BPR 53 | 2026
Dear V,
I have so many questions.
But first let me acknowledge that I’m taking a chance, writing a critical essay in letters. Not to mention addressing you directly. As you say in With My Back to the World (WMBttW), regarding your use of “Agnes” to refer to the artist Agnes Martin, I do so “not out of disrespect or presumption of intimacy and familiarity” (99). Rather, I’m following an impulse, as you did.
Most obviously, I’m riffing off Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, an uncategorizable literary experiment in which you intermix, in inquisitive and inventive ways, the epistolary form, lyric, documentary essay, existential meditations, and visual art. Here the one-to-one address of a letter, from an “I” to a “you,” creates a space, a shape for memory to inhabit. “I think I am more of a shaper,” you tell the reader (143). As you wrote to your mother, your teachers, your grandfather, the Ford Motor Company, a beloved poetry friend, I write to you. And I, too, aim to shape something in the process.
Though not explicitly in letter form, your poetry also possesses epistolary qualities. The poems and illustrations in With My Back to the World, for example, constitute a correspondence of sorts between you and Agnes Martin, an imaginative engagement with both her writing and her painting. Similarly, using W. S. Merwin titles in The Trees Witness Everything (TTWE) offered you “a way to inhabit another person’s mind,” the shared titles another mode of literary connection (118). Many of OBIT’s tankas are addressed to the speaker’s children in the manner of letters; moreover, the obituary poems themselves, which could be likened to elegiac farewell letters, addressed to a person or an object.
The “epistolary” writing in your books, with its one-to-one correspondences, speaks on a human scale, and therefore creates a pressing intimacy. Which is why, I think, addressing Agnes Martin as “Agnes” was a natural inclination. It points to a companionship or camaraderie often inherent to exchanges between women, and women artists in particular, instead of the more impersonal use of a patronym, as male critics typically employ. “V” is my version of your “Agnes.”
The epistolary, as form or inspiration or impulse, enables a voice that’s decidedly personal. You send your words across time and space, each poem a yearnful outreaching from a speaker to an addressee, one who is not present and may not be known to you, may not even be alive. Most of these “letters” will never reach the person to whom they are addressed.
Perhaps in this way they are like “dead” letters. Meaning, undeliverable and unreturnable. Rather, they hover in a space somewhere between arrival and return. This liminal realm is where readers find them, between the covers of your books and on the page. Like curious postal workers, they rip open your dead letters and encounter your words, sent off to a particular “you.” However, in tearing open these letters, in partaking of that intimacy, readers become another addressee, another “you,” and the letters come to life, every reader a resuscitator, every attentive reading an awakening, both of the work and of the relationship.
