Alice Notley Telling It Like It Is
by Pat Nolan
Alice Notley, Telling The Truth As It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 (The Song Cave, 2023)
Dreams occur in suspended animation while the muscles relax and the cells rejuvenate, a neutral state open to the chemical wash of memory, the stream that one never steps into twice, figuratively. That some of those neural combinations retain the tang of memory as fleeting images whose waking recall unlocks untold detail and minutia of something that never happened is an act of creation. Imagination, it’s a wonderful thing.
Alice Notley talks a lot about the hypnogogic state and dream consciousness, and its importance to her work. She opens this volume with What Can Be Learned From Dreams? and in another thoughtful, revealing essay titled Dreams, Again, relating the process of getting that nebulous state onto the page. In Telling The Truth Notley also touches on a very rich vein in detailing a marginalized, unaffiliated Americano poetry, and memorializing the particular elan that served to inform her creativity. Beside her excellent pieces on Williams and Whalen, she also addresses her connection to the putative New York School in the person of Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup as well as her understanding of Ed Dorn, Pierre Joris, bpnichol, Edwin Denby, and Allen Ginsberg.
Notley is passionate on her subjects, her nuanced prose knowledgeable and authoritative. This is not only the Delphic voice of the poems but also that of the sensitive close reader. There is a sober almost Classical tenor to her metamagical musings as well as brilliant flashes of wit and intelligence. This has always been the talent of her poetry. It shines in her talks and essays. The authority of her passion, a poetry of resistance, disobedience, the freedom to say no, to say fuck that, and the means to mean it is what Telling The Truth As It Comes Up is all about. Notley’s title also hints at the process of inspiration, viscerally enacted, of the moment, reflexively, through language and an understanding of the esthetics of language. Naturally, the essays talk about her writing, the process, closely linked to dream states, her reading, including crime fiction, which she discusses in Noir Talk, and also what she thinks about her role as a poet in explaining the obvious. “I have a sense” she says, “that there has been language from the beginning, that it isn’t fundamentally an invention,” and proceeds to essentially describe the wave function, the universal Kerouacian IT, and her own unique interpretations and intuitive understandings.
In Alette Update 2013, she talks about the negative reaction to the publication of The Descent of Alette, and who, among her contemporaries, really hated the quotation marks. She also relates the circumstances of writing the poem, her brother’s death, as an encapsulation of what she was experiencing at the time, a discontinuity of the senses, deconstructed, a shattered self remade on the loom of language. Each of those quote marks hook to the next phrase and the previous one as a tapestry of voices, a textured weave of cacophonous depth simply through disrupting syntactical flow with a punctuation convention. Genius. Her poetics of disobedience is her anti-social resistance to anything but her own unique vision of composition and concept, her formal scheme—she is in control. The controversial quotation marks reveal her artistry and work as another veil that the reader must pierce to reach a core intellection. It was bound to rub people the wrong way. The question never asked is why? The controversy of Alette overlooks the fact that Alice lives the poem uncompromisingly.
Notley opens her essay, Williams And, with the contention that even after over a century (this year marking the 100th anniversary of the publication of Spring And All) nobody really gets how significant William Carlos Williams’ influence on Americano poetry really is. “But I still have that funny feeling, thinking about Williams, that no one ever gets it, they’re still not getting it.” The same boiler plate “tidier-looking rectangles” (poems) are included in anthologies, out of context, as representative of his entire oeuvre without any regard to their complexity and innovation. Fortunately, in this essay, those aspects of Williams’ poetry are spelled out. Notley is on the button, precise and clear on his singular importance to the Americano canon. The three toed harpies (Vendler, Bloom, and Logan) may have tried to dismiss him as a mere scribbler, but Notley sets the record straight. Her view is refreshing.
To begin to understand the importance of Williams is to understand modern Americano poetry’s authentic source rooted in the quotidian and the vernacular. “But it is from Williams that we. . .have gotten all our permissions to mix prose and verse, balancing the two. . .to make things more dangerous. How prose-y can you get? How piercingly poetic can you get? On the same page. How broken can the text be and still be unified.” What else. The inclusiveness of his non-self-centered democratic voice. There are no rhetorical postures to puzzle over, just the lyricism of the perceived. “His voice lets us in.”
Moving from the innovations of Spring And All, Notley takes up a relatively unknown Williams poem, “Two Pendants For The Ears”, not included in any anthologies as it is too long, too light, “airy, diffuse”, a poem about Williams’ mother, Elena, dying. She unpacks the poem’s musical intricacies, its reliance on the voice of the poet, because an “exacting ear is involved, which measures experience by its own time.” This insightful exposition allows her to segue into the subject of the (always controversial) “variable foot” to further argue for its expressive melodic purpose. “Poetry has its own philosophy of time, bound up with stress as both a familiar musical beat and as a small pool of emphasis.” This essay on Williams, on the intelligence behind the innovation of his work, is among the most astute that has been published in a while, its authority grounded in a parallel practice.
Notley’s delight is palpable in the opening paragraphs of “To do exactly that, right now” The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (2007). “[T]he poems always seem like the most readable ever written—and why would anyone not want to write like this?” This is a well-known truism about Whalen’s poetry, how everyone thinks they can write poetry the way he does until they try and realize it’s not as simple as it seems. Some poets claim that after reading Whalen their style changes to sync with his, and that they can go on for weeks writing bad imitations of his poetry until they foreswear reading him (for a while, anyway) to reclaim their own poetic psyche. “This poetry is all tactile and grabbing and natural,” Notley says. “Whalen wrote everything down he thought about,” she continues, “drawing conclusions too, but within the same poetic fabric. . . . The mystery is how he managed to unify so much detail so pleasantly and musically. . . .”
Notley is an enthusiastic Whalen fan but she is critical of some of the editorial decisions made by the editor Michael Rothenberg regarding the chronology of the poems in the Collected Poem as well as the reproduction of journal pages of Whalen’s calligraphy which, up until he became a Buddhist monk, was one of the defining components of his poetic persona. Whalen dated all his poems (in the continental affectation of signifying the month in Roman numerals) so that there is always an awareness of when the poem was written and/or completed. Notley contends that Whalen dated his work “in order to underscore not so much chronology as connections,” the threads of his concerns and ruminations.
On Bear’s Head (1970), henceforth referred to as the “Old Testament”, was the largest compilation of Whalen’s work until the Collected Poems, now to be referred to as the “New Testament.” The order of the poems in the Old Testament was kept the way they were presented in his published books up to that time (Like I Say, Every Day, and Memoirs of an Interglacial Age, among others) following an anachronistic scheme of Whalen’s devising. As Notley rightfully objects, the chronological reordering of the poems in the New Testament does undercut the esthetic effect, and the poet’s “intent.” However, what the New Testament does provide is a timeline to Whalen’s genius. The only way Whalen’s entire oeuvre could possibly be replicated in their original published order would be by issuing a boxed set of his individual volumes, beginning with Like I Say (1960) to Canoeing Up Cabarga Creek (1996) . The Collected Poems then functions as an academic’s tool and resource. Whalen literary scholarship is long overdue and that is the primary utility of the New Testament, providing a context, a place to begin. “My point is,” Notley writes, summing up her apprehension over the chronology, “the poetry becomes a universe of simultaneity and synchronicity that includes chronology. The poet describes himself and his world, but in parallel poems, written virtually at the same time; there are parallel concerns.” Whalen’s poetry is a continuous dialogue with the self and the animate and inanimate peopled world by a consciousness sounding the void with echo and music to get to an inkling(!) of profundity assembled in altogether unexpected delineations.
The additional complaint of the reproduction of journal pages as irrelevant misses a point. The journal pages provide an insight into Whalen’s method of composition. The doodles and sketches (a feature in the Old Testament as well) reveal a creative process that works by distraction and whimsy. As Keith Kumasen Abbott points out in his essay, Little Mag Art, the reproduced journal pages in magazines and in books of Whalen’s calligraphy and doodles “in their ‘natural’ state fascinated readers, probably because these drafts created the sense of being in an artist’s studio, looking over his shoulder and watching him create his poems. And then there was an incredible infectious feeling of freedom, joy and lively form to Whalen’s works that became an ideal of those days; as Whalen himself characterized the mood, ‘A magic electrical Tibet.’ However, for his calligraphic productions, the notion of attention is implicit, the shapeliness of the Mind, the shapeliness of the instant, that imbues Zen brush paintings with such an immediacy. Whalen’s major statement of aesthetics termed this: ‘graph of a mind moving.’”
One of the most powerful pieces in Telling is The Iliad And Postmodern War, written to be delivered at Poet’s House in 2002 ,and deserving of its own critical exegesis and close reading. Here Notley’s truth speaking is on a par with the fabled Cassandra. “War is culture destroying. That is almost its avowed purpose, isn’t it? We propose to replace cultures with Freedom, the female statute, carved in the West’s best 19th century public style.” This sentiment echoes in similarity Nicanor Parra, the Chilean anti-poet, who said, “In the US, liberty is a statue.” As if our outright hypocrisy weren’t enough to shame us.
In the summation of her talk, Alette Update 2013, delivered in Paris and in Boulder, she states, “My feminism comes from my own experience and perception, and I don’t feel a great need to read about the subject per se, though I do need to write about it. I would like to say that I don’t consider myself to be a great woman poet. I consider myself to be a great poet. That is an essential aspect of my feminism.” Who is going to argue? Notley’s cred is solid.
In Telling The Truth As It Comes Up, Notley uncovers the architecture of her raison d’être. The essays and talks cover a lot of ground, some of it perhaps unfamiliar to a younger generation, but all of it necessary. Some of it is history, the story of the “Tulsa triumvirate,” as Jimmy Schuyler called Ted, Ron, and Dick, in How To Break Through, An Homage, delivered as a talk at the University of Tulsa in 2009. Some of it is informed speculation as in her essays on dreams, and yet others, on her commitment to the esthetics of her art, to which she has given a lifelong dedication.
Alice Notley embodies the poet shaman, a way of being a poet that has been sidelined by literary convention, as a tuning into an ancient vibe, primal, anachronistic, but still relevant—but then the poet is always out of time, either ahead or behind. Notley, in these essays, explains how she has made her own way, and time her own.
Pat Nolan’s poems, prose, and translations have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in North America as well as in Europe and Asia. He is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and three novels. His most recent books of poetry are So Much, Selected Poems Volume II 1990-2010 (Nualláin House, Publishers, 2019) and the thousand marvels of every moment, a tanka collection (Nualláin House, Publishers, 2018). He also maintains Parole, the blog of the New Black Bart Poetry Society. His serial fiction, Ode To Sunset, A Year In The Life Of American Genius, is available for perusal at odetosunset.com. He lives among the redwood wilds along the Russian River in Northern California.
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