[When I heard Tyrone was being transported back to Cincinnati from Buffalo to enter hospice, I wrote to him to say some things I needed him to hear, unsure whether my letter would reach him in time or whether he could even process it by then. It wasn’t the point, I guess—I needed to send him some love and some gratitude. Not long before that, we’d talked of crossing paths soon, and when Julia and I learned we’d move to Raleigh this summer he said he’d see us there next time he visited, so the news that he was dying just fucking knocked the wind out of me. We never lived in the same town or anything, but he was always so generous with us that it felt like we must have. And whenever Julia and I did get to hang out with him it was like that—just relief, candor, camaraderie. For me, Tyrone’s whole comportment showed how and why to remain in the world in your practice, to let your practice be exactly that—remaining in it. And even though he’s gone, I know I’ll always come back to him for guidance anyway. I’ll share my letter here—for Tyrone and for all the folks who’re missing him.]
3/5/24
Dear Tyrone,
I just wanted to tell you what you’ve meant to me as a poet and as a reader and as a person. I think C.C. was the first thing I read of yours—must have been in Buffalo I bet—prolly Michael Cross suggested it. So before we ever met I think you were teaching me something about difficulty and play—how they can live together in poems as a way of refusing/refuting simple answers to the world. That difficult play can hold the world to account at the same time as it makes room in the world for other people/beings, is (I now think) what I was learning from you back then in reading that book. Soon after that I probably read you in context of reading/talking to Brenda Iijima and/or Rob Halpern, but I also remember around that time seeing on your old author website that you read/valued the work of Cyrus Cassells (it stood out as surprising to me then but it doesn’t now—big world, no one answer etc.—did I ever tell you that Julia and I both studied with Cyrus in TX?). I don’t remember when I first got in touch with you though. Seems like it would have been to ask for poems to publish, maybe? Or to send you a book? Must have been before we all read at Pete’s Candy Store. Just dug through my email and it looks like the first time we were in touch I’d sent you some chapbooks and you sent a response—nothing miraculous, but it’s a testament to how much sky you hold up for folks like me just by being so engaged/responsive. Like, plenty of folks don’t respond, or don’t respond so thoughtfully. I guess I just want you to know how grateful I am for that. Julia and I recently stayed with Susan Gevirtz and she was marveling over an essay you’d written on her work. Feel like I’ve had that conversation with so many folks over the years—“Damn, did you see that thing Tyrone wrote? He’s the real deal.” Like, you show us how to put the work in, and why. I think over the years I developed this sense that you were a model for something like integrity/honesty—a model of the unrhetorical response—that engagement somehow has to mean letting in all the complication we inhabit, not accepting a program (any program, anyone’s) and instead offering the difficult view that also leaves room for folks to offer their own, and that preserves the trouble/acknowledges that the world’s too topographic to simplify. But like this is going to be work so don’t just be easy, only social etc. I often think of your criticism as cantankerous, but at the same time I see you as a kind of communitarian and (as a reader) generous, worldly/open, and kind. I can’t quite explain what it means to me to have had your eye on my own poems over the years—you’re one of maybe five folks whose engagement with my work made it feel like I had a community. I wish your life hadn’t been so hard, especially these last few years. I hope you’re surrounded right now by people who love you. Wish Julia and I were closer, too—we'd visit/help in a heartbeat.
I don’t know what else to say except that I’ll miss the shit out of you (& your work) if you go.
Love, C.J. Martin