The Risky, the Bold, the Audacious: A Remembrance of Lucie Brock-Broido, 1956–2018

The last time I saw Lucie Brock-Broido, we were shopping at my local Target, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 2006. The previous night, she had given a fierce, and fiercely funny, reading at Dickinson College at my invitation, and now she was about to drive back to New York. In addition to the reading, a class visit, and a party at my house, Lucie had agreed to an informal gathering with students, on the condition that it take place in a Starbucks.

Carlisle’s only Starbucks is inside Target. My memory of that session is mainly of the late-afternoon sun making it difficult to see anyone, and of exhaustion from having stayed up most of the night talking with Lucie, whose nocturnal ways seemed both cause and effect of the otherworldliness of her poems, after the party.

No one but Lucie Brock-Broido had ever been allowed to smoke in my house; my tiny kitchen made it smokier. “I’m going to be 50!” she had said over the “wonton soup without wontons” she had requested. “Isn’t that an unbelievable injustice?” And I was going to be 40. It didn’t seem possible that just over a decade separated us. As my professor in college, she had appeared as wise and formed as I was unwise and unformed.

Now, the students having gone back to campus, Lucie and I walked out of the Starbucks and into the Target. One of the worst things about New York City, we agreed, was that you couldn’t bring home carloads of cleaning products, shampoo, and toothpaste from megastores. She piled her cart with daily things—most memorably, huge packs of paper towels and toilet paper. For me, for reasons I can’t remember, she threw in a multipack of Pringles. At the checkout, she joked to the cashier that I was the one buying the toilet paper, and wasn’t her friend going overboard? We piled everything into her car, I told her how to get on I-81 and thanked her for the visit and Pringles, we hugged, and she drove away.

I met Lucie in the fall of 1988, my last year at Harvard. I had spent the previous year at Fudan University in Shanghai, where I hoped to find a world of poetry more or less like the contemporary American one, but in Chinese. That was, of course, one of the many ways in which I was unwise; I did not appreciate how unfree Chinese speech was and how little space its population had for literary anything. Another unwise motivation was that I had convinced myself that the English literary canon didn’t want me and I needed to connect with the Chinese one. Of course, true to everyone’s warnings, the People’s Republic of China in 1987–88 turned out to be an oppressed and oppressive place, bearing little resemblance to the China I had constructed in my head from the Penguin Poems of the Late T’ang, the Analects of Confucius, the folktales from my language classes, and my parents’ pre-Communist childhood anecdotes.

So when I met Lucie at a reception after a literary event at Harvard, I finally knew the obvious, that English was in every way my mother tongue and I was to some degree in the wrong major: East Asian Languages and Civilizations. It wasn’t fully wrong; I had simply come to understand that I had chosen it out of love for the study of languages, the point of which was to give more dimension to my use of English. I cherished my East Asian coursework, classmates, and professors, and had come back from China only to throw myself into the study of Japanese, which was completely unnecessary from a course-credit point of view but which deepened my understanding of syllabic verse forms, sentence fragments as a literary device, gendered speech, and a range of grammars (loose in Chinese, strict in Japanese, and strict with a thousand irrational exceptions in English). My proposed senior-thesis topics now kept...