I once suggested to Alice that she open a high-yield savings account, which is probably the funniest thing I could have ever said to her. She took in what that might mean and said, “No.” The first trip where we met in person, I was having breakfast with her and Eddie in a train station in Birmingham, England. Non sequitur she asked me: “Are you on pills?” I took this question as a great honor. About five years later, in Paris, she would give me some. At dinner on her 77th birthday in New York, she was startled to glimpse one of her watercolor poem-postcards from the mid-’80s on my phone’s lock screen. “It’s beautiful!” she said, almost surprised that it could be so. Later, in Paris again, while arranging her archive and talking about Joe Brainard, I learned what she meant—that beauty, with time, is something that occurs, sometimes suddenly. “It just happens,” she said. “It becomes beautiful.”
My life was changed by knowing and writing about and adoring Alice Notley, Alice Nightly, Alice the mom and grandmother, or, as she becomes in “At Night the States,” “Not myself.” Ted Berrigan once wrote in an inscription to her, Scorpio to Scorpio—“for Alice, the black-light of my life.” Doug Oliver, a Virgo, wrote, “for dearest Alice / KIND / We are and we always / will be to each other, / for we always have been.” Being formidable, hilarious, blasphemous, insistent, radiant, a great wit, and given completely to words—beyond the words we know—she, simply by loving you, was a guide. Her kindness came from how she survived, and how she included you in her survival. “We die and go to poetry,” she said. She said, “I’ve been finding it hard to write because of the way I feel close to you.” “The people I’ve loved and who died,” she said, “are still free inside themselves, uncharacterized and unchronologized by me or anyone.” With feathery, beautifully fleeting visions, Alice is free, utterly, inside herself—the operatic totality of her poems, the largeness of the universe, a language she ordered to be made.