Perceptive and funny. I guess that’s where I would start when talking about David. I always looked forward to being around him because he knew what time it was—he had his finger on the pulse of the messed up world and there was something really reassuring about that. The last correspondence I had with him was a Christmas card he sent to my family during the pandemic: “There is something wrong with society...it seems. Folks like you will make it better. I call right now ‘pandemonium.’” Another time, in the late 90s, I was walking through Union Square with him on a balmy December day when he prophesied, “It’s the springtime of global warming.”

David was perceptive about people too. He liked to tease. He used to rib me about my fear of flying, telling me that if I kept taking buses my ankles were going to swell up. Once we were out at Naropa together in a car being driven by Anne Waldman and he expressed his trepidation about having a triple Aries behind the wheel. I really loved and will miss those down-home familiarities that made me feel exactly that: at home. When I interviewed him for the Poetry Project Newsletter in 1996, we would meet at his place on 14th Street where one had to find a seat atop one of the many precariously stacked piles of papers, books, boxes. It occurs to me how much David was part of a now lost tribe of poet-data-gatherers, alongside Olson, Ginsberg, and Sanders. Looking back at the narrative of our interview conversation I can also see how much he schooled me on deep pockets of poetry and politics: the crossovers in the early 1960s in New York between Umbra and Fluxus, the emergence of a radical group called the Motherfuckers in Newark who took their name from a line in an Amiri Baraka poem, the existence of a West Coast multi-culture counterculture (the “Third Eye World” he named it in a poem in his book Neo-California), the role of poets in SNCC in the South and the role of poets in the revolution in Nicaragua.

I don’t remember ever not being friends with David, which makes me think that he was very generous, or that we simply had some sympathetic ear to each other from the beginning. Probably both. We didn’t see each other much, but the thread of connection was always there. Twenty-plus years after I first met him, I was leading a “class” called The Late Hominid Poetics Group at my apartment in Jackson Heights. I had designed the curriculum around useful activities for poets on the cusp of the collapse of society: dumpster diving, fermenting food, rigging solar panels and wind turbines. David found this curious, if not compelling. He wanted to talk with these younger Late Hominid poets who assembled every week on Sunday evenings. He’d ride the cross-town bus through Queens because, he said, he liked to see what was going on in all the different neighborhoods. And then he’d sit in the middle of the group to see what was going on in all the different threads of conversation. Like me, he was skeptical of MFA programs and the professionalization of poetry, but unlike me he had a pretty firm belief that poets, with their hands in the fire of Gnosis, were the only hope we had. His absence reminds me that little sparks of that fire still burn, and it inspires me to internalize a little bit of his optimism, a little bit of his care.