The first time I visited Green River Cemetery in East Hampton, New York, I had already read Ann Rower’s wonderful book *Lee and Elaine*. I was prepared to see the resting places of Elaine de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, Jean Stafford, Hannah Wilke, and more of the artists and writers our nameless narrator discusses in the book. I knew that Lee Krasner’s stone was going to be a smaller version of her husband’s, Jackson Pollock. But even knowing all this, when I rolled up to Green River Cemetery, sometimes called Springs Cemetery or the Artists’ Cemetery, I was in a state of jacked-up ecstasy. I wanted to throw off any sense of decorum and roll around on the grass. Most of the photographs I took that day were terrible, due to my frenzied, shaking hands. “Cemeteries, like I said before,” Rower’s narrator explains, “always got me hot.” When I spoke to Ann Rower on the phone in order to write this introduction, she in New York and I in Berkeley, I asked her why cemeteries always got us so hot.…