The Brooklyn Rail

Only relatively recently did I become a reader of Alice Notley, and there is so much Notley, this means I only know a small amount of her writing. I started with Désamère, a long poem from the nineties, because I came across a description of it in one of her essays as a work that confronts global ecological destruction in what Notley called a “feminine-epic-like” form. At about the same time I encountered the iPad-generated “poem/drawings” that she had been posting on Instagram during COVID. As I started engaging with these apparently dissimilar works, they began to take on almost a form of call and response in my mind: One, Désamère, with its finely wrought visionary language, and the other—the wild, sometimes crude, but strangely compelling poem/drawings. This was such an interesting entry into Notley’s poetry, that it led me straight into more, especially the monumental Speak Angel Series, which is open on my desk as I write. I’ve always found it interesting that one can resist some poetry for a long time and then at a certain moment in life it suddenly opens to you (or more accurately you to it) and you think, “how could I have almost missed this?”

Now with Notley’s death, I find myself looking again at the not quite beautiful, but incredibly “alive” poem/drawings, especially the later ones in the series, which often incorporate flowers she had known from her childhood in the desert near Needles, California.

Notley wrote a bit about these works in an introduction to the version that appeared in print, titled Runes and Chords. One thing Notley said was that she felt people were “lonely for handwriting”—an interesting extension of our COVID-era emotional landscape onto the losses incurred by our digital lives. The irony of this is that I found the print version of her poem/drawings somewhat muted in comparison with the vividness, and at times even ferocity, they had when viewed on a computer screen. She also said she wanted these pieces to remain “slightly chaotic.” One of the poem/drawings, in fact, includes the words “This is the flag of CHAOS” and “It is my flag.” This “chaos,” I think, is a positive characteristic of a lot of her work, an aspect of her famous “disobedience” and maybe even a key to her prolific output.

Yet another statement she made is the quite unironic “I’m showing you my soul perhaps” and “This is a portrait of essence.” In fact, she has long been a poet who uses such words unabashedly, as in the poem/drawing which includes: “Souls from every part of the Cosmos are around us / they may see your ‘self’ that you don’t ‘know’.”* I think Notley’s use of such language also shows how she has been resistant to the “forbiddens” that emerge from group formations around even the most experimental writing—a resistance that made her push back against the New York School label even while inhabiting its social and geographic center, and that perhaps also manifested itself in her migration from New York to Paris.

The poem/drawings also include countless small moments of delight, like a little orange Sol LeWitt-like drawing in the corner of one, with the line just above it asking “are you looking for the dispenser?” This is typical of the daily talk that infiltrates these pieces so thoroughly.

Alongside these pleasures, however, an untranquil irritableness and even righteous anger over social and environmental conditions inhabits the work, as with a drawing of a blood-red planet or maybe sun, accompanied by the words: “you are disgusting / your planet has no intelligent life forms” and another: “you are walking in the destroyed world / always walking in the future.”

But mainly there are a lot of flowers, which emerge part way through the series and mark a point in which the visual poetics become much more dense and interesting. These pieces also illustrate her ability to unite the utterly worldly with the utterly unworldly, often with dreams as the medium for these scalar effects. Thus a drawing of desert sage is the occasion for the lines: “So much happened did it? / Yes. So much // Desert Sage in the galaxy of the ground.” And one of Mojave indigo includes both “how poignant like dynamite” and “large unreal ground.”

“World comes before universe,” and “Own species comes before others,” says a nemesis-tempter figure in the much earlier long poem Désamère, and also, “Love is between humans.”

“Being to universe. That’s a relation too." the poet counters.

In another section of Désamère, the poet attempts to speak from a position beyond-the-human, specifically from the heart of yet another flower:

Out of its center a language comes
Indecipherable, melodic,
Which speaks from l’ame de l’universe
That language, implied my dream, is
Embedded in any poem
Speaks to more than people, more than any
Human Era—

This reference to a language whose source is “the soul of the universe” reminds me of Tolstoy’s assertion that the premise of all religions is the answer to the question—What is our relation to the universe, and what does that say about how we should behave?

Again, from Désamère:

A poet may be a good saint because
He or she hears the word—the language
Spoken by the flower—and can repeat it
. . .
Take the word I and tear it in half
The flower, which must be joined, suddenly stands there unguarded
The seriousness of this

I’ve come to think of “the seriousness” of this visionary mode as a way of seeing that unites species of care across all scales of existence. It points to a love that, in Désamère, Notley states “is not an emotion,” but rather a way of joining with the other and others of the universe. This takes me back to the poem/drawings, which I think are a kind of return, or a reworking, at an alternative altitude, of this, Notley’s answer, to “how should we behave?”

Thank you, Alice Notley.