and poetry is a small town) operates that there was Alice’s apartment she shared with Ted and then there was the Poetry Project and the relationship between the two explained the world, that one was intimacy and even authority the way it comes from home and the other an institution even in its molten stage was power. Though people worked there and they had homes too. It got fraught. But Alice sat in the front room of her intimacy palace (where she always lived, everywhere in the world) with her manuscripts in spring binders piled neatly on the shelf and all I’ve got to add is that then and now and the moment that she died Alice played a note entirely unique and true to herself in all the ways she was fearless and radiant and stubborn and dedicated to her art and if I were to say it had a color I’d say it was radiantly pale yellow and it flies through the airwaves like one of the birds she loved perhaps an owl and I think I can hear her still. I miss you my friend, so much.