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Small Houses
Rebuilt with Musical Glue: A Word-by-Word with Alice Notley (through the medium of Maureen Holm) |
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| New
York School poet Alice Notley emerged twenty-five years and as many
volumes ago out of Needles, California. ("Fill it with loves &
movies & take it by car, / But only at night in playing-at-romantic
river time. / The daytime blue sky gives back nothing.") She lives
in Paris with her husband, British poet Douglas Oliver.
Telling by the syllable I went out to Iowa City in '67 as a fiction writer and almost instantly started writing poems. I got interested in the fact that there was this control on one page. I think most fiction writers write by the sentence and paragraph, but my stories were written painstakingly, almost syllable by syllable. I left and spent a year in San Francisco, Morocco and Spain. When I came back, some new poets had arrived, including my future husband, Ted Berrigan. I began reading people like Frank O'Hara, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg instead of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, and it made a great difference. I needed both a more casual voice, a freer line and a sense of happiness in poetry. How deep it goes It's the musical glue between words that's important to me and the sense of saying something deep in the way that poetry says it. I'm interested in reading sometimes what people do in a story, but I don't want to tell that. When you describe your life, you have a sense of drama and importance -- you should have. I don't find that in terms of a broad, discursive line. I'm finding it in patches, patches of intense passage, emotion, terrible change. If I were a novelist, I'd probably make a story that involved change of character over time and do something that I consider rather faked in order to make that be a story. But I'm a poet. It's one time that interests me, one passage, how deep it goes, how much truth you can tell about it. Moving in place I wrote a long narrative poem, "The Ascent of Alette", using methods from dream, though my dreams tell truncated stories. I wanted to write an epic, yet women didn't have stories. I found a source, "The Descent of Imanna", the Sumerian epic about the goddess, Imanna, descending into Hell to visit her sister, the goddess of Hell. She shows up at the door of Hell and is told she has to die first. She returns to the upper world and there she has to choose someone to take her place below. She gets extremely angry at her husband because he isn't mourning her, so she sends him back down to take her place! And that's really about all she does for a very long time in the poem. I used that as a pattern for near inaction. There are no fights, no battles. What happens is really an internal thing, the way a myth or a dream is internal and moves in place much of the time. I had to define for myself what an epic poem was. I invented a measure for it, a line that has a very particular sound, and it's vivid, rhythmic, very musical. Below the surface A lot of poetry sounds to me like prose, most poems I read in The New Yorker, for example. They tell of prose-like experiences, about walks, fathers dying, and so forth. Prose doesn't use words to go below the surface, which is what poetry does. Prose-like poetry won't use the peculiar word, the sudden word, the unexpected word. I like the line, the way it sets up cross connections and how quick it is. The line thinks more quickly than prose and goes deep, setting up echoes and cross references, being zany beyond what the market allows. Re-centering the 'I' I didn't intend to write autobiography [in Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998)]. My intention was and still is to re-center the "I" in poetry. People have become very unsure how to use it, when to use it, and whether it represents anything real besides a physical reference. I wanted to explore this notion in an impartial and honest way and to give people back the pronoun, "I". There has to be a way to talk about oneself without narcissism. And my self seemed to be the only subject matter available. When I started writing these poems I didn't know it at first, but I was probably doing something like self-hypnosis. I would go very deeply inside myself, my legs and feet would begin to tingle, and I would remember things I hadn't in a very long time. Intact at age four I seemed to be focusing on the house I lived in when I was about 4 and what it felt like to be 4, convinced that I hadn't changed significantly, that the intact self, the real self, was that child self. At a certain point, I had a lot of these poems and it seemed clear that the only way to present them was in chronological order. Between particulars and past With the move to Paris I've lost lots of my old social self, and having that taken away from me, I've come to notice that all that's left is my self! And I know it's there! The poems tend to go between Paris and the past because I haven't figured out how to talk about Paris yet. The expatriate life is odd, certainly. I've started looking for the Paris particulars, but I seem to have a lot of business with the past to take care of first. 'Memory is the murderer/is (is not).' That's "Perfect Point". It's about how the mind works when it thinks in words. It doesn't always. I was trying to get that flow, that play. It's also about letting go of the past and about change, another of the poems that had to do with Ted's death and my becoming a different person. Memory is selective, the terrain it leaves topographical, but I'd like to get past that selection process because what you find is that the terrain is frozen. That's only one story: what you remember. You have an interpretation of what happened in your life, but you can change it, and then have access to different emotions about events. I'm using the idea of houses I've lived in, which represent different feelings at different times to me. The house I lived in at 4 was the "alley house." It's also a play on my name, as is "The Ascent of Alette." And the houses are all me. The alley house was a temporary house, a shabby house, bare. Those were qualities I once remembered as negative, but which I now remember as extraordinarily positive because they stand for a spiritual state before I acquired all of the baggage and the cultural niceties which screw one up. Admit the argument, not the jargon Sure, artists talk about moral obligation, at least if they're not currently engaged in a subversion of it -- and in a morally urgent way. The poem, for me, tells the truth. I'm not terribly interested in the poem as object -- although I've probably said I was in the past. But my poems almost all have recognizable content, something available that has to do with thought, truth, perception, trying to find a real-moment reality. Poetry is a much better tool than prose for this process, much better than philosophy. Poetry is immediate, real reality. That's what the poet tries to get and he doesn't do it with jargon. I think the poetry world could use quite an injection of Shaw. He lets every aspect of the world have its say. In the poetry world, all argument is polarized. Phasing in larger voices There was a period where people's voices entered my poetry. I saw a lot of Shaw plays. My work then was a combination of prose and poetry, narrative and conversation. After Ted died, I wrote very tiny poems and a lot of elegy. Then, other people started dying who were really important in my life, and I entered a narrative phase. I had things to discuss in a more impersonal way. If my brother died essentially because he had participated in the Vietnam War, that was not just a personal event, but rather, one I needed to discuss in the larger context. Now I want to establish another vantage point, some way of talking that results from not living in America and from appreciating other parts of the world. Ignoring the polar noise And from not taking part in the American poetic dialogue. It's difficult because I'm in it; I'm just always in it. The voices go on in my head all the time. They chatter to one another, this School over to that, academics to experimentalists and, oh, it's just all chattering. ________ |
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