so blue-colored/it's almost blue

Joshua Clover, 1962-2025

Not a swim report, but all through my swim I thought about Joshua Clover, poet, critic, professor, force of nature. I heard about his death last night, and I’ve been thinking of him ever since, through dreams, through water. We had fallen out of touch for no reason, just through time, but he was one of the most formative and important friends of my life.

We met at Boston University, when I was 17 and he was 21, the big literary man on campus. He was literally big, very tall, maybe 6’4”?—I don’t know; that I don’t seems like an astonishing lack—and in those days a little chubby, though not long after college he took up running and became lean, and somehow taller. Was he a Deadhead back then, or did he just wear Grateful Dead t-shirts sometimes? He had a skateboard and metal-rimmed glasses and his already silver and steel hair was a mass of curls.

Joshua was part of a group of glamorous, smoking, drinking, extraordinarily talented older students in charge of the Boston University Literary Guild who for some reason took me under their collective wing. It’s hard to explain how awkward and shy I was in those days. I joined BULG (pronounced “bulge”) and the literary magazine, Ex Libris. They were poets so I wrote poetry. I wanted to impress them, particularly Joshua. We published each other so often (though we read blind) we resorted to pseudonyms. One of mine was Trudy Booth; one of his was Delia Renaldo Aantiphani-Siedenburg. “Renaldo”—which was how I addressed all correspondence to him—was after Bob Dylan’s role in Renaldo and Clara.

He and I became great pals. He looked out for me until he graduated, encouraged me to apply for poetry classes, including George Starbuck’s transformative graduate poetry workshop (Madonna anno domini is dedicated to George), read my work and made it better. He took me seriously when I was a nearly silent kid. It’s hard for me to guess how much of that is what made me a writer. A lot. I was a dinghy and Joshua’s rising tide lifted me up.

One summer we took The Sociology of Deviance together, and we volunteered to act deviantly in public so the other could take notes for a final paper. I cannot remember all the details of the event that we staged at the IHOP in Brighton in the middle of the night, except I think I wore a wedding gown. My friend Rebecca definitely climbed on the table, held a triangular piece of toast to her head, quacked like a duck, and declared, “I’m Napoleon, you mother fuckers,” a line I wrote because I knew it would make Joshua laugh. He had a delightful rapid fire laugh, which somehow involved his upper body, particularly his long arms in an idiosyncratic gesture close to his torso. I can still see it.

He and I ended up at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the same time—I was in my second year when he was in his first—and we had a running joke about whether Frank Conroy, the director, knew who I was. In those days Frank was famous for being a little unclear on names. Like the jazz pianist he was, he called most of the male students,“Babe.” But he knew Joshua’s name: they shot pool together at the Foxhead, the workshop bar. Everyone knew Joshua’s name. For some reason Joshua was sure Frank must have known mine. (Eventually he did; even now I think it was unlikely he knew it in 1989.) Joshua and I spent some time in the hallways of the English Philosophy Building trying to surprise Frank into calling me something. Our efforts were inconclusive. Maybe, as always, Joshua just liked a game.

During the long difficult year I lived in Philadelphia while I was in library school, I had Joshua’s poem “Blue Louise,” taped to the wall over my desk; I’d ripped it out of the American Poetry Review. I read it every single day. I still think regularly, the sky so blue-colored/it’s almost blue. (The below is the whole poem. It ends with a comma. It’s probably why years later I ended a book with a dash.)

In 1992 to 1993, we were together again, fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. We had an ongoing competition about the mail, in those days when things you wanted might come through the post: money, personal correspondence. It was a kind of poker, I guess. Daily, we compared our hands.

“What did you get?” he asked me one day.

“Oh,” I said, “a check and two postcards.”

He smiled broadly. Then said, “A fan letter.”

“I hate you,” I said, and he laughed with happiness.

There was a lot of pool playing that year—my beloved late Lucy Grealy was also quite good—and one day Lucy and I were at a bar called The Red Rooster, back of the Crown & Anchor, and for some reason I did extremely well. I told Joshua about it and said maybe I should pick it up more seriously.

“Here’s the thing,” said Joshua, who had seen my previous occasional attempts at the table. “Sometimes when people have a sudden great success, they think it’s a sign to keep going, when really they’ve had their peak experience, and they should stop and enjoy the feeling.”

I think about this truth all the time. It has saved me some pain in life.

Though our friendship was always fond and easy, not fraught in any way, I know he could be difficult, maddening. He used contempt as a rhetorical device. To put it mildly, he liked an argument. He was so hellaciously smart that he could make other people feel dumb; that didn’t bother him. When we were undergraduates he was so antagonistic to a visiting professor of poetry, the professor canceled workshop and met us individually for the rest of the semester. I loved him very much.

His work means the world to me. I wish there were more of it to come. We talked to each other now and then on Twitter, though even that’s been a long while, and I regret it. I’m so sorry for his close beloveds.

He was responsible for one of the most magical moments in any friendship I’ve ever had. Before I tell you this story, you need to know that my nickname when I was in college and grad school and a little of high school was Maddog, which many friends who met me in my 20s still call me. How did I get this nickname? I used to say I couldn’t remember, but now I’ll confess: I gave it to myself, age 17, a short plump unfearsome awkward person. At first the name me laugh with its irony, and then its air of toughness pleased me. I still like it.

Joshua always called me Maddog. When we were fellows in Provincetown, he had a once-a-week late night/early morning radio show on WOMR, the community station, playing the music he loved, an astonishing array, because nobody loved music so much nor had so many thoughts about it. In those days I wrote overnight, listening to the radio, generally Larry King but once a week to Joshua’s show.

At the end of his shift one night, he said, in his ordinary voice, “And if Maddog McCracken is listening to this—”

And then in a loving voice, my friend said, “Go to bed, Maddog. It’s late.”