The Brooklyn Rail

In the late spring of 2022—a miracle year—I picked up the Talisman House edition of Alice Notley’s Selected Poems and read “Homer’s Art.” I jolted in astonishment. Here was a prose poem that wasn’t just poem but manifesto. A grand theory of literature, gender, history. It called forth new ground rules for how poets could speak both to and against contemporary reality. Soon I reread “White Phosphorus” (which faces “Homer’s Art” on an adjoining page) in a new context. I already thought it as one of the great anti-war poems ever to be written with its sui generis spacing and odd apostrophal jitters. I got it. These works directly preceded The Descent of Alette, what many rightfully consider among the greatest long poems of our time. My research spiraled. 1988 I realized was this juncture point for Notley: raw personal grief, new poetic form, structural violence, ancient spirituality all suddenly converged. She had suffered a crucible. Four years after Ted Berrigan’s death her stepdaughter was killed in a freak car accident (1987). Then the very next year, just as she’d started writing these feminist epics, her brother who was a Vietnam vet died of an overdose. To survive one must survive everything. Alice Notley did that. She fled the world and became the world.

I began corresponding with her that summer over email. We’d spoken decades before. I’d published a fine poem of hers and then wrote an essay about her polyphony of voices. Now her emails arrived as if from another planet: she’d describe a tiny seahorse pendant in one breath and in the next casually announce “I’m already dead” proudly.

When we met up in Paris, I’d remember such lines. Before she was served a buttery pasta dish she shrugged at me and with a warm smirk said, “The self doesn’t exist.” You know when someone is bullshitting you. Especially when self-help spiritualese is everywhere, from robotic malaise to tyrannical uplift. She thought and spoke like bone. As Emily Dickinson says somewhere about her father’s heart, it was “terrible and true,” which I always took to mean terrible because true. So I boarded a plane and sneezed across the Atlantic. For the first time in years I was writing poetry again, now under my chosen name. I felt alive. Yes, I made my pilgrimage to an oracle of sorts. We laughed constantly. Bickered in spurts. I felt safe around someone who carried so much grief and suffering yet stood undaunted.

Her small yet grand apartment terrified me. She’d lived there for thirty years in near-total physical solitude. She loved her friends and family deeply, spoke to them, traveled when able to. But her life was defined by writing, by exile, by her choice to exist as a devotional being. Ordinary performances of belonging had been liquidated. It’s okay if I’m exaggerating. It meant a great deal to me to see a life lived this way. Her commitment wasn’t decorative. Survival had morphed into cosmology. And on she went.

She hated the academy. Loathed the prize world. Fine, most do. But even community in the more personal sense I understood from her was something she neither believed in nor trusted. Her title Culture of One says it plain enough. I started to imagine what it might be like for an artist to construct a parallel reality that slowly superseded this one. Since the early nineties she wrote, what, something like ten thousand pages of poetry. Can you imagine that? Can anyone? Still, she wrote in many ways. Some of them impossible. She did so fearlessly.

Notley’s spiritual clarity is what ended up leaving the greatest impression on me. She shared with me about her daily conversations with the dead. I’ve always been wary of anyone who makes the otherworldly too real. Because, well, I have plenty of unresolved grief. And because my brother’s schizophrenia instilled a razory fear of psychosis inside me. Angels? Stay away, hover over there, plz be mute. Dante’s Inferno was more interesting to me as a revenge plot than as actual mystical transcript. Allegory like a friendly pillow for the hurt and fragile. Yet what if there are such dialogues? Notley’s art is so steely, deeply sensitive, quite feeling-oriented. Try to listen to “At Night the States” without weeping. She herself is so very un-fragile. Instead, she’s tenacious; indestructible. She had a mission.

I’ll never forget this: she told me that we must talk to the dead not so that they help and heal us, but so that we can help and heal them. It made me look anew with a slant on the dead I carry: Ashley from high school, my beloved Chris at college, both of my parents, John, Mark, et al. I’d always thought of elegies as like defeat. I’d always assumed our job was to imagine what they from their perch of eternity would tell us if they could about what’s next, how to live life better. Plastics, Benjamin! Notley’s sense of tending to the dead inverted that. She poured not just blood or praise but her words. And as she listened, she spoke back what she knew about the structure of things. She was always so uncanny. She’d look around the room and go: “Every object in this room was invented by a man.” And then how patriarchy “robs young boys of their own bodies so they can go become killers.” Her emphasis was hard-won, so very real. No wonder she transformed her brother into an owl, a permanent presence that haunted her books. How live like that. How make art so integral.

Whose spirit have I tended to?
What dead souls can I make whole again?

 

 

Prompts inspired by Alice Notley’s Writings (Excerpts) 

 

Posthumous Poem

Write a poem that begins with the line “When I was alive,” as “When I Was Alive,” does. Emily Dickinson can be said to have invented the posthumous poem, at the very least, to have widely popularized it: to speak from a perspective from beyond the grave, casually and often. Think about yourself in the past tense. Use short or clipped lines. Challenge the “eternal now” (the metaphysics of presence) of lyric poetry. 

 

 

Ghost Ventriloquy Poem 

Write a poem in the voice of a dead poet or writer. You can explore the life, the voice, the history, the speculation. You can also mount a defense for their writing. Or focus on something neglected or overlooked. 

“You speak for and as the dead in your poetry… Actually.. this reminds me of one of my favorite early poems by you called “Jack Would Speak Through The Imperfect Medium of Alice.” How did that poem come about?” 

Alice Notley:  “Jack Would Speak..” was written after the first biographies of (Jack) Kerouac began to come out in the mid-seventies. I found them very irritating because none of the authors seemed interested in how good Kerouac’s writing is, only in certain facts or suppositions about his life. I didn’t care about his life as a life. I’m not sure I care about anyone’s life that way, as if it were a story told according to contemporary conventions in thinking and judging another’s (or one’s) personal existence. So I wrote the poem in defense of his writing, as if spoken by him—who knows?—maybe he told me what to say? 

 

 

Tarot Card Poem

Write a poem in the voice of a Tarot card, such as “Two of Swords,” from Certain Magical Acts. Let secret knowledge flow from the image, its associations, to something you cannot possibly be aware of.  

I’m blind with my arms crossed over my breasts, sword in each hand.
I seek justice in countervailing sharpnesses: you are in force and you are in force.
I can’t help but be both of you.  

 

 

Nonbinary Anachronistic Poem 

One of the things traditional poems of any style do, in the lyric mode, is occupy an Eternal Now of their utterance. In this sense, though they may be set in the past, that past becomes Now; or if they are set in the future, then that future is Now. Notley often blurs the boundaries between past and present seamlessly, so in the same poem where there is a discussion of Dido, you will have someone talking about their black sequin dress; or in a poem that references Ancient Sumer, you can also have Bush and Cheney. One way to think of this chronology mashup is to assume all time is being collapsed in your poem into the same time; another way, more challenging even, is to allow the poem to flicker back and forth between ancient and sudden, modern story and origin story. Try either. Try both. Destroy the Past/Present binary. 

 

 

“First” Poem 

Notley has described The Descent of Alette as: “One of the major story elements of the poem is the search for the First Woman.” Wallace Stevens’ poetry spent decades wondering about the First Idea; and now for the last several decades, in collection after collection, Notley often re-imagines, encounters, elegizes and celebrates the First Woman as a central figure of her imagination. What first person, place or thing can you become haunted by and make space for inside a poem, as a prehistory?