from In the Assarts
Jeff Hilson
31
Repeat I am not a crossbowman
not with these arms
I blunder on
o poesy I couldn't put it together
better as well as
I thomas wyatt
the spy who loved me
is masturbating with the ruler
A-B-B-A
A-B-B-A
o anne Boleyn
I'm straight &
half as good as you &
quite the way you do
32
When I grow up I want to be
I thomas wyatt & hang around
the stately homes of england.
I am not in this dance
the little necks of england
slipped & crowned
so long anne Boleyn you spoiled
my holiday theory of value.
How to explain the flowers to
I thomas wyatt when I was rescued by
her falling
head on my moustache.
O anne Boleyn was there room in
the room that you roomed in?
33
I loved you o anne Boleyn
instead of thomas wyatt I
wrote your falling name on
my mistake. You in very small
trunks. You in dark green.
You in tough smooth tops.
Since I went to pieces
alas my american tats were this bad
when I got off with your head
when I was sir thomas wyatt
yes no don't know
why I spent my life in wood.
These hands made the best french boats.
These hands make the best english bats.
34
When I was sir thomas wyatt
& I dreamt I shot arrows in my
anne Boleyn bra. She was just
being herself by my slow-grown
yew self-bow. I am sir thomas
wyatt I said (we were both
idiots) & I live in a tent
on the field of the cloth of gold.
I shot arrows in a minute.
She died on a shiny turret.
O anne Boleyn I made your head
into an italian sonnet.
Tremendous on the face is you
(she loves to wear a lame bra too)
35
Who I love is donovan
all I said is
& when I am fighting
& when english guitarists were exhausted
& when I am penetrated by the sound of music
my first double album
& now I am a parent I love
double albums more than
double penetration
because I am always fighting
donovan I said
donovan phillips leitch
I love you either way instead of
o anne Boleyn its not the fucking 1360s
36
So I considered the environment
not being on fire or anything
either way I absorbed a photon
its not the fucking 1360s
I'm just mad about
the field of the cloth of gold
& my other yellow hands
in which they lie.
O grammar rules
like the terrible terrible rings
on my photon belt.
O gamma rays
that light itself like
the terrible terrible assarts.
31
Repeat I am not a crossbowman
not with these arms
I blunder on
o poesy I couldn't put it together
better as well as
I thomas wyatt
the spy who loved me
is masturbating with the ruler
A-B-B-A
A-B-B-A
o anne Boleyn
I'm straight &
half as good as you &
quite the way you do
32
When I grow up I want to be
I thomas wyatt & hang around
the stately homes of england.
I am not in this dance
the little necks of england
slipped & crowned
so long anne Boleyn you spoiled
my holiday theory of value.
How to explain the flowers to
I thomas wyatt when I was rescued by
her falling
head on my moustache.
O anne Boleyn was there room in
the room that you roomed in?
33
I loved you o anne Boleyn
instead of thomas wyatt I
wrote your falling name on
my mistake. You in very small
trunks. You in dark green.
You in tough smooth tops.
Since I went to pieces
alas my american tats were this bad
when I got off with your head
when I was sir thomas wyatt
yes no don't know
why I spent my life in wood.
These hands made the best french boats.
These hands make the best english bats.
34
When I was sir thomas wyatt
& I dreamt I shot arrows in my
anne Boleyn bra. She was just
being herself by my slow-grown
yew self-bow. I am sir thomas
wyatt I said (we were both
idiots) & I live in a tent
on the field of the cloth of gold.
I shot arrows in a minute.
She died on a shiny turret.
O anne Boleyn I made your head
into an italian sonnet.
Tremendous on the face is you
(she loves to wear a lame bra too)
35
Who I love is donovan
all I said is
& when I am fighting
& when english guitarists were exhausted
& when I am penetrated by the sound of music
my first double album
& now I am a parent I love
double albums more than
double penetration
because I am always fighting
donovan I said
donovan phillips leitch
I love you either way instead of
o anne Boleyn its not the fucking 1360s
36
So I considered the environment
not being on fire or anything
either way I absorbed a photon
its not the fucking 1360s
I'm just mad about
the field of the cloth of gold
& my other yellow hands
in which they lie.
O grammar rules
like the terrible terrible rings
on my photon belt.
O gamma rays
that light itself like
the terrible terrible assarts.
Tina Bass: Mouthings
A book of conversations.BUY 6" x 9", jacket-hardcover binding, cream interior paper, 60 pages. £8.96 plus £3.50 p&p. Or Download the pdf for free.
"Intercapillary Editions", 2008
Sources and developmental origins are left behind in Tina Bass’ fleet set of scenes cut from conversations with her twin sons covering just over a year. What seemed to the poet worth archiving becomes art-action, a journal which opens at the threshold of state schooling and continues onwards. Coming across these tiny exchanges of power, acquisition, socialisation and play, I read them in unravelling ways: as pieces from a sequence of conversation novels which were somewhere splintering and unifying; as the unsystematic studies or emblems of a parent; as an investigative diagram of articulation. What is it that’s emplotted here?
(series editor Edmund Hardy)
Statement from the author:
On the 6th September 2006 I wrote down a short conversation that I’d had with my two young sons. I posted it onto a MySpace blog and two weeks later recorded another, and then another; until it was suggested that I gather them into a book.
I had been aware for quite some time that I was doing more than recording the words of my children. Obviously the records serve as memorabilia; the preservation of which will demonstrate to Leon and Owen that their mother was paying attention. Each entry can be viewed as an item in the memory box, placed alongside the first baby-grows and the envelopes filled with milk teeth.
As a female writer, writing in a way that foregrounds motherhood, I believe that I have also been articulating something of the unsaid feminine. I have recently been guided to Mary Kelly’s Postpartum Document and have been fascinated by her passion for illustrating ‘the collaged life of women who choose to create and procreate’. That particular work has been critiqued by many but it is when Mary describes the Document as ‘the rationalisation of a difficult experience’ or compensation for giving birth and losing control, that I find myself smiling and releasing an exuberant ‘Hear, Hear’.
27th September 2006
(Owen has struggled to drop off to sleep since he has started school. Leon rarely takes longer than 1-5 minutes)
Owen: 'Cwab' starts with 'cuh', 'koala' starts with 'cuh', 'starfish' starts
with a 'duh'
Mummy: Owen, it's time to close your eyes and go to sleep now. It's late.
Owen: I can't sleep because I'm thinking.
Leon: Owen. YOU. JUST. CLOSE. YOUR. EYES.
Tina Bass currently lives, works and studies in the Midlands of England. With the support of Lawrence Upton and Martin Holroyd she has recently had two poetry chapbooks published: Mechanical Expressions (Writers Forum, 2007), and Fat Man Dancing, (Poetry Monthly Press, 2006). Some of her poems are online at Great Works, Dusie and "Intercapillary Space".
[#] "Intercapillary Editions" main page
Constellation: Alice Notley
Curated by Carol Watts and Edmund Hardy
Contents“‘As - I - say - a - word,’” “she said again”
“but in a” “staccato way,” “a - new - star - appears’” “And at
each word she said” “a point” “of light appeared”
- Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette, p.99
[#] Carol Watts and Edmund Hardy: Introduction
In The Pines
[#] John Hall: Beginning to read Alice Notley’s In the Pines
[#] Steve Willey: The Sounds of the Pines
[#] Catherine Wagner: On ‘In The Pines’
[#] Michael Peverett: Alice Notley, “In Forgetting”
[#] Pansy-Maurer-Alvarez: This Plot, This Place
[#] Elizabeth James: ‘Our violent times’: reading notes
[#] David Kennedy: This Is Not Poetry #27
From 165 Meeting House Lane to Margaret & Dusty and after
[#] Lisa Samuels: Words for Alice Notley
[#] Ian Davidson: Bodies, near and far: Alice Notley
[#] Sophie Robinson: ‘Incidentals in the Day World’
[#] Susana Gardner: “Alice ordered me to be made”: As deconstruction of hearts or,- a hand of broken sonnets
[#] Steven Waling: Alice Notley’s ‘January’: An Appreciation
[#] Lynne Hjelmgaard: Notes on Alice Notley’s ‘Desert For All Of Music To Take Place’
[#] Elizabeth Bryant: A response to Alice Notley’s ‘Sweetheart’
[#] Dana Ward: That Alice Notley & Jay-Z & Dana Would Speak Through The Imperfect Media of Dana
Mysteries of Small Houses
[#] Carol Watts: On ‘Would Want to Be in My Wildlife’
[#] Jon Clay: Alice Notley’s ‘A Baby Is Born Out of a White Owl’s Forehead – 1972’
[#] Peter Middleton: “101” from Mysteries of Small Houses
[#] Amy Hollowell: After Alice Notley’s “1992,” from Mysteries of Small Houses
[#] Jen Currin: After “Remember What I Came Here to Do to This World Very Little Actually”
[#] Sarah Hopkins: Response to Alice Notley’s ‘Lady Poverty’
[#] Elizabeth Treadwell: After ‘Beginning with a Stain’
The Descent of Alette
[#] Caroline Bergvall: Alette in the Subway
[#] Zoë Skoulding: Notes on ‘A red-lined map’: The Descent of Alette
[#] Piers Hugill: Materials for a reading of ‘“I stood waiting”’ from The Descent of Alette
[#] Melissa Flores–Bórquez: Notley, Monteverdi & Infinite Negativity
[#] Claudia Keelan: Poet of Prophecy: Our Anti-Saint Alice Notley
Alma, or the Dead Women
[#] Ralph Hawkins: ‘Radical Feminist’ from Alma, or The Dead Women
[#] Tim Allen: and if it’s its it’s true: Some thoughts on Alma, or The Dead Women by Alice Notley
[#] Jennifer Cooke: Alice Notley’s ‘Decomposition’
From the Beginning
[#] Edmund Hardy: Alice Notley’s From the Beginning: To a poem’s unreason
Above the Leaders
[#] Stephen Mooney: On Above the Leaders
[#] William Rowe: Alice Notley: A Poem from Above the Leaders
Negativity’s Kiss
[#] Redell Olsen: 3 Selections from “Negativity’s Kiss” by Alice Notley
[#] Alice Notley: Ten poems from Negativity’s Kiss
Constellation: Alice Notley
This Constellation is a collaboration between Birkbeck Centre for Poetics, Openned and “Intercapillary Space”.
[#] Main Birkbeck Notley page
[#] Openned Video Constellation of Notley reading at Birkbeck, May 2008
[#] Return to top of this page
The Notley collage image used throughout the Constellation is by Susana Gardner
The Openned video constellation was filmed by Stephen Willey, page design and blog design by Alex Davies & Stephen Willey, special thanks to Adrian Tribe at BirkbeckIntroduction
Carol Watts and Edmund Hardy
The idea for this constellation of responses to the work of Alice Notley came from an event held at Birkbeck Poetics Centre in May 2008. The original thought had been that while her work is circulating and celebrated in the US there had been few opportunities to hear her recently in Britain. The importance of hearing Alice – the central encounter with voice in her writing – meant that we had to find a form of event that might do justice to it. Not long academic papers, as is often the model, but something more interstitial and open. She agreed to be present and to read throughout the day, so I decided her voice and its relation to a community of friends (known and unknown, present and absent) would shape what we did, the ‘work’ of discussion on the day. Each of the original group of participants spoke for no more than ten minutes, taking one poem or section of poetry as their starting point, and freely moving from her work to their and her practice, from personal negotiations of what they found there, to debates about what was at stake in such a writing. From 10 in the morning to 6 in the evening she talked, read, exchanged. That work, and footage of her reading, is the kernel of this unravelling constellation, which has spread as it should in capillary form through a wider community of connections to the US, New Zealand, Switzerland, France. To explore and celebrate her writing.
Alice has said she always has a sense of audience when she writes, that her voice negotiates an audience whom she could imagine present as they might be in St Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. In a collection like Margaret & Dusty you can hear them all talking back, identifiable and immediate friends, lovers, children, merging with the more general being-there of people who ‘harass their mothers’ or ‘can surprise & whomp out a good’. It sometimes takes on the feel of a wry Whitman-like inclusiveness. ‘But what we are,/we’re all friends, sometime/ lovers, relatives, enemies./ We’re bigger than the/ cosmos, bigger than/ religion. That’s no/ help either.’ As many of these responses explore, her work is throughout marked by a play and indeterminacy of address, of self-positioning, which can often be exhilarated, full of pain, unremittingly open to its self-scrutiny, and which channels the social and political intensities of what life and language are even as it is at its most intimate and conversational.
Beyond the dynamics of her writing – which this constellation opens up in ways that should speak for themselves – there are two further thoughts which Alice’s continuous performance and the event generated for me. One is about the acoustic terrain of a reading, what takes place in a room – the duration of that experience for both poet and audience. Not just the encounter with the poem and its sounding, its calling out – an encounter which moves in and out of moments of recognition for both, in an affective experience which can also feel unworked and therefore involve shock, wonder, suffering, laughter, anger, fear. But also the space a reading opens up, even as you listen, a space for thought: aleatory, daydreaming, a time for the hearing of other voices including the thresholds for your own writing, personal material, kinds of permission. Moving in and out of proximity to the voice. Working alongside Alice on that day meant that some of this process was freed into discussion, and the pitch of the pieces included here, from those present and absent, reflects that – including poems written ‘for’ and alongside Alice’s work, and more personal modes of engagement, reflections on practice, integrated with critical investigation.
The second thought concerns what it might be to constitute a ‘community of friends’, in and beyond the room where poetry is performed and written. Increasingly the nature of poetic exchange online, in blogs, rapid uploadings, lists and interventions, produces kinds of intimate connection, the recognition of the presence of voices and diverse forms of poetic labour, which feel like a rhizomatic community even when none of us may meet. And in turn these connections produce events like the one in May, which has had an extended life in the ongoing connection between Birkbeck Poetics Centre, “Intercapillary Space” and Openned, and beyond. It’s a creative extension of community which has amazing generative promise, is transforming practice, but which knows at root the extraordinary value of a presence like Alice’s. An open community of friends not in any cosy or exclusive sense, but one which has its wide flows and affinities, and also, in Blake’s sense, sometimes, in its contesting, a political force: ‘Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake/ Do be my Enemy for Friendships Sake’. So that is where I begin to hear her voice, where I want to encounter her work, among other spaces, as well as in the room on that day in May.
Carol Watts
The invitation was to address one particular Notley poem, at the colloquium and for this extended gathering also. Contributors were free to choose the poem and the form their response or reading would take – essay or poem, note or review. The result is not a chronological trip through Notley’s work so much as a map of current preoccupations, books in the pocket, poems in the head. As such the pieces fell (more or less) into their own arrangement.
Beginning with the place where you slept last night, In the Pines, this book of curative and death-eyed lyric, already given the title of a dream-like, contested nocturnal space, proves here a work equally contested as arguments and poems cut back across each other. Lisa Samuels then invokes the poet of voices in Margaret and Dusty, writing of a permission to write first found, leading us back to a series of reflections on earlier Notley books, several contributors discussing both the carrying of voice and of body through and into text. An epigrammatic, two line poem by Elizabeth Treadwell, which I read as a kind of talisman, points onwards to the book of “I”, the Mysteries of Small Houses: creating a self, finding that self as poverty, the pieces here responding to poems from across the autobiographical arc of the book. The Descent of Alette then forms something of a centre-piece, from fragments to an epic whole, a poem of political thought, fabled structures, psyche transmuted, continuous narrative. Different contributors seem to face the question: What does this poem propose about the world?
The politics of Disobedience and then of Alma, or the Dead Women run through to the extended noir investigation of power and falsity in Notley’s new work, Negativity’s Kiss, while alongside these engagements are pieces on two booklet-length works, From the Beginning and the Paris poems of Above the Leaders. Notley once wrote in an essay, ‘The Poetics of Disobedience’, “I think I conceive of myself as disobeying my readership a lot.” In this collection, the various disobeyed bring individual encounters to light:– writing and experiencing very differently, while puzzling over lines and permissions, words and their shadows, and that key Notley imperative to find the world.
Edmund Hardy
Acknowledgements
Both curators would like to thank Steve Willey for filming on the day and to Steve and Alex Davies for the video constellation, Stephen Mooney for taping the talks and working on the Poetics Centre website, and Jon Clay for the initial conversation which sparked the thought. Thanks too to Susana Gardner, Lynne Hjelmgaard and John Hall for their help in bringing together the extended constellation. To all the participants for their rich contributions and willingness to be constellated. And to Alice Notley herself, for her generosity, and stamina.
_____________________________________________________________________
Constellation: Alice Notley
[#] Birkbeck Centre for Poetics
[#] Openned Video Constellation of Readings
[#] Return to “Intercapillary Space” Notley Contents page
The idea for this constellation of responses to the work of Alice Notley came from an event held at Birkbeck Poetics Centre in May 2008. The original thought had been that while her work is circulating and celebrated in the US there had been few opportunities to hear her recently in Britain. The importance of hearing Alice – the central encounter with voice in her writing – meant that we had to find a form of event that might do justice to it. Not long academic papers, as is often the model, but something more interstitial and open. She agreed to be present and to read throughout the day, so I decided her voice and its relation to a community of friends (known and unknown, present and absent) would shape what we did, the ‘work’ of discussion on the day. Each of the original group of participants spoke for no more than ten minutes, taking one poem or section of poetry as their starting point, and freely moving from her work to their and her practice, from personal negotiations of what they found there, to debates about what was at stake in such a writing. From 10 in the morning to 6 in the evening she talked, read, exchanged. That work, and footage of her reading, is the kernel of this unravelling constellation, which has spread as it should in capillary form through a wider community of connections to the US, New Zealand, Switzerland, France. To explore and celebrate her writing.
Alice has said she always has a sense of audience when she writes, that her voice negotiates an audience whom she could imagine present as they might be in St Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. In a collection like Margaret & Dusty you can hear them all talking back, identifiable and immediate friends, lovers, children, merging with the more general being-there of people who ‘harass their mothers’ or ‘can surprise & whomp out a good’. It sometimes takes on the feel of a wry Whitman-like inclusiveness. ‘But what we are,/we’re all friends, sometime/ lovers, relatives, enemies./ We’re bigger than the/ cosmos, bigger than/ religion. That’s no/ help either.’ As many of these responses explore, her work is throughout marked by a play and indeterminacy of address, of self-positioning, which can often be exhilarated, full of pain, unremittingly open to its self-scrutiny, and which channels the social and political intensities of what life and language are even as it is at its most intimate and conversational.
Beyond the dynamics of her writing – which this constellation opens up in ways that should speak for themselves – there are two further thoughts which Alice’s continuous performance and the event generated for me. One is about the acoustic terrain of a reading, what takes place in a room – the duration of that experience for both poet and audience. Not just the encounter with the poem and its sounding, its calling out – an encounter which moves in and out of moments of recognition for both, in an affective experience which can also feel unworked and therefore involve shock, wonder, suffering, laughter, anger, fear. But also the space a reading opens up, even as you listen, a space for thought: aleatory, daydreaming, a time for the hearing of other voices including the thresholds for your own writing, personal material, kinds of permission. Moving in and out of proximity to the voice. Working alongside Alice on that day meant that some of this process was freed into discussion, and the pitch of the pieces included here, from those present and absent, reflects that – including poems written ‘for’ and alongside Alice’s work, and more personal modes of engagement, reflections on practice, integrated with critical investigation.
The second thought concerns what it might be to constitute a ‘community of friends’, in and beyond the room where poetry is performed and written. Increasingly the nature of poetic exchange online, in blogs, rapid uploadings, lists and interventions, produces kinds of intimate connection, the recognition of the presence of voices and diverse forms of poetic labour, which feel like a rhizomatic community even when none of us may meet. And in turn these connections produce events like the one in May, which has had an extended life in the ongoing connection between Birkbeck Poetics Centre, “Intercapillary Space” and Openned, and beyond. It’s a creative extension of community which has amazing generative promise, is transforming practice, but which knows at root the extraordinary value of a presence like Alice’s. An open community of friends not in any cosy or exclusive sense, but one which has its wide flows and affinities, and also, in Blake’s sense, sometimes, in its contesting, a political force: ‘Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake/ Do be my Enemy for Friendships Sake’. So that is where I begin to hear her voice, where I want to encounter her work, among other spaces, as well as in the room on that day in May.
Carol Watts
The invitation was to address one particular Notley poem, at the colloquium and for this extended gathering also. Contributors were free to choose the poem and the form their response or reading would take – essay or poem, note or review. The result is not a chronological trip through Notley’s work so much as a map of current preoccupations, books in the pocket, poems in the head. As such the pieces fell (more or less) into their own arrangement.
Beginning with the place where you slept last night, In the Pines, this book of curative and death-eyed lyric, already given the title of a dream-like, contested nocturnal space, proves here a work equally contested as arguments and poems cut back across each other. Lisa Samuels then invokes the poet of voices in Margaret and Dusty, writing of a permission to write first found, leading us back to a series of reflections on earlier Notley books, several contributors discussing both the carrying of voice and of body through and into text. An epigrammatic, two line poem by Elizabeth Treadwell, which I read as a kind of talisman, points onwards to the book of “I”, the Mysteries of Small Houses: creating a self, finding that self as poverty, the pieces here responding to poems from across the autobiographical arc of the book. The Descent of Alette then forms something of a centre-piece, from fragments to an epic whole, a poem of political thought, fabled structures, psyche transmuted, continuous narrative. Different contributors seem to face the question: What does this poem propose about the world?
The politics of Disobedience and then of Alma, or the Dead Women run through to the extended noir investigation of power and falsity in Notley’s new work, Negativity’s Kiss, while alongside these engagements are pieces on two booklet-length works, From the Beginning and the Paris poems of Above the Leaders. Notley once wrote in an essay, ‘The Poetics of Disobedience’, “I think I conceive of myself as disobeying my readership a lot.” In this collection, the various disobeyed bring individual encounters to light:– writing and experiencing very differently, while puzzling over lines and permissions, words and their shadows, and that key Notley imperative to find the world.
Edmund Hardy
Acknowledgements
Both curators would like to thank Steve Willey for filming on the day and to Steve and Alex Davies for the video constellation, Stephen Mooney for taping the talks and working on the Poetics Centre website, and Jon Clay for the initial conversation which sparked the thought. Thanks too to Susana Gardner, Lynne Hjelmgaard and John Hall for their help in bringing together the extended constellation. To all the participants for their rich contributions and willingness to be constellated. And to Alice Notley herself, for her generosity, and stamina.
_____________________________________________________________________
Constellation: Alice Notley[#] Birkbeck Centre for Poetics
[#] Openned Video Constellation of Readings
[#] Return to “Intercapillary Space” Notley Contents page
‘Decomposition’ by Alice Notley
Jennifer Cooke
Alma, or The Dead Women (New York: Granary Books, 2006), pp. 161-2.
Alma is a work of mourning and dreaming wherein angry ululations, accusations and broken images rub next to some political dirt and straight talking. It is a female book. It talks of the subjugation of women. At least one male reviewer has felt locked out by this, although I wonder if he would state such a thing about, for instance, Afro-Caribbean poetry which directly addresses race.[1] I suspect it is the intensity and insistence of female grief that makes Alma so uncomfortable for some. In the West, grief is usually private so there is a goodly indecency in Alma’s determination to mourn to the end. Not just in its subjects, this femaleness of Alma lives in its language. Is this really possible? Can this book perform a female way of speaking, of writing, as dreamed of by Luce Irigaray and others?
Alma and ‘Decomposition’ remind me of facts about the split between the sexes, forceful facts which are so obvious that they seem to be invisible in contemporary culture. Here’s one: on 3rd October 2008, UK prisons were holding 78,846 men and 4,437 women.[3] Regardless of whether we quibble with the classifications of crime and take into account that some will be incarcerated unjustly, the differential is still absolutely staggering. Yet when is this ever really talked about? With incisive eloquence, these figures mark a societal scandal, a massive human failure, but there is pretty much silence on this particular gender divide in the public sphere. Men just are more aggressive, more inclined to get involved in crime, more likely to be violent or risk-takers: this is what is implicitly assented by the silence and, more perniciously, those qualities are repeatedly represented as useful in certain contexts, such as the financial trading floors of the city. Alma is having none of this and is not afraid to state the obvious facts: that wars are run by men; that men are the ones quoted in the newspapers talking of war, of finance, of football; that it is men who hold guns and shoot them. Alma is freshly angry with such ‘givens’; it will not let us shrug our shoulders and give up, fatigued by post-feminism. I for one am invigorated by this.
The opening lines of ‘Decomposition’ are:
The mad woman, the ‘mental’, and the spell-casting witch are outsiders who are therefore natural companions, if historically separated, as Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément point out in The Newly Born Woman (1975). Cixous and Clément’s description of ‘femininity in writing’ functions as a kind of prophesy fulfilled and overflowed by Alma. They write of:
The movement from the third to fourth and final stanza blurs the boundary between self and enemy, making it hard to ascertain who is being referred to at the start of the poem’s final section:
This last stanza is the most affecting; it is also perhaps the one where the gender divide is, if not broken down (‘he’ still holds the gun, ‘she’ still dies), then at least inclusive of both genders as those who watch such events, although the final line pushes this away from the speaker of the poem, accusing: ‘because you bear the charge of this ground’ (162). What to make of this condemnation of reason, war and patriarchy? It has been made before, of course, but these events and discourses remain powerfully dominant and thus there is still a necessity to criticise and to resist them. Notley’s ‘Decomposition’ is unrepentant about such a line and unrelenting to read. In a West which still rationalises turning a blind eye to atrocities or excusing them as aberrations, Notley’s commitment is, I think, painfully eloquent and exemplary.
Notes
[1] Alan Clinton, in his review of the poem in Reconstruction, 7.4 (2007), claims ‘the text excludes me as a reader’. http://reconstruction.eserver.org/074/clinton.shtml, accessed 9th October 2008.
[2] Isaac Watts, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com, accessed 9th October 2008.
[3] Weekly figures are published on the HM Prison Service website: http://www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/, accessed 9th October 2008.
[4] Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I. B. Tauris Pulishers, 1996), p. 92.
Alma, or The Dead Women (New York: Granary Books, 2006), pp. 161-2.
Alma is a work of mourning and dreaming wherein angry ululations, accusations and broken images rub next to some political dirt and straight talking. It is a female book. It talks of the subjugation of women. At least one male reviewer has felt locked out by this, although I wonder if he would state such a thing about, for instance, Afro-Caribbean poetry which directly addresses race.[1] I suspect it is the intensity and insistence of female grief that makes Alma so uncomfortable for some. In the West, grief is usually private so there is a goodly indecency in Alma’s determination to mourn to the end. Not just in its subjects, this femaleness of Alma lives in its language. Is this really possible? Can this book perform a female way of speaking, of writing, as dreamed of by Luce Irigaray and others?
MAN because he is hunter and fisher. because he cannot speak‘Decomposition’ fights against this solid ‘MAN’ of which it speaks, with his manly activities and law-giving speech. The poem is in ruins, with fragmented lines like incomplete thoughts, and with repetitions through which these thoughts return: a work of composition coming apart. Each stanza is punctuated by a star or perhaps a bullet-point, the kind that the poem mutates from war, to democracy, then dance (but also heraldry) in its move through ‘bullet’ to ‘ballot’ to ‘ballet’ (161). The title, ‘Decomposition’, is that familiar word for the state of physical putridity, but a more archaic usage paradoxically names the opposite: it means composition pushed further, an extra compounding of things already composite. This older sense of decomposition is a suitable appellation for the poetic: the poet’s tool, language, is already composite, composed of words whose meanings are layered sediments; the work of poetry, especially the work of the poetry that is Alma, compounds this further. The poem title’s ‘de’ signals the undoing of orderly, proper writing, a challenge to ‘composition lessons’, and also – perhaps unintentionally –undoes the fallacy of composition, a philosophical term for which the OED uses Isaac Watts’ 1724 definition, from his Logick: or the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth:
except in regulation if he could speak as i can he would be in ruins too
(161)
The sophism of composition is when we infer any thing concerning ideas in a compounded sense, which is only true in a divided sense..If any one should argue thus, Two and three are even and odd; five are two and three; therefore five are even and odd.[2]A later example is of how many small debts can erroneously be inferred, because they are all small, to therefore not be ruinous. To de-compose this fallacy, then, would be to attempt to fight against or resist a world in which logic has been skewed and to attempt to restore events, or perhaps reason, to their or its proper proportions: to make it be seen, for example, that the many deaths of women who are innocent over the world cannot be reduced to specific, tragic circumstances or illustrative photos in newspapers, symbolising grief (‘because the tears of women are politically exploitable’ (118)) but actually add up to a terrible – and Alma would argue, male – injustice against one half of humanity. This is what Alma confronts us with: not the idea that every bullet and every bomb that has ever killed a woman was a calculated act of misogyny, deployed by a man against an innocent; but, instead, that in a patriarchal world, again and again women have more to lose – and often do - and less to gain than men.
Alma and ‘Decomposition’ remind me of facts about the split between the sexes, forceful facts which are so obvious that they seem to be invisible in contemporary culture. Here’s one: on 3rd October 2008, UK prisons were holding 78,846 men and 4,437 women.[3] Regardless of whether we quibble with the classifications of crime and take into account that some will be incarcerated unjustly, the differential is still absolutely staggering. Yet when is this ever really talked about? With incisive eloquence, these figures mark a societal scandal, a massive human failure, but there is pretty much silence on this particular gender divide in the public sphere. Men just are more aggressive, more inclined to get involved in crime, more likely to be violent or risk-takers: this is what is implicitly assented by the silence and, more perniciously, those qualities are repeatedly represented as useful in certain contexts, such as the financial trading floors of the city. Alma is having none of this and is not afraid to state the obvious facts: that wars are run by men; that men are the ones quoted in the newspapers talking of war, of finance, of football; that it is men who hold guns and shoot them. Alma is freshly angry with such ‘givens’; it will not let us shrug our shoulders and give up, fatigued by post-feminism. I for one am invigorated by this.
The opening lines of ‘Decomposition’ are:
and intone inside the spell am i inside it with the deadSpells are cast by women, the mysterious incantations of witches and sorceresses. ‘Decomposition’ speaks from within the spell; the voice is that which embodies the selves of its ‘we’. The first stanza is concerned with tone, intoning and the nuance of tone, in eyes as in speech:
we will not distinguish ourselves from the nuances of speaking
(161)
if you are mental you’ll know the tone of it bleedingThe ‘it’ referred to as ‘bleeding’, if we follow on from the previous few lines, is ‘my work’ cut ‘down to his size’, as man exerts decisions over the writing and voice of woman. Work and women bleed, as do the bullet-torn and the freshly dead, the corpse whose flesh ‘sings’ in decomposing, in leaking into the earth. The ‘you’ could be the mental ‘you’, or not: there are many ‘you’s in the poem, many ‘i’s, with ‘we’ and ‘our’ as well, and this multiplicity of addressees and speakers disarms any attempt to read the poem as a private communication whilst retaining the privacy, in ‘Decomposition’ at least, of a certain anonymity and therefore an ‘i’ available for identification. The ‘i’ remains lower case and thus shorn of some of its insistent centrality encoded within its usual bold column of black-on-white as ‘I’. ‘Decomposition’, as other poems in the collection, uses the mandala, symbol of unity and completeness; i’s and eyes which can bring together.
i am bleeding only to intone and see through mandala eyes
it is for you i intone, or for the tone itself as a smell is a tone of its own
corpse, the corpse flesh sings it
(161)
The mad woman, the ‘mental’, and the spell-casting witch are outsiders who are therefore natural companions, if historically separated, as Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément point out in The Newly Born Woman (1975). Cixous and Clément’s description of ‘femininity in writing’ functions as a kind of prophesy fulfilled and overflowed by Alma. They write of:
a privileging of voice: writing and voice are entwined and interwoven and writing’s continuity/voice’s rhythm take each other’s breath away through interchanging, make the text gasp or form it out of suspenses and silences, make it lose its voice or rend it with cries.[4]In ‘Decomposition’, there is a usurpation of that most traditional of male discourses: ‘you need to know the name of the law: magic / if you’re mental you’ll know that…’ (161). If the law is magic then it is aligned with ritual and with rites, which is what the later part of Alma turns towards with poems entitled, ‘Rite to Make You Exist Anyway’ and ‘Rite Against Fear’. The slippage into ‘write’ hardly needs highlighting. Magic waned as Enlightenment rationality replaced religion; to return to it, to conjure it as law, is ambiguous. On the one hand, magic has always stood at variance to mainstream explanations and knowledge; it has been hunted down by powerful men, as Cixous and Clément comment in their reading of the Spanish Inquisitors. It attempted to challenge the dominance of the church and of rationality with the supernatural and, often, the local and the mythical. On the other hand, to name law as magic is to give law the properties of powers which are inexplicable. As the poem moves into the third stanza, magic returns as the power of man to kill:
and your name is?...surcease he saidMagic becomes the drug which kills in his hands, the ‘genocide’ which ‘rhymes with cyanide the blue of reason’ (162). Reason is the colour of cyanide which through its rhyming is patterned with genocide and with suicide, placed within the domain of men as ‘magic or medicine’. In this way, magic is not reclaimed as a pre-modern realm of liberating protest to dominant thought but is thoroughly modernised, appropriated by a patriarchal reason which, in turn, can kill.
but he really said my name is cyanide,
as if he and his magic or medicine were Now’s suicide pill
(162)
The movement from the third to fourth and final stanza blurs the boundary between self and enemy, making it hard to ascertain who is being referred to at the start of the poem’s final section:
everyone is defending a self against their faces charred the broken enemyWar is brought over the threshold into the domestic sphere; it is conducted in a room, where, indeed, raids do happen, snipers do shoot from, and people are killed in: it is not only on the ‘battlefield’ in the ‘open air’ that the ‘theatre of war’ takes place. Even more fragmented than the other stanzas, there is urgency here, in the face of death, for ‘…he is going to shoot them all and i’ll / we are watching, nations founded on the genocide of who was there first’ (162). We are all complicit; we are all spectators. In the people dressed as performing bears for the one who holds the gun, there is a horrible prescience of the human circus created at Abu Ghraib prison by the American soldiers. Finally, poignantly, it is ‘she’ who is the ‘anyone’ whose eye is ‘now never closed’ (162), the anyone which is repeated six times in four lines. ‘i am here for the love of my incursion’ (162), claims the poem towards its close: incursion as blame-taking, as well as attack or invasion.
*
has to kill those people why the rules for taking over the room
(162)
This last stanza is the most affecting; it is also perhaps the one where the gender divide is, if not broken down (‘he’ still holds the gun, ‘she’ still dies), then at least inclusive of both genders as those who watch such events, although the final line pushes this away from the speaker of the poem, accusing: ‘because you bear the charge of this ground’ (162). What to make of this condemnation of reason, war and patriarchy? It has been made before, of course, but these events and discourses remain powerfully dominant and thus there is still a necessity to criticise and to resist them. Notley’s ‘Decomposition’ is unrepentant about such a line and unrelenting to read. In a West which still rationalises turning a blind eye to atrocities or excusing them as aberrations, Notley’s commitment is, I think, painfully eloquent and exemplary.
Notes
[1] Alan Clinton, in his review of the poem in Reconstruction, 7.4 (2007), claims ‘the text excludes me as a reader’. http://reconstruction.eserver.org/074/clinton.shtml, accessed 9th October 2008.
[2] Isaac Watts, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com, accessed 9th October 2008.
[3] Weekly figures are published on the HM Prison Service website: http://www.hmprisonservice.gov.uk/, accessed 9th October 2008.
[4] Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I. B. Tauris Pulishers, 1996), p. 92.
Ten poems from Negativity's Kiss
Alice Notley
CAST OF CHARACTERS
The Agent: The Agent, assigned vaguely by the government to tail Ines, the poet, has fallen in love with her.
Charl: Charlatan Gregory, media (the Garble) mogul who has targeted Ines in his papers, wants to be shot, have a near-death experience, and report on it in order to be admired.
Verball: A sort of failed thinker, now killer, he has hacked to pieces Harry preparatory to killing Ines.
Harry: Victim of Verball’s axe murder, now existing only in ghostlike pieces, she haunts Verball.
Orphée: Possibly passé folklike singer, tried to shoot Ines, is now saddled with Verball with whom he once had an affair.
C.S.: Younger poet, female, tried to shoot Ines, and is now preparing to shoot Charl.
Cop: Assigned to Ines’s case after first attempted murder of her, has been transformed into lucidmindedness by this association.
Ines: Verball’s ultimate victim, also the author of various poems promulgated and attacked via the Garble. She has the power of Eversion: she can turn you insideout -- that is, totally fuck you over -- with her words. She is also the tutelary deity to whom Harry prays.
_____________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________
Constellation: Alice Notley
[#] Birkbeck Centre for Poetics
[#] Openned Video Constellation of Readings
[#] Return to “Intercapillary Space” Notley Contents page
CAST OF CHARACTERS
The Agent: The Agent, assigned vaguely by the government to tail Ines, the poet, has fallen in love with her.
Charl: Charlatan Gregory, media (the Garble) mogul who has targeted Ines in his papers, wants to be shot, have a near-death experience, and report on it in order to be admired.
Verball: A sort of failed thinker, now killer, he has hacked to pieces Harry preparatory to killing Ines.
Harry: Victim of Verball’s axe murder, now existing only in ghostlike pieces, she haunts Verball.
Orphée: Possibly passé folklike singer, tried to shoot Ines, is now saddled with Verball with whom he once had an affair.
C.S.: Younger poet, female, tried to shoot Ines, and is now preparing to shoot Charl.
Cop: Assigned to Ines’s case after first attempted murder of her, has been transformed into lucidmindedness by this association.
Ines: Verball’s ultimate victim, also the author of various poems promulgated and attacked via the Garble. She has the power of Eversion: she can turn you insideout -- that is, totally fuck you over -- with her words. She is also the tutelary deity to whom Harry prays.
_____________________________________________________________________
The President is more than the present
moment, the President
personifies Any Asshole as we prefer him the
King of our Night
Repeated from ‘first moment when I saw him’
he is continuuity smoothing time, so I
won’t break up into
pieces of freedom a doing what you want
each
second’s hopeless choice. The Agent thinks.
I served him
in order to be in time, and
serve Ines to be out of it. The glass men
gleam all around me but
I am supple, because I sigh. I’m medieval
quiet histrionic artifacts of a soul.
The executive emotion, state stated: states unified so
you can be a citizen
I’m too old. Everything I am --
fealty as eroticism -- older
than this surface where the President’s heart
farts: Man Get Fart
is the commandment of choice, via the
commercial God. So
lend me my best subterfuge
I serve Ines. Erect for poetry
because it’s more mysterious than
His Charlataned pronouncements
My new name is in my mouth
Angel Agent, assigned to discover Her.
Sent out from unforecast illumination
to wonder
How does she rest
silver amid the grimy turbulence, spectacle
both violent and asleep?
Or is she not silver but ebony in Xaos’
own untricked victory -- dark
truth to touch
is the very she I love.
*
Charl wants to be shot: he wants it
wants it wants it
he’s enacted no new thing, save further media
monopolies, for years. Head FULL
of rampant desire which chases all
fetid lingerings
of mechanical buyup of the language from his mind --
I need to be shot in
the heart -- could I survive a wounded heart?
I will provide a text of my near-death
experience for my public --
though I own communication I
haven’t yet written a book
will you admire me when I’ve suffered
physically and seen the diamond
of this god everyone has such fits about
god of Moses and Mohammed: father of Jesus: the
great big swoon
as then I’d rise. When the world digital
library is destroyed, I’ll
have buried my own account -- in many copies --
deep in earth and sea. In forms of book, scroll, tablet
as well as computer disk the newly
primitive future may not
know what to do with. But first
the bullet, the pain. Should I advertise for my assassin?
No it just has to happen . . . Like
falling in love.
No more goons around me, though: I’ll
pretend I want access to the readers
guards down -- I’ll receive select visitors in my
office -- how can I assure
being only wounded? I’ll find a bulletproof vest that
blunts but doesn’t stop
I’ll be shot, all right; I’ll have
the experience
And if it’s my head? -- but it will be my heart
my heart’s certain of that.
*
Verball’s secreted in Orphée’s extra place
But Harry
you’ve followed me -- Many not all of my fragments
have
Some are praying for succour from a tutelary deity
Darling I need to be reunited -- How can
you love me? -- I have to: you killed and
dismembered me
nobody knows me better than you do.
But I need a way out
of this love, I know that. I am not
Xaos, am I, for
I was once created. And then says, Tutelary,
Dance towards my pieces; gather me up . . .
Until I’m whole much of me rests
with you, perfidious Verball. For you’d
still prefer to kill Ines, wouldn’t you
And she is MY deity. You can’t kill
her before
she gathers me up
I think that’s correct, says Verball
We’d better render you
intact before I see to her. Pray Harry pray
Get her to unify you
Orphée hates me being here talking to
the air where
you are. -- And I had a lovely neck, Harry says,
and cobalt eyes, and NO
enemies, not even you. Why was I alive
if I could be ended like a piece of equipment?
Why was I born whole so your sick blade
could take me down
There’s no god except the one who puts me
together
and that’s not Jehovah who can’t do ANYTHING
phantom blowhard: the
perfect model of a man -- Not me Harry --
You cut me to pieces like a jealous god
like a powerloving sonofabitch who
thought he was owed something
Maybe I don’t really love you. But I can’t
leave your aura. You’ve rent me stolen me made me
yours, you shit.
*
Orphée lights a candle -- to what? I’m not
certain, he
thinks. Not to my old God he’d hate me
Verball says he’s killed a woman
speaks of cut limbs and bloody organs
He and I made love once, not a bad
thing though he’s icky now. Filthy
delusive atremble --
I’ll get a song out of this. But first I
have to suffer -- I can do that.
It’s all in your felonious, terrified
mind/
heart. I’ve been there. You light a candle
to some powerful jackoff from down
through the
ages: my own occult
internal Church of the Orphée Night
Oh please some god show compassion
Oh grant your principle singer some
downstreaming light
I’m a suffering traitor in a quandary
rack me
if you have to then show me the way.
The way? That’s a cliché. The beatific
way? That’s not me. I have gospel vertigo
dizzy for you lord -- whoever you are --
I feel that someone’s there -- but if it’s a
woman -- oh
No. If I’m praying without knowing to a
cunt. I don’t think like that. I didn’t
use that word, God. Or Goddess. The
words pop in --
I can’t let the papers connect me to
Verball. God, or woman god -- Charl’s
never gotten
through to me before -- I’m inviolate, aren’t I
*
I return to the rue des Pins resigned to
hallucinate
Harry, trees, apocalypse, my own story --
whatever’s happening isn’t. Take me
into your
sanctity, Dream, and enact my understanding
Blue and midnight blueblack trumpet
flowers. Eurynome’s
first creation from Xaos
the regeneration of night into fragility
Now the frail with their
pollened tongues speak. The pieces are
lost, say the voices, blown away
cannot be gathered . . .
But Harry can’t be just sacrificial, I reply . . .
We don’t believe in myths; we’re voices
of the moment. Tell her that she’s
no more than
us -- Don’t say I’m nothing! Harry shouts
We’re all invoked, a voice says.
Grief duties paid, get rid of this concern for
your organs. -- I want my pieces! -- You
can’t have them.
Am I a failure as a spirit of place? All the
spirits here are yelling at each other
We are chaotic, one says. Then:
Harry, pull
yourself together without all your parts.
You’re just dead, come away with us
nothing bad will happen. Dead’s
just dead
Lost eyes. A lot of smashed egrets, but no
regrets. Harry screams
I don’t want it! -- You don’t know
what you want . . .
I think she’s going with them
I stand trembling on the sidewalk . . .
shadow trees everywhere, smoke and teary drops
I think that I must be in danger.
*
C.S. dreams -- she hasn’t dreamed for
a long time --
that a black-gummed flower
a dark, mouthed blossom
is talking to her
Once you were a silly little shit
Now you’re being sucked towards la
vrai nuit
you had NO -- aucune -- réalité -- always on
the surface
tinted highlights. You contributed a
fraction of permanence --
a syllable or word -- to the Big Tablet
Two decades of remembering to wash your
pantyhose . . .
It is essentially a world where no one
experiences her own form . . . See yourself
NOW
C.S. views herself: she looks exactly
like the blue-black flower but pained
with closed black weeping eyes
slit into the top petals . . . I
don’t understand what the affect
of this
is, she thinks, in the dream. Beyond parody
and my own
dismemberment -- my doctrinairely
fractured
self . . . Has there always been torment
Who is the tormented --
pulled down into the earth by my
flower roots which
betray me -- I didn’t ask to be a flower
or a person. And I, it was I
who didn’t ask
C.S. awakens sobbing. I didn’t even ask
*
The cancellation of Harry’s presence
in Verball’s
life -- winds howl and she leaves -- is
ambiguous
She leaves ghosts of her ghost, traces
of pieces, mute
but tangible, at least to Verball. Or is
this his
“mind” -- he thinks the quote marks -- coming
apart -- is there a mind apart from
pieces -- Quo usque tandem
abutere, Inessential -- patientia nostra?
He cries out: I
don’t remember Latin! Is ambiguous.
You’re all so fucking ambiguous! Ghosts all --
have no power, all people, pieces, omens.
Numbers sparkling on every damned
branch. What trees?
A furor and torment that you have
divested yourself of
me -- Gone but with the
remnants of my faculties --
Harry you were too embedded -- Pulled
up by the
racines my brain -- nation my own
mental territoire, now you’ve left it’s
bombed and ruined
What are the pleasures of disintegration
my love?
Is this my “mind”? It was myself my all my
world, the city
of inside, collapsed and mutilated
Who has acted -- consciousness? With your
apple cheeks, pommettes, your dumb ideas
Protect me from ideas . . . But kill the
inessential . . . I only know traitors . . .
Explicators everywhere. Except for you
Harry, simple victim, who have ruined ME!
Oh Harry thou has robbed me of my youth --
for I wasn’t old. Now I’m insane
*
Cop and Agent huddle over coffees
Does it matter who shoots who? Cop asks
As long as there are weapons, all victims
are random
The occult ground of being doesn’t care does it?
Our international metropolis
peopled by insects like ourselves
has phony agendas to cover the hairy
asses of those who think for us, but
no one’s in charge! and we’re
importuned by nothing but stories
does the most harm, does the least
it’s all violent
Defend what?
I’ll defend Ines, Agent says, I have to.
She doesn’t need any help; she
caused everything, by causing us to have
a point of view,
Cop replies. No one else is
thinking. If only we’re thinking
our actions’ futility’s preordained.
I’m possessed the Agent says, I can only
be this way
as if I were the poet. One can select
a few things to witness, at a
time, I
saw this, this, I must have loved it, don’t
want it to die -- I’ve killed, haven’t you?
It makes no sense to have to say that,
Cop says
Doesn’t matter what we say, Agent says, But
now I can only speak from one impulse
a light or electric field. I’ve never been
afraid to die -- my training. My definition
My revered genius, species of the
moon.
A pure planet. Not afraid of symbols
Ivory trustee of the memory
of my ecstasy.
I’m the last ecstatic, flying between intellect
and soul
neoplatonic noncommercial daily inride
*
Cop’s Superiors summon him to the
glass
ceiling -- Are you protecting her too much
Ines l’hérétique, the woman
who must be cancelled -- Why? -- We
think motives are apocryphal. First you
knee-jerk do it, it’s in the body: right action.
Didn’t we train you for that? that’s beautiful
She’s just a woman, by definition disposable;
Then we can miss her: that’s beautiful
Who needs
her?
Cop feigns agreement and leaves: But, Really
you’ve no idea you’re not thinking. You
go to War for
this or that reason but really you just
go to war:
you make money so you can make more
ditto fuck so you can fuck again. My Superiors
dream of equalizing your words, he tells Ines,
with a piece -- the worst thing you can do
is say something, not shoot or get shot -- My former
wound is what I know best, Ines
says, Scar in head. It’s like a burning ruby
it’s how I think. I think, That spring is dead
forever
except as a lie; that violence speaks, not
voices; that reason’s mine and it’s very
red and incisive: made, or cut from a
natural stone. Civilizations begin in
chaos, learn to define a reasonable
course later,
scream their demise into the dust: if every civilization
on this globe now goes down, at the same
time, that
will be novel (who’ll be left to appreciate this
novelty?). I seem to be
saying I’m rational, a pointless condition:
do you agree? Is
this our stasis, rationality? I still want to
help. That’s not rational. A lost ethic, can’t work.
Chaos
comes for you, like for Harry. But, says Cop,
so does Verball.
*
The agent presents
himself to me
one day in a cafe, crowded -- I want you to
know I watch you for you, not them.
Why do you care? I ask. I need belief, he says. I
believe, I say, in what happens, though
several realities are happening in me as I sit here
cup in palms. I believe that
there is no right action, because there’s
no general will to act rightly -- that is,
I believe this apparent civilization --
what we agree on
as its facade -- is fucked and there’s nothing I
can do.
Then why do you play the just woman
why don’t you find something hedonistic
to do? kindergarten money or power, sex
in the public
orchid. That’s repulsive, I say
A life of smeary mirrors. I’d rather provoke
apoplexy
in the righteous -- though it’s kind of like
sticking insects lightly with needles to make
them scurry
The mirrors, he says, may reflect light
rather than
shallow selves. The mirrors themselves may
be light
it may all be illusory -- the wars, the political
lies I’ve served. And when we wake up dead it’s not
there. . . Why did Harry have to
suffer? I ask. Why did it hurt when you were shot?
he says. Harry
asked why she was born, but why
were you born,
Ines? We were each born destined, I say.
Not by a theocratic force, but
something tugs at my actions,
always
I believe in Fate
_____________________________________________________________________
Constellation: Alice Notley[#] Birkbeck Centre for Poetics
[#] Openned Video Constellation of Readings
[#] Return to “Intercapillary Space” Notley Contents page
Poet of Prophecy: Our Anti-Saint Alice Notley
Claudia Keelan
No American poet has charted the demise of our empire as aptly as Alice Notley in the last 20 years. From her vantage point in France, Notley has sketched with unerring accuracy the pitfalls of a national character. While intellectuals and the general public cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall, Notley was producing the seminal works of her life in rapid succession: in Close to Me and Closer…(The Language of Heaven) and Desamere, The Descent of Alette, and the 2001 Disobedience, Notley examines the terrain of decline, psychological and physical, of the American psyche. She is, indeed, our Aeneas, carrying our fathers upon her back, and she has restored the epic to its valorous role. Like all heroes, her protagonists—Alette, Amere and the authorial “I”-- set out to vanquish corrupt power and they succeed—as the poems succeed--via disruption and acceptance of indeterminacy. All father figures, her nemesis’s-- a mild, business man tyrant in The Descent of Alette; a guidance counselor in The Language of Heaven; and a seedy detective Harwood in Disobedience-- function as social intermediaries intent upon purging our hero’s righteous anger in order to bring her back to the “realm of human complacency…”(The Language of Heaven). But, thankfully for us, she won’t come back, she refuses mediation and her anger burns fiercely in its pursuit of justice.
_____________________________________________________________________
Constellation: Alice Notley
[#] Birkbeck Centre for Poetics
[#] Openned Video Constellation of Readings
[#] Return to “Intercapillary Space” Notley Contents page
No American poet has charted the demise of our empire as aptly as Alice Notley in the last 20 years. From her vantage point in France, Notley has sketched with unerring accuracy the pitfalls of a national character. While intellectuals and the general public cheered the fall of the Berlin Wall, Notley was producing the seminal works of her life in rapid succession: in Close to Me and Closer…(The Language of Heaven) and Desamere, The Descent of Alette, and the 2001 Disobedience, Notley examines the terrain of decline, psychological and physical, of the American psyche. She is, indeed, our Aeneas, carrying our fathers upon her back, and she has restored the epic to its valorous role. Like all heroes, her protagonists—Alette, Amere and the authorial “I”-- set out to vanquish corrupt power and they succeed—as the poems succeed--via disruption and acceptance of indeterminacy. All father figures, her nemesis’s-- a mild, business man tyrant in The Descent of Alette; a guidance counselor in The Language of Heaven; and a seedy detective Harwood in Disobedience-- function as social intermediaries intent upon purging our hero’s righteous anger in order to bring her back to the “realm of human complacency…”(The Language of Heaven). But, thankfully for us, she won’t come back, she refuses mediation and her anger burns fiercely in its pursuit of justice.
Anyone gets tired of carrying fathers…Carry him she does, as do all Americans, in houses we will never own, with money we can’t see or hold in our hands, sick and tired and uninsured in the hospitals. He is, literally, the “weight of (y)our life…” and his cruelty is our nation’s infrastructure. But, you gotta respect yr daddy so whatever you do, whatever you say, please, not with anger, not with that, it’s so unpleasant, SO embarrassing:
“This poem needs your love.”
An American might say that
How disgusting
Love an American: “they just love us.”
Get some Housing Projects; listen to Rap in them;
turn rightwing electing a maskface in a nice suit;
explode some nuclear bombs.
Americans come to Paris to find out they’re Americans
how interesting for them; I mean us
tired of carrying, carrying that weight
around my neck, who the fuck is this man?
depicted as the weight of your life, can
he be the brunt the cruelty
of that? Yes I carry him, carry him…
(“Just Under Skin of Left Leg”, Disobedience)
Marguerite Yournecar saidThat leaden sky is broadcasting from CNN today. A country steeped from its inception in notions of reform, the America of the 20th century replaced its preachers with psychiatrists, its civic institutions with support groups, its “self” for “health.” WH Auden said “the table is mine because I scrub it.” Wallace Stevens wrote “money is a kind of poetry,” and if you believe that you’ve lost not only the table but the poetry too.
she wouldn’t be in a book of women
of women’s writings because
only women would read it, and
they already knew they were angry—
And
anger, she said, is one, one person
a little personal sputter.
But that’s that kind of anger, Marguerite—
what about
an anger like Dante’s, a whole leaden sky
a church-charged orthodox anger,
creating, in Amer-lingo, a norm for the Great?
That’s not so bad, to damn in perpetuity,
if you’re Great?
(“Just Under the Skin of the Left Leg”)
The weight around my neck must die“Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down…”(“Canto 81,” Ezra Pound). The truth in Alice Notley’s poetry is the truth of my country. Obedient and cowardly, we have given our lives away to our father’s monetary hallucinations and now we will pay. But what is truly ours, what cannot be taken away, is what goes on living without “meaning,” that administrator, in one small breath and then another, in the poetry of this immediate present:
(“Just Under the Skin of the Left Leg”)
I don’t want to create any meaning;
I want to kill it…
You made meaning; I’m
trying to make life stand still,
long enough so I can exist.
I, truly, am speaking
(“Just Under the Skin of Left Leg”)
_____________________________________________________________________
Constellation: Alice Notley[#] Birkbeck Centre for Poetics
[#] Openned Video Constellation of Readings
[#] Return to “Intercapillary Space” Notley Contents page
and if it’s its it’s true: Some thoughts on ‘Alma, or The Dead Women’ by Alice Notley
Tim Allen
. . .is it the skeleton’s voice or mine? and if it’s its it’s true I will surely see its soul in the future of death and if it’s mine it’s the same. . .
If you try to isolate poetry from any other human activity it becomes easier to assimilate. Contradiction? Of course, this is poetry we’re talking about – but by establishing a gap between world and poem it becomes possible to deal with what the poem is doing – the world produced by the art of the poem might not be clear, or even whole, but it becomes something you can walk through, the obstacles and tangles of the world rendered as vision, dream, language. On the other hand if you treat poetry as an integral activity, at one with the mess of the world, it becomes impossible to recognise, and focus fails. Not such a contradiction, perhaps?
These thoughts are among many that swim back and forth in my brain’s goldfish bowl after reading Alice Notley’s Alma, or The Dead Women. The very existence of this poem – the book is a single poem - in the same world as other things (the Olympics, war in Georgia, summer TV repeats, going for a caravan holiday, offering to write a review of a poetry book when it’s something I’ve been unable to do for over three years) seems quite implausible on one level – surely stuff like this cannot be part of the normal world? Its existence in the same world as the more normal poetry I’ve been reading recently (normal as in normal and normal as in normal avant garde etc), from a clutch of current Brit and American magazines, speaks of a tear in the cultural fabric, a hint that not everybody is going down the same road. This is why this great negative scream of a book is so enthralling, gives so much hope through its terrors. The fact that Alice Notley is American (even though within Alma she makes it clear she wishes she was not) tends to place her work within a recognisable history of radical poetry, and yet what she does (if not how she does it) is so different to anything else coming out of that country at the moment that the contrast between the two is blinding. The seamless bland postmodernity and almost neo-spiritually inclined academy verse that has made so much current American poetry (both mainstream and innovative) so dull and unreadable, is challenged here by a poetry so raw, so expressive, so emotively spinal, so downright out of it yet so obviously right in there, in the world, that it becomes, if you want to deal with it, a poetry you need to distance from normal poetry as much as you distance that normal poetry from the world. Alma, or the Dead Women is different, something that any review should state for starters - if not then anything said on the matter would appear as a piddling triviality beside this precarious colossus.
Does a reader need to know anything about Alice Notley’s previous poetry, poetics or personal history to help them swallow, let alone digest, this book? The easy answer is NO! The immediate power of the narrative (which is what it first feels like), the tangible pain that exhausts the reader after only a few paragraphs in, hits direct. By the end of the book a reader with no previous knowledge of Notley might well ask, ‘Who is this person? Who is this individual that can write like this?’ but I don’t think that at such a point they would be asking ‘what?’ or ‘why?’ as the stories told here (strange and ruptured as they are) and the voices that tell them (even stranger – a multiplicity of schizophrenic ghosts) are almost certainly recognisable as the other, the forgotten, the marginalised, the dead, all coalescing into an Everywoman of mythical proportions, speaking in a world which renders such expression as inaudible and meaningless. Yes, anyone can feel, anyone can react in their privacy, but anyone who dares to express? Ah, there’s the difference, there’s the writer, propelled by an awful coincidence of personal grief with national (international) moral crisis into an extreme mesh of feeling and reaction that needs outlet in an epically framed field of expression that itself is extreme and uncompromising.
The harder answer to the question of whether knowledge of Notley’s other works would help in a reading of Alma is, however, YES. An experience of Notley’s poetry, or at least an experience of reading other late New York School poets, might well help in preventing Alma being read simply as a hard-boiled novel gone weird then seriously awry. Related to this I can even see how someone unfamiliar with modern poetry might read this book as the tract of an unfolding mental illness – there is indeed a case for saying there exists a parallel between the way Alma develops, particularly in its obsessive repetition and relocation of motifs and identities in a horizonless world, and the writings of mediums and the insane. Conversely, reading Alma as a fiction, as the controlled framing of a tale of psychosis, would not stretch credulity too far – there are a lot of weird novels out there. American literature has no lack of realism and violence either, we know only too well there are aspects of the culture that revel in the frisson provided by crime, drugs etc, hence the first 30 pages of Alma could be read in the same way I first remember reading Burroughs. However, the shock value (if value is the appropriate word?) of having, by line 5, your first person junkie character having ‘to shoot up, straight into my forehead’, far from leading to the familiar and inevitable stock of squalid scenes and cast leads instead, if you are paying attention, with the needle into that head itself, with the drug, into an ongoing dream. At base Alice Notley takes as, or makes, her discovered hallucination in the mind of her Alma, the field of a poem. My contention is that it takes a fairly experienced poetry reader to see that, to see that this twist is not novelty, not fiction, but real – not documentary realism either but a kind of ultra psychological realism. The wonder is that this is achieved with such apparent artlessness, ‘I was trying to have a nervous breakdown because I was having one…’ And Alma is ‘toying with the idea of a geometry that is a geomatriarchy, what is that?’ It is these simple shifts in sense, these small disruptions, that whatever else they are doing in relation to the layers of meaning that build up within the work as a whole entity, hook the text into close attention of the particular, producing the experience of a naming of nameless things, what we call poetry.
It is ironic that it is this relatively quiet syntactical methodology that provides the humming engine for such a long and complex poem, let alone one with such heat, one with such a strong imperative behind it. The reality of Alma, the reality of its need to be written, is overpowering – poetry like this is testament to the fact that when we are cornered and we have no choice but to turn and face whatever has cornered us, we make choices. Another contradiction? Of course, this is poetry, strange stuff at any level, let alone on the level that Notley takes it, and here she takes it from the corner of despair where it crouches, far out into epical time and mythical space, to compete with the impossible. But does it compete? Above I called Alma uncompromising, but it is as uncompromising with the notion of poetry as it is with anything else – there is definitely nothing ideal about this poem, either as idea or in its execution. At times it leaves poetry as an art dragging behind, unable to catch up with the urgency to slash language onto the page, to kick out, to voice nemesis. You could even say it is flawed (which indeed, some reviews have said) but I don’t see how, in its hurt, in its raw nerve relation to emotional reality, it could be other than flawed in the everyday sense. Language here is not just stretched, it is tortured into complicity. Every new image, every mutation of identity, every re-entrance of a character or motif for the thousandth time, has a desperation about it. The affect is cumulative: the reader is propelled along at pace but at the same time the effort required is emotionally exhausting. Because this constant use of energy must have a similar draining on the writer herself, a consistency of quality is hard to maintain through every individual chapter. (I don’t really know what to call the sections, the individually titled prose poems that, within six larger parts, structure the work.) Therefore thin passages occur and the repetition of tone or another rearrangement of her anger becomes tiresome on occasion – but read on we do. Something ties us to the poem even at these low points, it is as though these have to be navigated in order to discover the next surprise, the next explosion of meaning produced, as before, by some syntactical twist that suddenly re-routes you into the river of energy. I found the dips occurring most often in the middle sections of the book, maybe at that problematical point for all writers of long, long poems where the poet is undecided about concluding the project or forging ahead. This of course forges ahead, it has to, it has to exhaust its possibilities for redemption, at least, yes, the least it has to do is that.
The above does make me wonder what an edited version of Alma would be like, or even if one would be possible. It is a big book: 344 big pages of, mostly, prose. I wonder how differently the poem would have developed if 9/11 had not occurred. At that point Notley had just completed poem 23, The Invisible Organ Presence. The fact that, spookily, that poem ends with the precognitive ‘… if I led an army, or even owned a gun, or counselled politicians, why this is dangerous your thoughts are vicious - but what of this world that is, now, a single violent gesture? The floor keeps moving - ’ sends a shiver down the spine – the poet as Rimbaud’s seer comes to mind. Then tagged on brackets at the end inform us that a few hours later the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon happened. Notley does not of course need to tell us about the import of this, but its noting is vital with regards to the poem itself, and nakedly and instinctively she recognises this – from that point on the poem is undoubtedly sent somewhere it would not otherwise have gone. It is not a tangential shift however – what happens is that the shock and ramifications of 9/11 give a concrete quality to the more abstract anger of the previous pages, the event has externalised what was internal. I think it is fairly safe to say she had already been writing in a state of sorrow, grieving and confusion (following the death of her partner, the poet Douglas Oliver) in which she found both her personal history and her thoughts on the condition of being female in a patriarchal world blurring out of focus into a problem that only poetry could solve (salve) (nothing new for Notley) when this terrible public event occurs. Within the space of a few hours her self-knowledge becomes politicised, her personal conflict becomes universalised and she sees with a blinding clarity who and what is to blame. If only such knowledge could provide consolation? It does not, instead it hurls the poet into hell.
The fact that the next poem, the first post 9/11 poem, is called Radical Feminist and that the first lines are, ‘Alma speaks of the arrogance of countries, by shooting up into the world-map on her head arms thighs and feet…’ had me laughing out loud, a hollow laugh nonetheless. I was thinking something like, ‘Oh my God, what are we in for now?’ and ‘How is she going to handle this?’ The visible evidence of another 300 pages was there but I had no idea how such a thing could be accomplished. This stark situation needs to be considered by those who have expressed negative reactions to Alma. When you think of all the crap that has been written in response to 9/11, the searing quality and importance of Alma is all the more astonishing. The rest of the poetic avant garde (apologies for even calling them that these days) have been as unsuccessful as anyone else in dealing with it – and such a thing is perfectly understandable. Of course it is wrong to categorise Alma as being a response to 9/11, and I’m not. The poem was begun before that date and seems to have been completed before the invasion of Iraq, even though that looked unavoidable at the time. What the main body of the poem does coincide with is the invasion of Afghanistan.
Over the past few years I have found it very difficult reviewing, (Edmund Hardy, the co-editor of this site, used the phrase ‘reviewed-out’ to describe my predicament after reading and reviewing so much for Terrible Work) yet I really wanted to review Alma because I love Alice Notley’s work and in Britain she has neither the profile nor attention she deserves from her astonishing output over the past decade. I was fascinated by her The Descent of Alette (Penguin: 1996), to my mind one of the few true poetic gems written in recent years. The Americans take note of her, even give her prizes, after all she is one of theirs despite the fact she has lived in Europe for a number of years, but reading through some of the stateside reviews of Alma it is clear that the extreme hatred (I don’t know what else to call it) and absolute contempt that Notley has for Bush and the neo-cons puzzles and even embarrasses more staid critics of the regime – they don’t know how to read this poem because they don’t share the same rage. So what would the political right make of their naming in Alma? For example I’d be interested to know what Marjorie Perloff currently thinks about Alma, which politically has such an opposite take to that espoused by Perloff and certain others from the US literary/critical establishment (avant or not) in the wake of 9/11 who, even if not exactly flag wavers, still hum and ha. Notley’s reaction to what has happened regarding Iraq and Afghanistan is visceral, her disgust with the things her country appears to stand for goes deep. I cannot recall reading anything with an inner-space so intense and hyper, which is also so dependant upon the goings on out here in the globally topical. Such ambition is rare, such passion is too. I don’t think I could have chosen a worse book to get me back into reviewing mode – it’s a book that leaves me breathless, speechless.
Therefore it is convenient that Ralph Hawkins has written a wonderfully coherent article about Alma (Narcosis and Dreams) that manages to dig into the textual details and extract a multiplicity of possible interpretations, particularly those related to myth and symbolism. I’m really interested in his dissection of the naming anomaly in the poem too, the way the names of the cast of Alma (and Alma herself) lexically transform. And it is no coincidence that Hawkins chooses Radical Feminist, the first post 9/11 poem, as I noted above, on which to focus, as the relationship between Notley and radical feminism is so important and a possible reading of the book as a radical feminist tract is unavoidable. One of the first things I noted down when beginning this review was that Notley’s concern here was with, ‘the fissure in human affairs between the male psyche orientated towards confrontation and war (death in life) and the female psyche orientated towards harmony and peace (life in death).’ Some male reviews have made much of this simplistic binary, negatively of course. Considering the fact that this is such a huge part of Alma it might seem slightly amiss of me, but I prefer to bracket it, accept this radical feminist take on the human condition as a given, or as it is ‘given’ in the sense of experience to the poet called Alice Notley – accept it and move on into the poem. I for one am not going to argue with the stage as she has set out – I feel I have no right to, as the rich seams of despair she mines here are far in excess of any petty objections about ‘being unfair to men’. Personally I would surmise that both sexes are (almost) equally culpable for what has happened regarding the war on terror etc., just as there is (almost) an equality between its detractors, but such an opinion is irrelevant, trivial and meaningless compared with both the actual state of the world itself and the power of this poem. What matters is the action of this male war psyche, whether espoused by either sex. That Notley tends to see what has happened in terms of gendered psyche is as genuine as my seeing it in terms of national psyche, indeed, there is a close relationship: America’s sense of itself as ‘defender of the free world’ is itself a male conception, just as capitalism and imperialism are. And anyway, current affairs are only the tale end of a history of this sort of thing and Alma, in this respect, is as timeless as it is placeless. The dead women inhabit this timeless place and placeless time. Alice Notley has them speak and it rings super-true.
I’ve read rather a lot of poetry books in my time but this is one up there with the select few. Alma, or The Dead Women is not a flawed masterpiece, it is a masterpiece because it is flawed. Contradiction? Of course, this is poetry.
_____________________________________________________________________
Constellation: Alice Notley
[#] Birkbeck Centre for Poetics
[#] Openned Video Constellation of Readings
[#] Return to “Intercapillary Space” Notley Contents page
. . .is it the skeleton’s voice or mine? and if it’s its it’s true I will surely see its soul in the future of death and if it’s mine it’s the same. . .
If you try to isolate poetry from any other human activity it becomes easier to assimilate. Contradiction? Of course, this is poetry we’re talking about – but by establishing a gap between world and poem it becomes possible to deal with what the poem is doing – the world produced by the art of the poem might not be clear, or even whole, but it becomes something you can walk through, the obstacles and tangles of the world rendered as vision, dream, language. On the other hand if you treat poetry as an integral activity, at one with the mess of the world, it becomes impossible to recognise, and focus fails. Not such a contradiction, perhaps?
These thoughts are among many that swim back and forth in my brain’s goldfish bowl after reading Alice Notley’s Alma, or The Dead Women. The very existence of this poem – the book is a single poem - in the same world as other things (the Olympics, war in Georgia, summer TV repeats, going for a caravan holiday, offering to write a review of a poetry book when it’s something I’ve been unable to do for over three years) seems quite implausible on one level – surely stuff like this cannot be part of the normal world? Its existence in the same world as the more normal poetry I’ve been reading recently (normal as in normal and normal as in normal avant garde etc), from a clutch of current Brit and American magazines, speaks of a tear in the cultural fabric, a hint that not everybody is going down the same road. This is why this great negative scream of a book is so enthralling, gives so much hope through its terrors. The fact that Alice Notley is American (even though within Alma she makes it clear she wishes she was not) tends to place her work within a recognisable history of radical poetry, and yet what she does (if not how she does it) is so different to anything else coming out of that country at the moment that the contrast between the two is blinding. The seamless bland postmodernity and almost neo-spiritually inclined academy verse that has made so much current American poetry (both mainstream and innovative) so dull and unreadable, is challenged here by a poetry so raw, so expressive, so emotively spinal, so downright out of it yet so obviously right in there, in the world, that it becomes, if you want to deal with it, a poetry you need to distance from normal poetry as much as you distance that normal poetry from the world. Alma, or the Dead Women is different, something that any review should state for starters - if not then anything said on the matter would appear as a piddling triviality beside this precarious colossus.
Does a reader need to know anything about Alice Notley’s previous poetry, poetics or personal history to help them swallow, let alone digest, this book? The easy answer is NO! The immediate power of the narrative (which is what it first feels like), the tangible pain that exhausts the reader after only a few paragraphs in, hits direct. By the end of the book a reader with no previous knowledge of Notley might well ask, ‘Who is this person? Who is this individual that can write like this?’ but I don’t think that at such a point they would be asking ‘what?’ or ‘why?’ as the stories told here (strange and ruptured as they are) and the voices that tell them (even stranger – a multiplicity of schizophrenic ghosts) are almost certainly recognisable as the other, the forgotten, the marginalised, the dead, all coalescing into an Everywoman of mythical proportions, speaking in a world which renders such expression as inaudible and meaningless. Yes, anyone can feel, anyone can react in their privacy, but anyone who dares to express? Ah, there’s the difference, there’s the writer, propelled by an awful coincidence of personal grief with national (international) moral crisis into an extreme mesh of feeling and reaction that needs outlet in an epically framed field of expression that itself is extreme and uncompromising.
The harder answer to the question of whether knowledge of Notley’s other works would help in a reading of Alma is, however, YES. An experience of Notley’s poetry, or at least an experience of reading other late New York School poets, might well help in preventing Alma being read simply as a hard-boiled novel gone weird then seriously awry. Related to this I can even see how someone unfamiliar with modern poetry might read this book as the tract of an unfolding mental illness – there is indeed a case for saying there exists a parallel between the way Alma develops, particularly in its obsessive repetition and relocation of motifs and identities in a horizonless world, and the writings of mediums and the insane. Conversely, reading Alma as a fiction, as the controlled framing of a tale of psychosis, would not stretch credulity too far – there are a lot of weird novels out there. American literature has no lack of realism and violence either, we know only too well there are aspects of the culture that revel in the frisson provided by crime, drugs etc, hence the first 30 pages of Alma could be read in the same way I first remember reading Burroughs. However, the shock value (if value is the appropriate word?) of having, by line 5, your first person junkie character having ‘to shoot up, straight into my forehead’, far from leading to the familiar and inevitable stock of squalid scenes and cast leads instead, if you are paying attention, with the needle into that head itself, with the drug, into an ongoing dream. At base Alice Notley takes as, or makes, her discovered hallucination in the mind of her Alma, the field of a poem. My contention is that it takes a fairly experienced poetry reader to see that, to see that this twist is not novelty, not fiction, but real – not documentary realism either but a kind of ultra psychological realism. The wonder is that this is achieved with such apparent artlessness, ‘I was trying to have a nervous breakdown because I was having one…’ And Alma is ‘toying with the idea of a geometry that is a geomatriarchy, what is that?’ It is these simple shifts in sense, these small disruptions, that whatever else they are doing in relation to the layers of meaning that build up within the work as a whole entity, hook the text into close attention of the particular, producing the experience of a naming of nameless things, what we call poetry.
It is ironic that it is this relatively quiet syntactical methodology that provides the humming engine for such a long and complex poem, let alone one with such heat, one with such a strong imperative behind it. The reality of Alma, the reality of its need to be written, is overpowering – poetry like this is testament to the fact that when we are cornered and we have no choice but to turn and face whatever has cornered us, we make choices. Another contradiction? Of course, this is poetry, strange stuff at any level, let alone on the level that Notley takes it, and here she takes it from the corner of despair where it crouches, far out into epical time and mythical space, to compete with the impossible. But does it compete? Above I called Alma uncompromising, but it is as uncompromising with the notion of poetry as it is with anything else – there is definitely nothing ideal about this poem, either as idea or in its execution. At times it leaves poetry as an art dragging behind, unable to catch up with the urgency to slash language onto the page, to kick out, to voice nemesis. You could even say it is flawed (which indeed, some reviews have said) but I don’t see how, in its hurt, in its raw nerve relation to emotional reality, it could be other than flawed in the everyday sense. Language here is not just stretched, it is tortured into complicity. Every new image, every mutation of identity, every re-entrance of a character or motif for the thousandth time, has a desperation about it. The affect is cumulative: the reader is propelled along at pace but at the same time the effort required is emotionally exhausting. Because this constant use of energy must have a similar draining on the writer herself, a consistency of quality is hard to maintain through every individual chapter. (I don’t really know what to call the sections, the individually titled prose poems that, within six larger parts, structure the work.) Therefore thin passages occur and the repetition of tone or another rearrangement of her anger becomes tiresome on occasion – but read on we do. Something ties us to the poem even at these low points, it is as though these have to be navigated in order to discover the next surprise, the next explosion of meaning produced, as before, by some syntactical twist that suddenly re-routes you into the river of energy. I found the dips occurring most often in the middle sections of the book, maybe at that problematical point for all writers of long, long poems where the poet is undecided about concluding the project or forging ahead. This of course forges ahead, it has to, it has to exhaust its possibilities for redemption, at least, yes, the least it has to do is that.
The above does make me wonder what an edited version of Alma would be like, or even if one would be possible. It is a big book: 344 big pages of, mostly, prose. I wonder how differently the poem would have developed if 9/11 had not occurred. At that point Notley had just completed poem 23, The Invisible Organ Presence. The fact that, spookily, that poem ends with the precognitive ‘… if I led an army, or even owned a gun, or counselled politicians, why this is dangerous your thoughts are vicious - but what of this world that is, now, a single violent gesture? The floor keeps moving - ’ sends a shiver down the spine – the poet as Rimbaud’s seer comes to mind. Then tagged on brackets at the end inform us that a few hours later the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon happened. Notley does not of course need to tell us about the import of this, but its noting is vital with regards to the poem itself, and nakedly and instinctively she recognises this – from that point on the poem is undoubtedly sent somewhere it would not otherwise have gone. It is not a tangential shift however – what happens is that the shock and ramifications of 9/11 give a concrete quality to the more abstract anger of the previous pages, the event has externalised what was internal. I think it is fairly safe to say she had already been writing in a state of sorrow, grieving and confusion (following the death of her partner, the poet Douglas Oliver) in which she found both her personal history and her thoughts on the condition of being female in a patriarchal world blurring out of focus into a problem that only poetry could solve (salve) (nothing new for Notley) when this terrible public event occurs. Within the space of a few hours her self-knowledge becomes politicised, her personal conflict becomes universalised and she sees with a blinding clarity who and what is to blame. If only such knowledge could provide consolation? It does not, instead it hurls the poet into hell.
The fact that the next poem, the first post 9/11 poem, is called Radical Feminist and that the first lines are, ‘Alma speaks of the arrogance of countries, by shooting up into the world-map on her head arms thighs and feet…’ had me laughing out loud, a hollow laugh nonetheless. I was thinking something like, ‘Oh my God, what are we in for now?’ and ‘How is she going to handle this?’ The visible evidence of another 300 pages was there but I had no idea how such a thing could be accomplished. This stark situation needs to be considered by those who have expressed negative reactions to Alma. When you think of all the crap that has been written in response to 9/11, the searing quality and importance of Alma is all the more astonishing. The rest of the poetic avant garde (apologies for even calling them that these days) have been as unsuccessful as anyone else in dealing with it – and such a thing is perfectly understandable. Of course it is wrong to categorise Alma as being a response to 9/11, and I’m not. The poem was begun before that date and seems to have been completed before the invasion of Iraq, even though that looked unavoidable at the time. What the main body of the poem does coincide with is the invasion of Afghanistan.
Over the past few years I have found it very difficult reviewing, (Edmund Hardy, the co-editor of this site, used the phrase ‘reviewed-out’ to describe my predicament after reading and reviewing so much for Terrible Work) yet I really wanted to review Alma because I love Alice Notley’s work and in Britain she has neither the profile nor attention she deserves from her astonishing output over the past decade. I was fascinated by her The Descent of Alette (Penguin: 1996), to my mind one of the few true poetic gems written in recent years. The Americans take note of her, even give her prizes, after all she is one of theirs despite the fact she has lived in Europe for a number of years, but reading through some of the stateside reviews of Alma it is clear that the extreme hatred (I don’t know what else to call it) and absolute contempt that Notley has for Bush and the neo-cons puzzles and even embarrasses more staid critics of the regime – they don’t know how to read this poem because they don’t share the same rage. So what would the political right make of their naming in Alma? For example I’d be interested to know what Marjorie Perloff currently thinks about Alma, which politically has such an opposite take to that espoused by Perloff and certain others from the US literary/critical establishment (avant or not) in the wake of 9/11 who, even if not exactly flag wavers, still hum and ha. Notley’s reaction to what has happened regarding Iraq and Afghanistan is visceral, her disgust with the things her country appears to stand for goes deep. I cannot recall reading anything with an inner-space so intense and hyper, which is also so dependant upon the goings on out here in the globally topical. Such ambition is rare, such passion is too. I don’t think I could have chosen a worse book to get me back into reviewing mode – it’s a book that leaves me breathless, speechless.
Therefore it is convenient that Ralph Hawkins has written a wonderfully coherent article about Alma (Narcosis and Dreams) that manages to dig into the textual details and extract a multiplicity of possible interpretations, particularly those related to myth and symbolism. I’m really interested in his dissection of the naming anomaly in the poem too, the way the names of the cast of Alma (and Alma herself) lexically transform. And it is no coincidence that Hawkins chooses Radical Feminist, the first post 9/11 poem, as I noted above, on which to focus, as the relationship between Notley and radical feminism is so important and a possible reading of the book as a radical feminist tract is unavoidable. One of the first things I noted down when beginning this review was that Notley’s concern here was with, ‘the fissure in human affairs between the male psyche orientated towards confrontation and war (death in life) and the female psyche orientated towards harmony and peace (life in death).’ Some male reviews have made much of this simplistic binary, negatively of course. Considering the fact that this is such a huge part of Alma it might seem slightly amiss of me, but I prefer to bracket it, accept this radical feminist take on the human condition as a given, or as it is ‘given’ in the sense of experience to the poet called Alice Notley – accept it and move on into the poem. I for one am not going to argue with the stage as she has set out – I feel I have no right to, as the rich seams of despair she mines here are far in excess of any petty objections about ‘being unfair to men’. Personally I would surmise that both sexes are (almost) equally culpable for what has happened regarding the war on terror etc., just as there is (almost) an equality between its detractors, but such an opinion is irrelevant, trivial and meaningless compared with both the actual state of the world itself and the power of this poem. What matters is the action of this male war psyche, whether espoused by either sex. That Notley tends to see what has happened in terms of gendered psyche is as genuine as my seeing it in terms of national psyche, indeed, there is a close relationship: America’s sense of itself as ‘defender of the free world’ is itself a male conception, just as capitalism and imperialism are. And anyway, current affairs are only the tale end of a history of this sort of thing and Alma, in this respect, is as timeless as it is placeless. The dead women inhabit this timeless place and placeless time. Alice Notley has them speak and it rings super-true.
I’ve read rather a lot of poetry books in my time but this is one up there with the select few. Alma, or The Dead Women is not a flawed masterpiece, it is a masterpiece because it is flawed. Contradiction? Of course, this is poetry.
_____________________________________________________________________
Constellation: Alice Notley[#] Birkbeck Centre for Poetics
[#] Openned Video Constellation of Readings
[#] Return to “Intercapillary Space” Notley Contents page