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Reading a big, substantial
selection of any writer's work is a daunting prospect. Usually, the writer
settles down to a style by about the third collection so after a while, you
know what to expect. Alice Notley, however, seems to be constantly exploring
the edges of what it's possible for a poem to do. So here we have everything
from extensive 'poem-novel' experiments, political invectives, to
New York Poetry School list-poems like 'The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books'
which could as easily have been written by Ted Berrigan or Ron Padgett.
Mentioning Ted Berrigan brings me to the most impressive thing about this
collection: its orchestration of voices, especially the voices of her father,
of her first and second husbands Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver, and of her
children. If at times, this collection seems haunted by the ghosts of the
dead, this is not surprising; she has had to deal with the deaths of both her
husbands and her father. But there is never any sentimentality here, and she
approaches the subject of love and grief in a wide variety of ways. It's the
subject of 'Amer--and Desnos' as much as it of the poems recalling
life with Ted Berrigan in Mysteries of Small Houses:
'I dream,'
says dead desert Desnos,
'When Kennedy
sends the first Green Berets
Into Vietnam,
'sixty-two,
White moon
stains a lake, watery flower
You're young,
Amer¾, you say
"This
view is corny"'
'It's the
sixties,' Amer¾ says, 'I want a city
Soon it's the
eighties, the city's ruined
Which poem am
I, am I ruined?
The rents so
high, animals sleeping
Outside at
night, drugged and dirty'É
Personal grief mixes with political grief, with a breadth of reference that
is often startling in its twists and turns. Throughout this book, there's a
sense of melancholy, and even when she gets angry as in one or two poems
about the Vietnam poem, she doesn't shout, or pin the blame on anyone.
It's not often one finds oneself reading a selection of poems from cover to
cover with the eagerness of a good novel; and then you come to the end and
slow down, because you don't want to finish it. Most poetry selections have
their tedious passages, poems you don't reach the end of because they tail
off, or damp squibs. Grave of Light,
however, keeps up the energy levels throughout Early triumphs include the
diary poem, 'January', which mixes in the voices of her own children and the
her own life as a mother in a totally fresh way. There's no straining for
message, and no coyness, in her celebration of domestic life: in fact, it
seems to me to be that she's found the solution to the problem of being
patronised as 'merely a domestic woman poet.' Don't over-dramatise
or symbolise it: present it in as open a way as possible.
Her poetic sympathies, I believe, are with the New York School; though she
has gone far beyond them into poems that border on Language School, Beat,
Surrealist and other isms of the poetry world. What she learnt from is the
ability to be serious without pomposity: something the Beats, for instance,
are sometimes guilty of. Though she employs a whole battery of experimental
techniques to brilliant effect in such poems 'The Descent of Allette' or the
prose poems of 'Reason and Other Women', she's not essentially a
demonstrative poet. Her quiet has a woman in it, to misquote Frank O'Hara,
and she convinces by accumulation of images, by the way her language coils
into your consciousness, and by careful attention to the things of the word.
I can't say I've enjoyed a book this year half as much as this. Sad, funny,
thought-provoking, always on the move, this is an exceptional book. She's
difficult to quote from, because her best poems accumulate slowly. However, here
is a short extract from one of her most celebrated sequences, 'Mysteries of
Small Houses':
It's dark
down the rue Caulaincourt
where I don't
want to be in a red skirt
when we first
at Au Pierre de la Butte
five years
ago this wasn't my city
it was us
unmoored I'm walking with you
it's raining
we're wet down the hill down some steps
towards the
bridge over Montmatre Cemetery
over history
dead great men unlike me
I've always
wanted to be a
dead great man
though not exactly dead but
I'll never
make it
partly
because not a man
partly
because this is no world for greats..
The sense of a mind thinking as it goes along, following not so much an
argument as a river of perceptions, memory, wisdom, is just one of the many
Alice Notley's on offer in this collection.
© Steven Waling 2006
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