The Brooklyn Rail

I first laid eyes on Alice at Naropa in the summer of 1989. That was the gateway, the big portal I stood at when the Titans came crashing through. I met almost all my Mother Poets that year and the year before. Anne, Bernadette, Alice. (Etel and Fanny came later, though Etel was more like a Grandmother-Encourager, as she was to many of us.) Alice was reading that summer from The Descent of Alette, though it hadn’t come out yet. She and Anne were both really into Diane Wolkstein’s Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, which had come out a few years earlier. I wish I could say I recognized Alice’s genius right away, but I was bewildered. Why was she weeping while reading “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” aloud in workshop?

If she had already published Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, I might have read the line, “I don’t want to make you cry. I want to demonstrate that this—the world we live in—is imagined.” That’s something I already knew instinctively, but, in my apprenticeship, Alice allowed me to know it out loud. Her fierce, even ruthless, dedication to the poem as the only real world is the passion lesson.

Then I moved to Paris a few years later and suddenly we spent a lot of time together. Laird and Doug and Alice and I met at readings or had dinner at each other’s apartments. Soon Alice and I had a weekly lunch date (Tuesdays, I think) which I once slept through, being busy turning my days into nights, smoking too many cigarettes, writing poems, and reading in the bathtub for long hours.

The poet/photographer Tim Davis once asked me what I learned from Alice during our lunches—what advice had she given me? All I could think of was that she told me it was important to sit down together for dinner. Tim was not impressed. He wanted something writerly, I guess, but what Alice taught me was how to live, how to live as a poet-person, a teaching I am always working to remember. Part of that living was the “meeting of sense of artistic form and sense of reality, real life inner and outer,” as she puts it in her interview with Nick Sturm in the Poetry Project Newsletter.

Liberating advice she gave me: You don’t have to be the same kind of poet all the time.

Practical advice she gave me (when I told her I was reserving one morning a week for writing): No, even if it’s only 20 minutes, you have to check in with it most days.

Tidbit (on a visit to her apartment): she was mad at the neighbor (who was really loud), and demonstrated how she threw glasses of water down an open skylight, triumphant.

One of the most uncomfortable and beautiful moments of my life: Alice looking into my eyes at a dinner at our apartment during another Paris stint, circa 2010, and singing “Begin the Beguine” for a reeaaally long time. Never looking away. She was practicing the torch songs that had and would go into her work, and I was learning not to flinch in the face of the totally open and the totally tough.

Last time Laird and I saw her, after dinner at her neighborhood haunt, Le Corail: We went back to her place for tea. She showed us collages she was working on and said she couldn’t find the same wonderful pieces of paper she used to stumble on easily. I promised to keep my eyes out for wonderful pieces of paper. She gossiped deliciously, wiggled her toes in their socks (pale pink with red roses) and cackled. She told us a secret: agnès b. might use some of her poetry in a shop window. There was more of the “folk gossip” so dear to her. Her toes curled in delight. Alice’s work should be in every shop window in the world. Then the world would be as real as poetry.