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Alice Notley’s poetry changed everything for me. I first encountered it when a friend shared Cassandra Gillig’s album put me in charge of poetry magazine (2013) on Facebook in June of 2018, which features a recording of “At Night the States” from her 1987 reading in Buffalo mashed up with Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors.” (This experience came two years after discovering Nick Sturm’s long poem “I Feel YES” in 2015, which is what originally made me want to write poems. Learning that Sturm is Notley’s editor was a real red-strings on the wall moment for me.) Seven years and over a dozen of Notley’s books later—a mere dent, thankfully—I still can’t do justice to the impact that that poem has had on me. The experience was obliterating: it completely opened up what I thought language could do, how it could feel, and what I wanted to do with and to my own—one of those rare before-and-after, top-of-my-head-taken-off moments. For this reason, being prompted to share a poem after or for Notley in the wake of her death is a tough task. There are traces of her everywhere, from an amateur poem written explicitly after “At Night the States” in the immediate aftermath of that moment of discovery, when I wanted to live in that language and process and extend its inner workings for as long as I could, to echoes of it in everything I’ve written since—often subconsciously or intuitively, as if her way of speaking is so part of my mine now that it’s like catching myself, after the fact, speaking more like my father as I get older or realizing my handwriting is becoming indistinguishable from my mother’s. Notley has made an indelible mark on my poems—my way of narrating my reactions to experience and knowledge—and I’m grateful to know now, or to have an increasing sense, that I’m just one of many poets to have been rearranged by her use of language. We don’t know yet, can’t know, how lucky we are for having had her.

I wrote “Wednesday,” a new poem, for this occasion and with all this in mind: Notley’s voice living on, both in her poems and in all of ours, cheating death. Meanwhile, her corporeal life has ended—or, to borrow for the nth time from “At Night the States,” is done, perfection. I experience this loss alongside the still-fresh, forever-unbelievable deaths of my friend Mickey Harmon and his partner Jordan Celotto, both artists, who were murdered in their home in Buffalo this March, as well as of Adam Kreutinger, another friend and Buffalo-based artist, who died from brain cancer a week earlier. I borrow the last line of my poem from Mickey, who accompanied his contribution to Postcards on the Edge (Hallwalls, 2020) with a message that ends: “It’s your Buffalo. It’s my Buffalo. We are neighbors.” Though drastically different in terms of impact on my personal life and in my immediate community of Buffalo, I feel a similar debt: gratitude for having known and been changed by these people and awe in witnessing the ever-radiating influence of their lives on the communities around me. That big, brutal everything-feeling for which grief’s disorienting nothingness clears the way, collapsing time and short-circuiting the filtering process between immediate sense and naming and knowing our experiences. It’s amazing, impossible. So: Wednesday, one such failed shorthand for “want[ing] to say something in / particular.”

Thank you, Alice—all this not-ly—and thank you, Mickey, Jordan, and Adam. Never done, not really.