I didn’t meet Fanny till February 2020 but I guess I’d been reading her for about eight years. Even Love and I, which came out just before we met, saw straight into me: “Some who never feel loved keep traveling.” That was me.

It was after a reading I did with Elaine Kahn at MIT Bookshop. Fanny came, with a bunch of poets. I want you to see Fanny as I saw her that day, tiny and chic in horn-rimmed glasses, ordering fries and beer and settling in to flirt and gossip among us like Anna Karina in literally every Godard movie. She really was shining—the ingénue, the star.

Fanny had the power to make me feel that there wasn’t anything wrong with me. I was bothered by I guess an ordinary desire to know whether she liked my poems and we did talk about them but I don’t think that was the basis of our friendship. It was more about being a poet right than doing it right in any technical sense.

Fanny was wild and she appreciated extravagance of feeling and extravagance of kindness. She was ferocious but not in the sense of cruelty: she was ferocious in the protection and preserve of her inwardness; she was utterly undomesticated in the inner realms and moved thru the world as one free, and she made me feel it would be pathetic—a capitulation—ever to fit in. Which happened to be something I was struggling with a bit when we met. I loved her and I’ve wept over her much more than I’d have thought I had the right to. Yes, she was a tremendous artist. But I loved her.

We started hanging out once it was warm enough to meet up masked, or drink wine in her garden. Sometimes she flew away to California to be with her children. And she had many admirers, always coming and going from her garden. We went to a Black Lives Matter protest together on Cambridge Common once: she showed up in her Our Lady of Guadeloupe socks, armed with a huge bag of Cape Cod potato chips.

One time I brought this Good Will Hunting dude to see her. He’d shown up to our first date with a black eye, all pink muscle, blonde hair, chip on his shoulder, broken heart, and an accent so thick I could barely understand it, from Charlestown. Chahlstown. Irish Catholic, with a rosary tattoo. Do I need to explain what a fetish object a man of this kind is in the state of my birth, to a nerd like me? Fanny knew. Do you want to meet one of the greatest living Irish poets, I asked him. We drank wine with Fanny for a couple hours, and maybe I should mention that I didn’t and don’t drink, outside of very special occasions like Fanny, and she was marvelous, and upon leaving, the guy and I went and did acid. Fanny just gave me the feeling of, why not.

I asked her once why her sentences were so utterly unlike any other sentences. I was interviewing her in an online event for a German gallery: she said she practiced a kind of grammar wherein it was exceedingly important not to handle words unjustly, not to manipulate or force them into wrong relationship.

Last year I accidentally got to see her read with Suzanne Mercury in Gloucester—an astonishing, utterly etched, long poem. Why don’t you rip in to Cambridge on your way out tomorrow, goes Fanny. I guess I’d better rip in, I said. RIP IN, goes Fanny—so we did. It was the last time I saw her. I told her I was getting ready to teach The Changing Light at Sandover and of course, to her, James Merrill was more or less despicable, or should I say disgusting.

We were supposed to go on tour with Eileen across England and Ireland together the summer of 2020. It was to have been called Boston Creme. I even commissioned t-shirts from Alex Patrick Dyck, the first money from a prize that I spent—and of course when you print t-shirts ahead of time there definitely isn’t going to be a UK/Ireland tour featuring Eileen Myles, Fanny Howe, and you.

When are you going to be back on the TV, Fanny would email me sometimes, between Invisible College sessions. I have some screenshots of us, Fanny, Eileen, and me, eating Zoom lunch and Zoom dinner together, during lockdown. It all feels very far away.

There are many poets I admire dearly and desperately whom I never met, and then they died. Lots of living poets whose poetry I adore—and I don’t know them. Mostly I’m too shy. Sometimes it’s that I already feel like I have such a major relationship to their work that I don’t need anything else, or more to the point, don’t feel worthy of anything else. I was too shy to introduce myself to Fanny when she read at the Harvard Bookstore from Love and I—but the good lord saw fit to make me her neighbor for a little while. I think if it wasn’t for her I wouldn’t have been able to summon what it had felt like—deep in childhood—somewhere really far away—to have been seen. To have been loved. To be loved.