At the MLA hotel in 1972 or ’73, Marjorie Perloff bought me a breakfast. I was living then on what graduate students live on, and that meal was something I very much was in a position to use. Marjorie wasn’t just unhesitant about signing the check, either, or blasé or naive. Her meal arrived for me with a heating of Marjorie force: all enthusiasm, all energetic practical generosity.

Several years later in Honolulu, I met again with Marjorie, and this time her husband joined in the conversation. I have no idea whether she remembered me, but her energy that second time was focused with me on something distinctively detailed: specifically, the differently repeated u’s in Marinetti’s zang tumb tuumb. U after U, the conversation kept on overflowing with Marjorie’s learning, and its energy spilled over into the plenum of Perloff space.

After all the years since, I still remember the gush and flow. That memory phenomenon remains your doing after death, Marjorie. It’s the endless remaking of a memory that won’t die while we who live on live on in memory’s words.