Alice once wrote that she knew she and I would be best friends when I knocked on her door in Wivenhoe, Essex, in 1974 and said, “Where’s that baby,” and did not ask to see Ted, the visiting professor. That baby was the newborn Edmund. Our friendship lasted the next half century.

In 1976 in New York, Ted and Alice moved into 101 St. Mark’s Place, which became a drop-in destination for endless streams of visitors. Alice and I would go to double features of classic movies at Theatre 80 or new releases of James Bond movies. Her eclectic taste ran to TV shows and books, classics and trash. Dragnet, Peter Gunn, Ovid, Homer, Michael Connelly. In later years she said she didn’t like to read novels at all—only detective stories in English or French.

Many days in New York started out with trips to sell enough books to raise dinner money. Alice never wanted a job in academia, adamant that poetry alone would suffice. She achieved that throughout her life, giving readings and masterclasses, or participating in symposiums in Stockholm, Berlin, London, and around the US.

I met my husband, Steve Carey, at 101. When he died in 1989, a few years after Ted, it was Alice who offered solace and advice. We were two widows together with young children to raise. Then came Doug, Paris, more illness, and, in 2000, Doug’s death. Some years later, after a reading that Alice, Anselm, and Eddie gave at KGB, I was left overcome with emotion and unable to speak, such was the power of the grief and loss. After Doug died, Alice told me she was content to stay in Paris to allow Anselm and Edmund enough space to make their own way as poets, without her overshadowing them.

Later we joked about online dating. Her bio would begin, “Twice widowed poet with two poet sons...”

Our Saturday morning phone calls started around 2000 and lasted for a quarter century. Alice wanted to know the gossip, although so extensive was her network of friends and admirers that she often knew what was happening a few blocks from me sooner than I did. If someone had a new book, her first question was, “Who was the publisher?” Many conversations would end in rants on Alice’s part, which served as necessary outlets for her passion about events or her need to communicate after a solitary few days. In both her marriages, good-natured banter about poetry and life were what I recalled.

Although not calling herself a feminist, or any other label, Alice argued that women needed to make their presence felt en masse before they could take their rightful place in the world. She passionately felt that women—notably herself—were not given their due in the world at large and in the poetry world in particular. She seriously argued that she should have been awarded any prize or recognition going, including the Pulitzer Prize, for which she was a finalist in 1999, because she was the best poet around. Alice, relatedly, had a huge competitive streak, which she first revealed playing Monopoly with her young sons. In fact she wanted to come out on top in any situation.

Alice sometimes found herself in incongruous situations for a poet. One week we discussed what she might wear to attend the Cannes Film Festival for the opening of Beatrice Gibson’s film Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, in which she was featured. Another Saturday she recounted her experience of being given a solo tour of the empty Louvre, and her anxiety—not unusual—about getting to the meeting place without incident.

Talking to Alice required precision in language and clarity of thought, and she was always ready with penetrating questions. She was furious when galleys of her work were returned to her repeatedly with revisions that changed punctuation to be “correct” or otherwise revised her carefully thought-out layout. She railed against newspapers, for although she read voraciously she felt they often failed to get to the heart of stories; there was always some nugget of truth that was not being reported. Seymour Hersh was the trustworthy exception and she sent us trial subscriptions to his Substack.

She was very perceptive about people, and often surprised me with her understanding of the interactions between people, as though she had already thought through what motivated individuals and preemptively had advice as to how to respond in situations as they arose. She had a phenomenal memory and could recount the entire cast of movies she had seen as an eight-year-old. Her death has robbed me of parts of my life that she would have remembered but I would not.

I leave it to others to assess Alice as a poet, muse or mentor. I saw her first as a wife, a mother, and a friend.