The Brooklyn Rail

“Read poetry and imagine yourself writing it” Alice said in a public address in her casually vatic, distillate way. And that in a nutshell is what we as poets do. 

Her books can lend themselves to a generous bibliomancy, I’d even say a “rhapsodomancy,”  a generative divination by means of poetry. I mean she is that good, that surprising, that outrageous. Time and time again after reading Alice, I hear poets say: I never knew you could do that in a poem. 

Alice conjures book magic. As with bibliomancers of the past we open a book like the Bible or Virgil or Kabir to concentrate on a question or issue at random, then read the first passage that catches our eyes, especially during times of personal or societal crisis. We can do that with Alice.

That which we listen to makes us sing.

Each time I turn to my stack of Alice books, I piece together new visceral and neural networks and let my eye land on a new line, I arc into a new connection. They are companion animals.

I remember sitting next to Alice on the F Train subway platform on a dark fall evening in the late eighties on the way to Brooklyn to poet Sheila Alson’s house who was hosting space for for Alice to give a workshop around her kitchen table in a ground floor living room in Brooklyn with bars on the windows.

I jumped at the chance to ride the subway to Brooklyn to study with her. Since we both lived in the East Village I got to wait with Alice in the 2nd Avenue subway station where, as we watched huge rats dodge around the tracks below, she told me a little about her current writing of The Descent of Alette, which first appeared as the self-published massive book The Scarlet Cabinet: long poems alternating between her work and books by her second husband, the British poet, Douglas Oliver.

In the workshop, I was mesmerized to see Alice put a paperwhite narcissus in the middle of the table and asked us to write “around” the flower, not using any normal descriptive flower words, which was very hard. I think she used the phrase “like you were a neanderthal” as in you didn’t have all the powers of descriptive language yet. I thought her approach very Steinian and out of that night wrote a sequence of “P” flower poems and called it Cultivate and published it as my first pamphlet.

Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991–2018 (The Song Cave, 2023) begins with the astonishing “Is Dream something godlike inside you? One splits so easily into dialogue with it.” This is the key to many of the ways her “dream” poems create themselves. It’s as if the poem’s dream writes itself for her. It’s as if the mask Alice wears on the front of the book comes from a persona that has arisen from dream to speak back: “Dream is you, and Dream is not you. It does so much that you can’t do.” Or more “how to” work with dream: One would like to dream what one fancies one needs, for example. You have learned that you can suggest topics to Dream to be dreamed about.”

This makes me think of Alice’s bio note at the back of Disobedience which states “She has never tried to be anything but a poet and all her ancillary activities have been directed to that end.” In looking up “ancillary” I find it is from the Latin ancillarus, from ancilla, “maidservant” : Alice, the masterful handmaiden of poetry and poetry in turn does her bidding.

In April 2022 Alice came back through New York City to be the subject of the Poets and Critics Program, a collective based in Paris convened by Olivier Brossard, Vincent Broqua, and Abigail Lang. Along with many other poets and scholars I spent a heavenly day super saturated with poetry in the heady room of Alice open to any and all questions about her work. I visited her at “her” cafe and her jewelbox apartment full of manuscripts, books and collages.

November 14th, 2023 was the second to last night I got to be with Alice. I was invited by Terrence Arjoon to have a conversation after her reading at 192 Books and I was thrilled when she signed my copy of the new Song Cave essay book with the inscription “love Alice / Our Event.”

The next night was the last time I saw Alice, at the Bob Dylan Rough & Rowdy Ways concert at the King Theater in deep Brooklyn. We rendezvoused in the lobby—it was Ted’s Birthday. Tony and I gave Eddie and Alice and Anselm a ride home, pulling up under the bright marquee with Dylan’s name in gold light to the curb so Alice wouldn’t get rained on.

Then I remember the wildness of the wind blowing through the East Village, her presence was felt by us all—the day of her death— from thousands of miles away in Paris—and listening to a Bernadette Mayer poem from The Golden Book of Words dedicated to Alice containing the words “Rheingold maiden.” 

Back in Paris in June of this year, I had been hoping to see Alice again. Walking in Père-Lachaise with Eddie Berrigan, up the hill in humid June weather, it felt like being underwater in a Cocteau film. I tell Eddie to go ahead of me to make the 3 p.m. appointment and after I catch up and we go in to collect Alice’s ashes he takes the padded case inside a Galeries Lafayette bag that Eddie says would probably have amused her, and then he takes off on his long legs walking across the top of Paris.

Full Moon, September, 2025