It's time I shared these words here:
Made. adj. Assured of success. The year was 1965, the place New
York City, where a young lady of seventeen lives with her boyfriend in an
apartment with an airshaft instead of a window and discovers she loves playing
with words, letting them tumble on the page and jostle each other in strange
juxtapositions, the weirder the better. Having emigrated to the Lower East Side
from the Southeast Bronx she speaks a smattering of Puerto Rican Spanish and
knows how to stare down a potential mugger in an empty subway car. Late at
night, after a long day spent repairing damaged books in the New School library,
she sips Chianti from a coffee mug and edits the poems she wrote on the Houston
Street bus.
Six months later she comes home to her lover’s announcement
that he prefers someone else, the lease is in his name, she gets the picture.
“Oh there’s a letter for you,” he remembers and she snatches it out of his
betraying hands on her way out the door, leaving it unopened for a week or so
while she learns to breathe again and trust the air will not murder her.
The letter says we read your Bus Poems, want to publish all eleven
of them in our new magazine named after a tragic nymph. How apt. She meets the
editors who are delighted with her tender age. One offers to introduce her to
Alan Ginsberg. When the magazine comes out it is beautifully bound, Niobe
inscribed on the cover in large green letters, her poems interspersed with
photographs of graffiti-spattered walls in the city she will eventually desert as
abruptly as her boyfriend dumped her. She is destined to give up poetry to
write mystery novels, but for the moment, she has ‘made it.’