IN FRONT OF SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL IN PARIS, 2005. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX DUPEUX, COURTESY OF ALICE NOTLEY.
Within the new Spring difficulty of The Paris Overview, we revealed an Artwork of Poetry interview with Alice Notley, performed by Hannah Zeavin. To mark the event, we commissioned a collection of brief essays that analyze Notley’s works. We hope readers will get pleasure from discovering, or rediscovering, these lectures, essays, and poems.
That is one other ineffective plaque for you all together with the schoolchildren my brother might have by chance mortared.
—Alice Notley, “The Iliad and Postmodern Conflict”
We’ve lengthy put aside the notion of “greatness” in literary research as a result of it smacks of (male) cultural hoarding, an analogue to the practices that allowed and permit some males on earth—be they emperors or billionaires—to extract the sources that will have in any other case sufficed entire populaces—see: the conquest of the Americas, with its genocidal and ecocidal sequelae; see: the pressured mining of uncommon earths by endangered little one staff in Congo in order that ever-newer fashions of iPhones may succeed one another like a procession of pale and feeble heirs.
(As for me, a poet and mom scripting this essay within the Rust Belt with one window open on the most recent finish of the world—a February day almost thirty levels hotter than the historic common—I don’t need to crouch in some bolt-hole like a prepper Scrooge McDuck on a tin-can pile of greatness. I can’t afford it. Then I learn some billionaire is sending the world’s first cargo of junk to the moon by personal rocket. Proof of junk idea.)
And but, there’s particular and definitive greatness to Alice Notley—a capability, a surge, a stamina and a munificence; to me, her poetry, her poetic voice, unfurls a spangled aegis over the sector of battle that’s human existence over the previous 5 many years on this planet. Lengthy might it wave. Such a picture, I’m conscious, contradicts the anti-masculinist, anti-patriarchal, anti-militarist thrust of Notley’s poetry and her statements about her work. The reality is, this refulgent contradiction—Notley’s staunch anti-militarism versus what for lack of a greater phrase is likely to be known as her “warlikeness”—her indefatigability, the relentless resourcefulness of her dismantling of the masculinist constructions that help struggle, exploitation, destruction, and hurt—is likely to be the signature of her greatness itself, the response fueling its flight.
We will see this central contradiction at work in Notley’s discuss “The Iliad and Postmodern Conflict,” newly revealed in Telling the Fact as It Comes Up: Chosen Talks and Essays 1991–2018 however written within the fall of 2002, amid the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Notley reads the Iliad with the type of exactitude of refusal that remembers to me a Greek goddess’s pinpoint rage at man and god’s informal violation of feminine precinct and prerogative—be it daughter, pet deer, metropolis, or shrine. For Notley, the war-cult of her personal second and that of the Iliad are similar: “The Iliad is a sick guide, the struggle in opposition to terrorism is our personal sick poem.” She breaks with prose to pronounce a spell:
within the midst of all this
I say an inside ceremony
to kill my tradition in me
way back to I can
and together with all of now as
it’s at the moment understood.
This spell, for me, encapsulates Notley’s warlikeness. She desires to kill the war-addicted tradition, a tradition which is its “personal sick poem.” Hers is a goddess-like impulse. However to me it is just strugglelike, as a result of it’s not, in the long run, annihilative. As a substitute, its refusals and repulsions enact and require ceremonies that can themselves be the nascent impulses of latest constructions, new femme pluralities and potentialities.
To me, this lightbearing transfer, wherein whole refusal turns into paradoxically foundational, is Notley’s signature gesture, what she herself characterizes as Disobedience. Disobedience is an motion of thoughts, ethics, and artwork borne out in her huge guide Disobedience, which follows a femme speaker and her would-be Virgil, a louche TV detective she calls Robert Mitcham, on a downbeat but exhilarating journey by means of the Metropolis of Lights—an inversion of the subways of The Descent of Alette and a preliminary sortie, maybe, into the fecund pluralities of the nocturnal Alma, or The Useless Girls.
However for all of the dedicated, exacting, marvelous types this signature that Disobedience has allowed Notley to find—now infernal, now city, now Byzantine, now earthy, now desert, now cosmic—a vital high quality is its inception into and proximity to struggle. On this sense the –like in warlikeness may point out poetry’s tendency to similize; that’s, to attract comparisons that double the conjectural area of poetry. After all, this notion that writing may very well be double like this prompts Plato to view it with suspicion, as a pharmakon—each poison and remedy—and, elsewhere, to ban poets from the Republic, on account that their “false” poems may reveal the weeping of shades of warriors within the afterlife, and thus reveal the painful fact about dying, heroes, and struggle.
In doubling the imaginative area of poetry away from the pragmatic proscriptions of the militarized Republic and revealing true grief of struggle, Notley is disobedient to each one in every of Plato’s proscriptions. The selection is deliberate, and intentionally conveyed, in her transient discuss on the writing of The Descent of Alette, “The ‘Female’ Epic,” delivered at SUNY Albany in 1995. There she describes the inception of Alette within the “state of maximum disaster” her brother underwent upon his return from the Vietnam Conflict. Affected by PTSD, he turned hooked on medication, entered rehab, and underwent remedy “to provide a number of the guilt again to the nationwide neighborhood, the place it belonged, however nonetheless died, by chance OD’d every week after leaving that rehab.”
The ache and lack of her brother is the instantiating occasion in Notley’s profession, in all its rage, generosity, and dazzling vary. Discourse with, and/or proximity to, this ghost permits her to imagine the alter ego Désamère and ventriloquize the fragile and formidable guide of that identify, after which to embark upon the explicitly katabatic Descent of Alette, the pointedly “female” epic. Notley places on one other alter ego—this time that of Alette—and goes into cosmic battle. In her discuss, Notley discusses what she characterizes because the “female epic”:
All of a sudden I, and greater than myself, my sister-in-law and my mom, have been getting used, mangled, by the forces that produce epic, and we had no say within the matter, by no means had, and worse had no story ourselves. We hadn’t acted, we hadn’t gone to struggle. We definitely hadn’t been “at court docket” (within the regal sense), we weren’t concerned in governmental energy constructions, didn’t have voices which participated in public political dialogue. We received to undergo, however with no trajectory.
On this passage we will see the quick pluralizing that can be key to Notley’s poetics, transferring ahead: “I, and greater than myself.” The dying of her brother, Albert, and the ensuing ache and guilt, is the font of the anti-militarism, anti-patriarchy, and anti-masculinism that fuels 5 many years of her work, however from this warlike conceptus additionally grows an intuition towards plurality in its moral, political, aesthetic, and choral potential—a “female” trajectory towards a starry firmament of voices, types, and potentialities. As “The ‘Female’ Epic” concludes, “I’m writing at the moment as a unified, authorial ‘I’ who Should Communicate. There will not be a narrative subsequent time I write Epic, there could also be one thing extra circuitous than acknowledged Time and Story, extra winding, double-back. There will definitely be a Voice.” That is an apt description of the bigger and bigger attain, the flexing, cosmic intimacy of Voice that has characterised Notley’s work since.
In “The Iliad and Postmodern Conflict,” written some eight years after Alette, Notley offers an surprising and placing determine for her work’s antiwar warlikeness: the Greek maiden Iphigenia, who in Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis is sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon, to appease the gods, increase a wind, and sail to Troy after Helen. Of Iphigenia, Notley remarks,
I don’t need to be that girl. Any a part of whose existence is sacrificed to struggle. Whose brother is made right into a killer by historic custom. Whose nation slaughters foreigners. Who should at all times appease a silly deity, observe the dictates of a benighted even silly male chief. And survive. And take it, take it, take it.
But Notley notes that Euripides additionally wrote a second play, Iphigenia among the many Taurians, wherein Iphigenia doesn’t die. As a substitute, she is switched on the vital second with a deer, which is sacrificed to Artemis in her place. She is spirited off to a distant island, Tauris, the place a shrine to Artemis has been constructed after the goddess’s picture, her likeness, has fallen from the sky. On this double play, then, doubles actually rain from the sky: a double (nonetheless wrathlike) Artemis, a double Iphigenia, a someway at all times nocturnal double location, like a dream location—as Hypnos, the god of dreaming, is, in Greek fable, the dual to Thanatos, the god of dying. Into dream’s double-region we might sail in our boats or fall with our pictures into night time, into at all times extra night time. In Euripides’s second model, Iphigenia’s Furies-hunted brother, Orestes, oars ashore with a pal, and the 2 males are initially mistaken for Dioscuri, the double gods Castor and Pollux. He has PTSD-like panic assault on the seaside, considering the Furies are after him once more. Finally Iphigenia and her brother are in a position to acknowledge one another, are reunited and escape—into the night time, right into a deeper a part of the dream, that death-alternative, that twin of Thanatos: Hypnos, dream, artwork.
Earlier than all this occurs, nonetheless, Iphigenia is granted a dream imaginative and prescient which she misinterprets—a protracted colonnade wherein one column sprouts a rush of blond hair. Whereas Notley doesn’t point out this passage in her discuss, Iphigenia’s unbelievable and suggestive imaginative and prescient of an architectural construction blossoming with golden hair brings to thoughts the radiant, architectonic, city, and prismatic types which have structured Notley’s poetic texts for the previous a number of many years, particularly Knowledge and Different Girls. It even anticipates that surprising icon of Disobedience with which Notley closes her definitive 1999 essay, “The Poetics of Disobedience”—that of the best reader:
It’s attainable that the reader, or possibly the best reader, is a really disobedient particular person, a head/church/metropolis entity her/himself stuffed with hovering icons and the phrases of all of the dwelling and all of the lifeless, who sees and listens to all of it and by no means lets on that there’s all this lovely almost-undifferentiation inside, every part equal and nearly undemarcated within the mild of basic justice. And poker-faced places up with the outer types. As I do lots of the time however not a lot after I’m writing.
The final word determine of Disobedience, of other, gold-blossoming colonnades, unfurling a dream-space away from the masculinist militarism of the waking world, is the reader. Notley assigns to the reader her Disobedience whereas additionally distributing her infinitude, her stamina, her resourcefulness, her munificence, to the thoughts of the reader herself. Underneath the aegis of Disobedience, we oar away from struggle, by night time, by means of dream, then into mild.
Joyelle McSweeney’s tenth guide, Demise Kinds, is now accessible from Nightboat Books.
