Poem by Alice Notley, within the assortment Grave of Gentle. Courtesy of Wesleyan College Press. {Photograph} by Sara Nicholson.
Poets have all the time identified how insufficient language is. The speaker of this poem is aware of it properly. Regardless of how arduous she tries to seize the elegant or primordial essence of being, phrases fail her. Alice Notley herself has written about this in an essay, first revealed in 1998, known as “The Poetics of Disobedience”: “I really feel ambivalent about phrases, I do know they don’t work, I do know they aren’t it. I don’t within the least really feel that the whole lot is language.” Her poem “The World, All That Dwell & All That Happen” rubs up towards the sting of the unsayable. Discover that it begins with “the world” and ends with “the Universe,” that its very construction factors to the poem’s origin in and return to an infinite area past language. Paradoxically, impossibly, the poem is bounded by boundlessness.
The poem’s scenario is easy. A lady is looking a window on a wet day in New York Metropolis, 1977. She remembers a combat from the week earlier than. She watches a person cross the road. She can be considering the character of being, what she calls “the one organism.” That is how she defines it: “A monstrous life-death residing not-dying / Caving-in upthrusting throughout it- / Self like pits & mountains endlessly factor.” She’s talking quick. These strains have a strong rhythmic velocity. As she struggles to articulate an ontology, the phrases get squished collectively right into a hilarious pileup of modifiers. It’s humorous, awkward. She is aware of her definition is insufficient, however it’s the most effective she’s received.
Between the world and the universe, a girl is pondering. In contrast to the person on the street—and I believe gender is essential right here, echoing again to the sooner “he”—she is considering it. At its coronary heart, this poem describes a compressed second in time, put into stark reduction by her contemplation of the nice organism of being. The second comprises a droplet of eternity; Avenue A is metonymic for “the Universe.” I hear an echo of William Blake’s infinite grain of sand, by which we see writ minutely a complete world.
The poem is stuffed with contrasts. A spouse and a husband. The pondering lady within the window, the unthinking man on the street. Males, who’re bestial (they don’t suppose, and so they throw stuff), versus girls, who’re philosophical. The “3 giant books” parallel the “handful or 2 of arduous, tight rain.” Books, which function each a logo of their combat and their supply of reconciliation. The organism, which is all contradiction: its “life-death” shoots up and plunges down on the similar time. The phrase all within the title and first line, which capabilities as each a singular and plural noun. The phrase itself, damaged into “it-” and “Self,” self and world. She describes the climate as grey when she’d been in despair, however at present “fortunately” as pearl. The poem’s palette is all contrasting brights and darks. Tiny lights twinkling in a Christmas tree, her chiaroscuroed hand towards a luminous sky.
I’ve all the time discovered this final picture troublesome to speak about. Perhaps it’s the phrase touching, the truth that she tells us her fingers are actually touching the sky. She is merging with the organism, and the window has grow to be a portal between her on a regular basis life and a common consciousness past. Or is it the odd phrase order—“fingers fortunately black touching” as an alternative of “black fingers fortunately touching”—that so arrests me right here. It takes my breath away. One thing is occurring on the poem’s atomic stage. For Notley, poems enact a “vibratory setting-off” of language, a quantum area of motion, transformation, and condensed energy. “It might’t be taught and may barely be mentioned,” she writes. “It’s perhaps like, as an alternative of describing an object, making you hear its atoms spin.”
Notley is a troublesome poet. First there’s the sheer quantity of her work, almost fifty books and chapbooks throughout six a long time. A few of these are quick, however others—Alma, or the Useless Girls; Benediction; and The Communicate Angel Sequence—are sprawling epics, a whole bunch of pages lengthy every. A lot of her work, particularly post-2000, isn’t particularly excerptible or anthologizable. She has mentioned broadly her curiosity in goals, telepathy, trance states, and communication with the useless, from whom she takes dictation often. “I believe most of my poems could also be already written,” she says in her most up-to-date guide, Being Mirrored Upon. These unwritten works are carved onto “a stele or slab” inside “an enormous inexperienced ‘room’ / with no partitions flooring or edges” that she visits in goals. She refuses to fall again on what others have stated, to settle right into a single mode or type—she is as suspicious of obtained concepts as Descartes—and the result’s a livid integrity (“One should disobey everybody else with the intention to see in any respect,” she writes in “The Poetics of Disobedience”). But for all this, I discover that lots of her most troublesome poems are quick and unassuming, like this one. Inexhaustible. Poems whose atoms, magically, I can hear spin.
I really like this poem as a result of it’s lovely. But it surely’s additionally private: I like studying about girls pondering. Girls like Isabel Archer and Anna Wulf, just like the unnamed narrators of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina and Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19. I’m additionally a girl who likes to brood in home windows. The place I dwell after I dwell in New York, there’s a window seat that appears out onto the doorway to a neighborhood park. It’s a strong place to be nameless. And as Notley’s speaker is aware of, it’s a great place to suppose. I like to consider her on the window of her then-apartment at 101 St. Mark’s Place, like a Climate Angel, perched from on excessive. She’s grow to be a type of goddess, dreaming the world into being. Desires that, like so many nice poems, are, in response to Notley, “messy, embarrassing, truthful, typically clairvoyant.” Like this poem, “filled with beautiful launch.”
Sara Nicholson is the writer of three books of poems, most lately April.
