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Disobedience: On Not Reading Alice Notley

Sophie Mayer

Disobedience stands in ambush at the virtual co-ordinates of our ‘post-modern’ inferno. Against ‘decorous poetry,’ Alice Notley’s verse has a caustic swish, the intimacy of a vivisectionist on the contemporary body politic. In an unsentimental interrogation of the will, the soul and the common being the long poem ‘disses’ the orthodoxies of political power, sex, and philosophy. Disobedience does what only the best poetry can do in times like these, surprise, denounce, dissent: Griffin Trust 2002 Judges’ Citation

Alice Griffin’s Disobedience was awarded the Griffin Prize for Poetry (International) in 2002. I was somewhere between Toronto, where the prize was awarded, and Boulder, where the disembodied poetics had been getting to me. I was in love, which is the worst time to read new poetry. It all seemed to mean too much (not much patience with the ‘caustic swish’). On our second date, we went to Scream in High Park, the Toronto alt.lit. festival, and feasted mosquitoes undeterred by the smoky sound of Nicole Brossard’s voice. Poetry = that infuriating itch under the skin.

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‘ “ ‘When I was born,’ ‘I was born now’ ‘fully grown,’ ‘on heroin,’ ‘When I was born’ ‘fully grown’ ‘in the universe’ ‘of no change’ ‘nothing’ ‘grows up from” ‘ (‘Who sings this, whose voice?’ ‘This person’ ‘is a shadow’ ‘down at the end of’ ‘the platform’ ‘I can’t see him’ ‘at all’ ‘He continues’ (‘Book One,’ 1990).

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“Alice Notley was born in 1945 in Bisbee, Arizona. She received a B.A from Barnard College, in 1967, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1969. She married the writer Ted Berrigan in 1972, with whom she had two sons. After Berrigan’s death in 1983, she married the British poet Doug Oliver and relocated to Paris, France.”

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‘The Phoenix Program was CIA-affiliated. (Later
in Needles Dicky Roten confirms that Albert was
in the LRR and a lot of what he did was top secret:
he has a double record, one with blanks).

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His boundaries are too painful and too small:
they keep him where he remembers, they keep his
knowledge concentrated, personal. He must get free of
this self now, but I don’t know how he will;
yet escape’s fated, written already (we all know it and
don’t know it). (‘Sept 17/Aug 29, ‘88’)

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I first heard of Alice Notley in Cambridge in spring 2000, at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry. Notley and Oliver’s attendance was pre-empted by Oliver’s death in April 2000. The assembled poets assembled in stunned silences and the absences of their poetry. I remember presences: Trevor Joyce, Peter Minter, Robin Blaser. The launch of Redell Olsen’s Book of Fur. Poetry = mourners living bodily in a shadow of words.

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‘My love died in the poison blue of spring. The flowers were all polluted blue in
my dreams, and you have been dead for so long that to tell you is
Meaningless?
Contrariwise, you are that one. It was nearly a year ago ravage, all that drama out
of order. Contaminate changes to a sacrificial body, tatooed with blue
so one would know where to fire the radiation
Sacrificial to?’ (‘Iphigeneia,’ 2001)

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“Notley’s writing and art responds to a broad spectrum of American culture. Her experiments with poetic forms and free verse owe as much to Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, and Ted Berrigan as they do to William Carlos Williams. Like them, she believes that she is writing primarily to express her own personal tone of voice. She feels her speech is the voice of ‘the new wife, and the new mother’ in her own time, but her first aim is to make a poem, rather than present a platform of social reform.”

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‘If your child says, “When mom dies we’ll see her come back here & be a ghost,”
Don’t indulge in being spooked. Be amused. If you’re reading Plato, the part
Where he seems to sat women are a lesser order of beings than men, don’t
Stop reading. A character is speaking. If you’ve yet another downstairs neighbor who hates every
Step you take on your floor, his ceiling, ignore him to the extent that you
Must breathe & walk about & have lots of fun.’ (‘The Prophet,’ 1979)

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Alice Notley’s collected poems, Grave of Light, was published in 2006 by Wesleyan University Press. It is 388 pages long, and measures 9.2 x 7.2 x 1.5 inches, roughly the size of two house bricks. It was not available in the UK until August 2008, when the paperback was published.

In summer 2006, I ordered it from the bookstore where I used to work in Canada, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore which has long supported Notley, whose poem ‘Radical Feminist’ begins:

‘Alma speaks of the arrogance of countries, by shooting up into the worldmap on her head arms thighs and feet, each place requires a drug so she can forget it and dream the true again. innocents scream in her sleep though no one over 20 is innocent but who needed to die for the megalomanias of a man, men, their works together a tumor the size of the planet. they all beg me to care to care, she mutters, caring as at any historical time makes warriors appear, the stupid little fuckers, and the male leaders’ faces – oh the old shit of it, the tastelessness of it and their reactions, their psychotic mugs, their being “up to it.”’ (2003)

When I went to collect the book, I also bought Camille Martin, Codes of Public Sleep (BookThug, 2007), Joanne Arnott, Steepy Mountain: love poetry (Kegedonce, 2004), Etel Adnan, In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (City Lights, 2005). Poetry=more poetry.

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“Among the numerous collections of verse that Notley has published are INCIDENTALS IN THE DAY WORLD (1973), WHEN I WAS ALIVE (1980), WALTZING MATILDA (1981), MARGARET AND DUSTY (1985), and HOW SPRING COMES (1981) which received a 1982 San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award. In addition to her poems, Notley wrote a short autobiography entitled TELL ME AGAIN (1982).”

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‘I heard the knock though I thought
possibly it was the drum in the phonograph
I open the door it is the girl upstairs
will ask me for a knife to open her lock
she forgot her key or to turn down the
phonography I open the door I start & shake
all over an embarrassing little spasm
there is someone there after a week’s
waiting it isn’t you it’s the girl up-
utairs asking me to turn down the
                                                phonograph (‘Friday Midnight Exactly’)

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Notley led me to other poets and poetry led me back to Notley. Telling my students about sortes Virgilianae, the medieval military practice of basing battle strategy on a line selected at random from the Aeneid, I began to read Grave of Light in the same way. Its overwhelming record of postmodern American life from the bohemia of ‘Desk? // Shit it was an orange crate’ (‘I Hope I’m Not Here Next Year’, 1970) through loss, Vietnam, politics, motherhood, Paris, Iraq and words. Poetry = war, told slant.

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“In addition to poetry, Notley has also experimented with the visual arts; her collection includes collages, watercolors, and sketches. Many of the collages are composed of everyday objects and images and are quite consistent with her poetry in that respect. A significant group of the collages are aimed at de-eroticizing images taken from pornographic magazines.”

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Grave of Light features a collage by Notley on the cover. I have stared at that cover on my shelf for nearly three years. I have stared at it on tables in apartments in Madrid, Berlin, Paris, Reykjavik and San Francisco, carrying it with me (two house bricks) with/as good intentions. It seemed so whole. A grave of light, absorbing all eyebeams and thought processes in a spiral down to the (reading instruction of the) final lines:

 

‘me leaning down
brushing with painted feathers
to the left of chance your operatic,
            broken

book.’ (from Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, 2005).

“Biographical note”: Electronic Poets Center/Alice Notley Biography//University of California, San Diego/Geisel Library/Mandeville Special Collections Library//Register of the Alice Notley Collection/1969-1997/MSS 0319//This file created: 04/20/1998

All poems from Alice Notley, Grave of Light (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2006).