That first Summer of teaching at Bard in 2004, I would crawl back to my tiny campus room at night after the gruelling tempo of the day, and hide there, reading, in the horrifically humid air. What had I brought to read? I remember for a fact, Milarepa’s A life , Scalapino’s The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence, Michaux’s Miserable Miracle. I can’t remember the rest of the small heavy suitcase full of books I’d brought. I got Zither from the bookshop. The following year she gave me Dahlia’s Iris — Secret Autobiography and Fiction.

I don’t think I have ever read one to the end, apart from Zither, which I’ve read several times. But I always read her vertically, rather than horizontally. A kind of work that makes sense of the poetic by referring it to non-verbal and spatial knowledges. Using personal experience towards depersonalisation. One’s own living relays as thought sample. Each sentence so tightly knotted, I’m sometimes able to catch the liana as it swings by, but rarely able to stay on for the full swing.

She would be walking around the Bard campus holding a small fanned out Summer umbrella over her head, in long skirts and sandals, carrying a cushion for sitting on to relieve her severe back pain during the long sessions. She might walk straight past one, a little shyly, or nod discreetly as she walked on, her physical presence on campus both strong and delicate, amused or intensely focused. In sessions, she was tough and inquisitive, prodding, sometimes unable to hold back her impatience. These were difficult and superb moments. She would cut through the crap or meanders of complacent exchanges with sudden insightful, sometimes totally mysterious, comments that reduced the room to silent surprise.

Her books are mentally exacting and yet sensuous, very much of the world. Those complex nearly abstract ones that deal with autobiographical tracing as part of a buddhist mind training, and tackle zen as part of a generative poetic training. Powerful work once one breaks into the crystal. Poetry as the not be-all, not end-all of poetry. I had embarked on an intense amount of meditation a couple of years earlier and her dense propositions became precious minefields to me. How to make art while changing one’s mind.

Alice Coltrane’s Ptah, the El Daoud. Leslie Scalapino’s Zither/Autobiography. That was my first Summer there.

Caroline Bergvall