The Brooklyn Rail

Ten years ago I had successful open-heart bypass surgery. For several hours, with my heart stopped, I knew only black. “I” was outside of space time, “dead to the world.” When I awoke on the ICU gurney-bed with my mind returned to me, I laughed. I might have been Schrodinger’s cat (1935) in a closed box, dead and alive, a quantum entanglement. Now, in Alice Notley’s The Speak Angel Series we have our first quantum poet, who can be both within the physical/mental world of human history, as well as outside with the dead, “painted black” (as one early jacket sleeve of “Paint It Black” had it, the Jagger/Richards-written Rolling Stones hit of 1966).

Notley’s lines on the page ask to be spoken; we are reading/hearing the entanglement of voice and mind as it happens before life and after life. It’s as if anything that happens can’t be taken for granted: “I hated to see you go my home or star or eonic fleetingness.” Especially poetry can no longer be taken for granted. It’s all new, like the first written sonnet, its author dead to the previous world of ballad, psalm, ode. As was the case for the form of Sumerian City Lament: it’s the first epic entangled with our time via Speak Angel, a lament for losing time itself but gaining angel-like voices that live, like Notley’s twenty-first century epic, in a timeless yet gorgeous collage. Life as we’ve known it is most bravely lamented, brightly pasted on black—which becomes Notley’s speech-act of adding life to her black ground of an epic collage. The entire fourth part of the epic series is entitled “To Paste On.”

Now, dead and living are quantum-entangled in an eternal non-moment, for we are outside time and time’s universe. The voices are entangled with Alice’s, querying voices of the dead and unborn. Not the “why are we here?” and “where are we going?” of human questing, but an implicit “what does it mean?” to speak in and from black. Answer: it’s not a story, not a Platonic dialogue or ancient narrative epic, not a lyric’s resolution; it’s poetry made as new as Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” now on a par with quantum physics, so that a metaphysical point of view becomes enmeshed with Alice’s physical voice. “We are searching for the outlines of kinds of words / That tell us how the dead should act they don’t act / That will be our new spokenness is it aloud or not / Are there distinctions at all calling out to you if words can call.”

Of the prior century, Carlo Rovelli notes: “In the early ‘teens and 1920s Cubism and quantum theory both moved away from the idea that the world is representable from a single perspective.” Yet it doesn’t have to be more complicated than a mother’s voice as heard from within the womb. We don’t know if we will be or won’t be born, we don’t know about time, but we can feel the poet’s voice as if saying the future is the past, the past is the future, what matters most is that you can hear. “I / Don’t always / Come as you’ve / Known me/ Look / Underneath / What you’ve / Written / Every- / Thing every- / One is speak- / Ing to you I / Am the primal / Principal the / Tone of / Voice”.

With this unparalleled epic poem I can also embrace what happened when my heart was stopped a decade ago as if “etherized upon a table,” in Eliot’s century-old ironic trope of empty judgment. Unlike Prufrock, I’ve recouped the image as the living voice of memory, or the many afterlife voices of Notley’s Speak Angel: far from judgmental, they are full of seemingly unanswerable questions, refreshingly naive, no less than Alice among them: “How did I / Get here / The problem was / That there is / Nothing linear except for / Written / Words / Compressing too all of / Time/ Into an/ Utterance.” Rovelli writes of the quantum universe: “The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person… The externally observed world does not exist.” His argument makes the case for Notley’s poetry “leading” us, as even voices of the afterlife and “before life,” in which we all manifest, are within hearing of her as-if universe-wide motherly epic voice.

As she listens to the disembodied worrying voices of others, Notley is nothing if not self-aware. “…I forget my mean- / Ing as soon as I speak it we are wondering if we need to control it” says one. “When do the control and formation start another says / Others speak their words absorbed by darkness and color forgotten / Relentless I have gone on ahead nothing is here but speaking intently.” Nevertheless, nothing exists in itself: “We must abandon the simple idea of a world made of things,” says Rovelli. “We recognize it as an old prejudice, an old vehicle that we no longer have any use for.” Notley is rather more emphatic about such knowledge and its norms within poetry, biting back when the old dispensation in poetry challenges her: “They think they have more influence because they work in a putrid uni- / Versity but I work in the whole universe wind and night I must find / It the alphabet the dead woman said he says do I have to be nice / No…”

But our poet is more often tolerant in her instruction, especially in the way her epic insists on characterizing poetry as no longer needing markers for the figurative. “If I hand you this.      it’s a word/ If I have no hands dead not needing them think it to you / I DON’T hand it.” And she can be tenderly ironic as well. “If you / Would / Just / Stop / Your / Chil- / Dren / Don’t / Need / Any- / Thing / But / Your / Love / And a / Few / Drops of / Sugar / Water / From / Your / Beak.” In her quantum understanding of “everything in relation” birds are not simply metaphorical children. In Speak Angel’s context of the universe, parents and children can be as interchangeable as narration entangled with the poetry into which it dissolves. “All at once the chorus      of individual minds sings / And in my hand-to-be hold a bacterium.” Before-life is interchangeable with afterlife. It’s an unstable creation story, dependent on the quality of listening.

Did it matter what my surname was? As I recall the day after heart surgery, the nurse came in and asked if I was related to the Pittsburgh quarterback on that day’s Super Bowl telecast, Roethlisberger. The disoriented question was an echo of the operating table black space. Apropos, in Notley’s take on a creation story, all that existed was disembodied voices perplexed as to where their bodies had gone—an ironic reverse of the Eden story, where bodies had come first, no questions asked. Notley’s version is a quantum advance, preceding as well as succeeding Adam and Eve’s exile from the Garden, both happening in a single quantum moment. Preceding birth and following death: the utter spatial blackness, in which any image of our bodies is blotted out. And yet, the perplexed voices harbor neither fear nor trepidation; this is no heavy-meaning bardo or purgatory. The overriding voice is Alice’s, which becomes a gloriously sustained argument for poetry’s precedence over narrative. “It takes the concentration the absorption of an angel to emit a poem / And we try to leave them in the minds of the live asleep.” While also a suggestion of dreams as timeless, the poet’s irony echoes the legends of Lilith, who rivaled Eve in biblical Eden and after. In post-biblical Jewish legend, Lilith entered the wet-dreams of men, causing them to ejaculate—an apt though ironic image for poetry’s origin in dreams. And it’s as if Lilith represents breaking the window of narrative through which the poet escapes death with the new, quantum-like power of poetry to be everywhere and nowhere. All that exists, writes Rovelli, is “a reality made up of relations rather than objects.” Notley: “I want POWer to fill this MY VOID of no size in no space // Where there is ALL of or NO space I am a BROken WINDow.” It’s the quantum I that breaks the lyric or the narrating I’s window.

Meanwhile, I can’t help how storified this essay must be. It puts me in mind of half a century ago, when I lived a short distance from Alice on St. Marks Place. In those twenty-something years, neither we nor almost all the poets we knew had time for reviews. (Ted Berrigan, on the cusp of an older generation and Alice’s husband, was an exception, attested to in a recent collection of his various forms of prose comment, Get the Money! (City Lights, 2022)). Nor did we offer book blurbs. Instead, we responded to books with more books and poems of our own in quick independent output. The synergy alone spoke volumes. Notley’s Early Works (Fonograf, 2023), published in conjunction with The Speak Angel Series, testify to a listening community. And so does her latest epic, although Speak Angel is an epoch-making advance of 635 pages. Probably the same would have happened for Keats and Shelley, had they outlived their twenties. Instead, we have Shelley’s Adonais, An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821) along with shorter poetic epics, as we have from Notley since 1992’s The Descent of Alette.

In Speak Angel, however, the perspective from in front of a proscenium stage has long been rolled up and put in the closet. As Rovelli says of the quantum world, it “is made up of [infinite] perspectives, already from the most elementary level.” In Notley’s cosmic theater, “we aren’t onstage any more” in our social roles: “There could be no not-us BUT there was infinite fig- /URATION. And now we NEED NO GROUND / EVerything is CONversation the senSATIONS are reMODeled in- / TO IDEas // I remember how to speak      of WHAT I REMEMBER there is THAT/ I DIDNn’t first LEARN IT as an INFant but RATHer I GRADually / REMEMBERED IT // I want you to tell me how to act      we AREN’T onSTAGE / We AREn’t onstage ANY more like in LIFE.”

Rovelli writes: “The cosmos is change, life is discourse,” echoing Notley’s “everything is conversation.” In quantum theory, according to Rovelli, “in communication” is how anything exists. The seed of this new understanding was “already in Fragment 115 by Democritus, originator of atomic theory, c. 400 BCE,” yet atoms are discrete and inviolable. A quantum, also the smallest part of something, is usually energy. So for Notley no less than Rovelli, nothing physically exists solo—except, as in a dream, like disembodied voices. And far less optimistically back in the day of Eliot’s Prufrock (1915): “Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

The epic I most align with Speak Angel is William Blake’s Milton (1810), in which he channels the emanation of the dead poet John Milton via Blake’s foot, specifically through his big toe. It was no joke, anymore than voices of the dead are in Speak Angel, even as they speculate if they can hear without ears, see without eyes. It is extravagant like Blake but no less serious in its irony. Yet unlike Blake’s poetic mentor Milton, Notley’s dead can range from deadpan oracular poets to dear departed family. She could lead even the uber-individualist Lucifer of Paradise Lost (1667) behind her, since he was bound into a hell of meanings.

And she speaks to/for all of them: “…I’m leading you to freedom you are not imprisoned by your bodies / I’m leading you to freedom you are not imprisoned by any beliefs / There is not a thing that is true I’m leading you to / There are words that can sting your stupid ankles words the only real like / Jail and childbirth and cancer and poverty used to be / Learn to speak the new language you former mechanistic liars learn how to talk.” The echoes here are of Newtonian mechanics, which prevailed in physics before the twentieth century, and the “talk” of quantum mechanics, in which everything presents itself only in relation (or communication) to something else—and not discretely. No thing is true because “the new language” no longer partakes of the narrative or lyrical “I”. So who is the I in “I’m leading you”? Actually, the proper question is, where is the I. If we asked that of an angel, the old answer might have been heaven; or better, eternity, outside of the time governing the physical universe. Now, both the individual angel and the individual I share a reality of language in poetry free from beliefs. The words, as if pasted on a collage, no longer simply retain meaning; rather, their relation to other words obviates the need for a narrating language, so that the poet is free to express this radical newness with “words that can sting your stupid ankles.” Who needs ankles in eternity?

Rovelli: “Quantum theory puts into question the very conceptual grammar of our way of conceiving the world. We discover new maps for thinking about reality that describe the world to us a little more accurately.” The “world” to which Rovelli refers is now the universe, so that the earthbound or narrative grammar of language can be transformed in Speak Angel from an echo chamber where an earthling encounters information that reflects what they already know, into an outer space where what is heard is unpredictable. Yet even as poetry has always been able to elevate our hearing into an unforeseeable dreamlike context, Rovelli shrinks it back into an echo chamber: “When we look around ourselves, we are not truly ‘observing’: we are instead dreaming an image of the world based on what we know.”

In a quantum universe, however, or in Alice Notley’s quantum epic, we are “watching what appeared to be as solid as rock melt into air,” writes Rovelli. His intent is not to disorient us, but to make “lighter, it seems to me, the transitory and bittersweet flowing of our lives.” It can free our minds, as in Speak Angel, where Notley’s lightness inheres in her voice as poetry itself, even as she can flip her criticism of “mechanistic” thinking into a gentle, mothering irony: “The washing machine would stop when it was out of balance.” Rovelli elaborates: “There is a sense of the vertiginous—of freedom, happiness, lightness—in the vision of the world that we are offered by the discovery of quanta.”

Alice Notley’s epic often eschews grammatical niceties and punctuation in seeming simulation of that freedom, nudging us to listen closely. Of the reasons we must attend, foremost is a cushioning reminder that several idiosyncratic forms she has created for herself over a lifetime function as sounding boards. They keep us from being overwhelmed by being spoken to so insistently. Instead, we hear the soothing reverberations of what it might be like to speak or sing in a non-earthbound context.