The Brooklyn Rail

Because Alice Notley had become interested in the epic genre and was at that time loosely in the Buffalo milieu, when Jack Clarke asked her to contribute to the Olsonic pamphlet project the Curriculum of the Soul, she significantly chose Homer’s Art as her commission. Her brother’s death in 1988, as victim of PTSD after his service in Vietnam, had provoked Notley’s thinking “about politics, sexual politics, war, and poetry,” and she therefore “became determined to write an epic poem, to create a female protagonist, and to come to terms with the issue of the relation of women to heroic action.”¹

Notley’s works in the early 1990s can be visualized as an “epic cluster”: Homer’s Art (1990), Close to me & Closer… (The Language of Heaven) (written 1991–92), and Désamère (written 1992–93), “White Phosphorus” (1988) (originally published in the pamphlet Homer’s Art), with the culmination being the contemporaneous The Descent of Alette (first appearing in 1992 in The Scarlet Cabinet, then from Penguin Books in 1996). Taken together they define Notley’s epic concerns. “White Phosphorus” is an elegiac choral work mourning her brother and, crucially, inventing a unique line presentation for the voices. The Descent of Alette (which Notley always described as an epic), is a “tale of the tribe” whose female quest figure allegorically rectifies the fundamental violence and exclusion that brought gender inequality into the world. Both are haunted meditative poems saturated with social critiques of war and of patriarchal power.

The Descent of Alette condenses a Dantean voyage into Inferno and Purgatorio, a.k.a. the subway of New York, a city depicted in economic and social collapse (under Reagan), and involves the moral killing of a cartoonish but powerful Tyrant by a feminist hero, whose quest through despair and ethical preparation for the confrontation are rendered in sonnet-like sections of an eerie poetry.

Her pamphlet Homer’s Art defines epic as a public story, swiftly and engagingly written, “simple & grand,” not just “playing around with words.” Homer’s Art makes efficient critical remarks, implicating Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems, and any stylistically disjunctive field poetics. Notley argues that focus on the ongoing discoveries enabled by a unified narrative surpasses the Olsonic (and Poundean) mode of disjunction. Instead of “dissolving of the old continuous narrative & lyric coherences & the reconstituting of them into fragments, collage-like entities, & disjunctive & often abstract pieces of language,” Notley draws for her epic on mythic evocations, a narrative based on quest stages shadowing the movement of dreams, a female hero, and a visionary drama using a choral measure of pacing insights.²

To write an epic, Notley argues one must find and re-enter a primal story, a pursuit indebted to Olsonic intellectual-spiritual projects. Identifying “original mind,” or “some sense of what mind was like before Homer” takes up the challenge of finding the “archaic mind,” that vital, if ahistorical Olsonic project.³ This goal had led, in Olson circles, to many Jungian and mythopoetic studies, a yearning to reconstruct or recover this cultural zone (and its underground continuation in hermetic knowledges) with varied ethnographic and rhetorical success. Notley does not resist this goal, but she reconceptualizes it with a distinct pronoun shift. As the last lines of her manifesto-essay, Notley takes the idea of the archaic as contemporary inspiration, not only a recovery of former mind but a female’s heuristic discovery: “Perhaps someone might discover that original mind inside herself right now, in these times. Anyone might.”⁴ That pronoun dramatizes her own claim.

To participate in the Olson-inflected search for archaic mind, Notley challenges some of that Olsonic context, deftly confronting the gender exclusions as the fundamental assumption of the genre: “perhaps … there might be recovered some sense of what mind was like before Homer, before the world went haywire & women were denied participation in the design & making of it.”⁵ That is, some hard-to-define rupture in shared power, ending with males claiming all power, is postulated as having occurred in archaic time. This had also been a general feminist hypothesis about pre-history. Identifying and narratively extirpating that exclusionary patriarchal power becomes Notley’s epic goal. Some co-equality between humans preceded an unnarrated catastrophe that imprisoned and “decapitated” the archaic female (and further subjugated both genders), was engineered by patriarchal tyranny, here depicted as a singular, trans-historical Tyrant. This is the “historical” myth behind The Descent of Alette. Notley announces that other epic works have been “generated by war & are male centered—stories for men about a male world.” Instead, she wants, in the name of “archaic mind,” to undo this epic via a female-world epic.⁶ Notley’s cultural ambition is brilliantly informed and uncompromising.