A Charmed and Desperate Poet

“I am more powerful than a president; I am a charmed and desperate 
poet speaking to everyone.” — Alice Notley, Culture of One

1.

For a long time, I was one of the luckiest people alive. I was a college-educated, middle-class American woman at the turn of the century. I was 23 years old. The millennium was coming. I had just won a poetry contest.

And I was about to read Alice Notley for the first time.

First prize for the poetry contest was $500 to be spent at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa. The contest was judged by a slightly older but still very young poet known for his fun, flashy style and exuberant political commitments. In conferring the award on my anonymously submitted poem, he confided to the elegant and erudite manager of Prairie Lights’s poetry section, “I'm just sorry because I had hoped to choose a woman poet for this prize.” The manager, who knew I was the poet in question, replied, “Then I have good news for you.”

At the time, this little parable of foiled gender expectations delighted me. I was that rare silver bird who could snip the nets of gender and fly up to heaven—the heaven of poets: rows of books that jostle on shelves like the students who tussle at the Café des Poètes in Cocteau's Orpheus. They are waiting for the gods of Poetry to notice them.

But the god that notices them is Death.

I used my gift certificate to read across the whole store. And one day I pulled down Notley’s The Descent of Alette (1992).

2.

I would like to say that I immediately grasped the full aesthetic, cosmic, political, and psychological armament Notley prepares for us in this book: this “feminine” epic in which she inverts the dayworld to its nightside and sends a woman avatar, Alette, shuttling through a grimy underground on a quest which even she (at first) doesn't understand. I can say I was pulled in right away by its intensely concentrated voice and vision, the pushy quotation marks into which Notley parcels each line and which, like Basquiat's crossed-out inscriptions or Cy Twombly's squalls, seem to be there to make you look closer. As I peered in, a gritty, vivid world appeared in holographic episodes:

“One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly”

“I didn't know” “how I'd arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”

“But I knew the train” “knew riding it” “knew the look of

“those about me” “I gradually became aware—” “though it seemed

as that happened” “that I'd always” “known it too—” “that there was”

“a tyrant” “a man in charge of” “the fact that we were”

“below the ground” “endlessly riding” 'our trains, never surfacing”

“A man who” “would make you payc “so muchc to leave the subway”

“that you don't “ever ask” “how much it is”

As we readers ride this subway with Alette, “endlessly” encountering ghost-interlocuters and dream-vignettes, the quotation marks distend our ability to predict where a given scene or utterance is going, or even to assign a speaking voice to a real or spectral body. Time, sound, power all bend in this space. Along with our heroine, we begin to piece together Alette's dream task: she must trace collective pain back to its political origins—that embodiment of patriarchy, The Tyrant—and give it right back to him by opening his guts with her owl claw.

But for a long time, she resists. And this resistance gives the piece its plot and its refulgent friction. Book I is dedicated to visions on the subway; Book II to a series of revelatory caves; Book III to battle-training under the tutelage of an owl; and Book IV to the showdown with the Tyrant himself. It is not a single episode but the totality of them that provides Alette with the arsenal she will need to defeat the Tyrant; the associative shapeshifting method of Alette becomes the associative, shapeshifting method of Alette herself. When she finds the Tyrant sleeping under a mysterious fleshy bush, it's the bush she attacks:

[...]    “I dropped” “the bush”

“suddenly” “Rose, rushed up” “in weightless smallness” “Hovered widewinged”,

“an owl again” “Then settled on the floor” “& with my talon”

“dug into it,” “the fleshy floor” “I gouged out the” “stubborn

last root” “Blood spurted up” 'in a small jet” “Then I changed back”

“into a woman” “sat breathless” “& blood-spattered”

Here Alette is woman, rose, owl, then woman again, a synaptic array of forms unanticipated even by herself. Moreover, she does not attack the Tyrant directly but via his phantom double, the bush. It is by this dream method that Alette can not only “kill” the Tyrant but undo his regime; this insight arms her to deliver the book's indelible vow: “‘I will change the” “forms in dreams.’”

Alette's vow is one Notley kept for the rest of her life, holding it up like a prism to cast a myriad dissident light, working it up into a total principle of Disobedience, a course she set with the title of her next big book: Disobedience (2001). Her notion of disobedience would be borne out both in her work and her life for the next four decades, and articulated in her iconic talk, “The Poetics of Disobedience”:

More and more as I wrote Disobedience I discovered I couldn't go along, with the government or governments, with radicals and certainly not conservatives or centrists, with radical poetics and certainly not with other poetics, with other women's feminisms, with any fucking thing at all; belonging to any of it was not only an infringement on my liberty but a veil over clear thinking. 
  
It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against . . . everything.

3.

From that first reading, I was mightily impressed by the ambition of Alette. I loved the disconcerting way Alette's katabasis is set in that most earthly of locations: the Reagan-era New York City subway I recognized from growing up in 1980s New Jersey, under our shared penumbral chemical haze. I knew this topography, crammed with the ill and the prophetic, veterans and addicts, all riding the train, all in a state of vatic, rattly, ratty oscillation, under the suspect fluid of unaccountably dreamy lights, travestying the above-ground circulation of money and power which makes all trains go round.

I loved the cheap, low-down brownish pages on which Penguin had inexplicably printed the book. Something to read on the train. Something you might find there.

And I loved, contradictorily, that a woman had made it.

Yet to understand Notley's achievement, and the mightiness of the poem, its twin engines of ambivalence and determination, the implacable generosity of what Notley made for us—and demands of us—I would have to understand the size of that pain. I would have to lose my luck, my American schoolboy sense of myself as a winner—a winner of contests.

I would have to know grief, and in some ways become Grief. That thing that lifts its wings and screams.

That thing that refuses.

That disobedient thing: a woman.

4.

After reading Descent, I greedily went on to Disobedience. The title here felt like a huge flag being waved, a callback to Alette's vow, but also an inversion of Alette's compactness into a dazzling flight over the City of Lights, accompanied by a spectral gumshoe called both “Hardwood” and “Robert Mitch-ham.” Here, Notley exploits and explodes the recognizable coordinates of city, personnel, and dialogue into a cosmic fabric, rich with signs:

Am I seriously Soul?

When time goes away I don't care about

me (him or me)

The phone rang; we're meeting at 1:30.

What do I use my personality for? Humor was there from the beginning...And

the behavior of certain elementary particles seems rather humor-filled;

certainly unpredictable. There are equations that 'cover' this unpredictability.

The relation of I, soul, to particle: I think I am its field of familiar

the non-niggling corpus

playing, like a photon, myself: watch me I'll behave another way from usual.

Deeper, under the fox costume,

I'm more than I say in time

but time's less exact than I am.

We see another form of shapeshifting here as Notley moves at photonic speed through various versions of what a poem can be. First, spiritual speculation rendered as allegory (“Am I seriously Soul?”), then a nimble take on Notley's own debt to the New York School and specifically Frank O'Hara (the phone call, the exact time set for the cosmic date), then the opening up of the O'Hara-esque term “personality” into at once its largest and smallest coordinates. By the end, we get the big cosmic boast—“time's less exact than I am”—which makes me love Notley.

Yet there is also a problem here, the ultra-generative problem which is also Notley's great accomplishment: her utter singularity. Other big books—Alma, or the Dead Women, and Reason and Other Women—return to the initial moves of Alette, using techniques of reflection, inversion, quotation, transcription, and dialogue to break down not just the coordinates of the speaking “I” but also those of the self. Yet Notley's distinctive, unmistakable voice means the task of deindividuation can't quite succeed, while her extensive oeuvre embodies the paradoxical stubbornness to keep trying.

As for me, the hero of this essay, I found these big post-Alette books, with their paroxysms of singularity and plurality, to be most striking after I, too, became a mother (twice) over the following decade. I would turn my gaze from these confounding, visionary books to stare into the black abyssal eyes of infants and the black owlish eyes of recalcitrant toddlers and think, for all of us:

who are we.

5.

For me, it was the unexpected death of our third child in 2017 that circuited me back to Alette some two decades after I had first read her: One day I awoke and found myself on a subway, endlessly. Demeter, Clytemnestra, Electra, Antigone, Cassandra, these were my models: the women who would not get over it, who could not just let it go. My long black hair and my long black clothes hung from me. What a drag; everything pointed to a loss.

Before she wrote Alette, Notley was already the author of 20 books of addictively novel, song-length poems, by turns fluidly and flatly cosmic. With her first husband, the poet Ted Berrigan, she was strongly associated with the milieus, presses, and personnel of what would be called the Second-Generation New York School, whether it convened in Iowa, Chicago, Bolinas, Buffalo, or (iconically) St. Marks Place. In her mid-40s, she was contemplating what it might mean to write a long poem on the model of Charles Olson or Ezra Pound or (importantly for Notley) William Carlos Williams—or to write a long poem not like one of these.

I now know that Notley wrote The Descent of Alette not (just) from this ambition or from her well of abundant virtuosity but from a path warped by grief's singularity. Loss followed loss: her father, Albert Notley Sr., in 1975; Ted Berrigan in 1983; her young stepdaughter, Kate Berrigan, in 1987; and, most crucially for her poetry, the unassimilable death of her brother, also called Al, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 1988 after returning from Vietnam with PTSD. She outlived them all, perhaps to her greater grief, and then she had to outwrite them, or, maybe, to write her way out to where they now were, to travel their far orbits.

In the wake of all these deaths, her work collapsed and exploded, became illimitable, unprecedented, simultaneously incandescent and nocturnal. It became truly great. This is obvious to everyone now, and I think to Notley—but it is a greatness that is supra-individual, depending as it does on contact with the dead. As she contended in a Paris Review interview in 2024:

I think the real answer has to do with suffering, and how you perceive things after suffering. You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you. I started hearing the dead, for example. And I felt that, because I had some new knowledge, I had something to give people—that I had things to say that would make them feel better.

It's as if, for Notley, the dead are stand-ins for the Other, all the Others that might be included in poetry's address—“people.” To accommodate all these dead and living people, her formally compact poems necessarily started working themselves apart, expanding in scale. Her poetry became a site where ghosts could and did cross like comets in the night, or like some desert scavengers who turn their earthly eyes on us with astral luminosity. In this way she became “more powerful than a president,” “a charmed and desperate / poet, speaking to everyone.”

6.

In the mouth of the poems written around this period of loss, the matter of names becomes crucial, as the work of mourning expands and becomes cosmic—elegy becomes epic. As she wrote in her 1995 essay on “The ‘Feminine’ Epic,” with the death of her brother,

Suddenly I, and more than myself, my sister-in-law and my mother, were being used, mangled by the forces which produce epic, and we had no say in the matter, never had, and worse had no story ourselves. We hadn't acted. We hadn't gone to war [. . .] We got to suffer, but without a trajectory.

The “feminine” epic is sudden; it is plural—“I, and more than myself”; it attempts to envision existence without power's forms, a rejection of every orthodoxy Notley would later term “disobedience.” Crucially, while anti-patriarchal, this vision of disobedience includes men in its ambition “to change the” “forms in dreams.” While she was writing Alette, Notley reports, her dead father appeared to her in a dream to instruct her that her poem must not harm anyone. On the subway, a figure much like Notley's troubled brother appears to Alette, pleading, “'I need a dolor” “a few more dolors” “Then after that” “I'll see / our father'”; it is this troubled veteran who articulates the urgency of her quest when he begs her, “Give me change” “Give me change.” The secret name “Al” stretches, in the poem “White Phosphorus,” written just prior to Alette, to become “Owl”; that Owl then stretches its wings to become “Alette,” then, in subsequent volumes, “Amere,” and, later, “Alma” provide eponyms. In a fusillade of poems and books, then, ciphers are passed from speaker to speaker, agonists and avatars, the living and the dead, men and women, the godly and the mortal and the not-yet-formed.

Notley’s use of aliases across her oeuvre invents and investigates a plurality critical to her vision. This vision does not feel utopian; instead, in rejecting all binaries and orthodoxies, it instantiates uncomfortable but suggestive chains of likeness, affiliation, recognition, and refusal. The Tyrant is a “he,” but so is the Owl that bestows on Alette her talon; The Tyrant is sliced open with a talon, but so is Alette. Figures that should be oppositional are instead joined by likeness. They mirror each other. What else might they have in common? Surprisingly, what must be seized from the Tyrant is not power, but pain; in a pivotal moment, we learn that the Tyrant has taken Alette's pain into himself, and it is in reclaiming her pain that she reclaims her name and becomes the protagonist of her own epic: “My name is” “Alette” “My brother” “died in battle.” Notley's distinctive ambivalence doubles rather than blunts the power of her vision; this inclusivity renders her disobedience broad, expansive, and shape-shifting, like Alette, and like Notley’s oeuvre itself.

7.

In the middle part of my life, I lost my luck. Knocked from the lit path of my life, I awoke to find my form changed by grief. I was now a woman. But as I opened my eyes in the dark, I began to realize that death's adjacency to life entails a double domain, and thus a doubling of aesthetic power: day and night, light and dark, living and dead, the old life, the afterlife. We can cross into this terrain through dream. Everyone can do this. The only enemy to this kind of flight is Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is the Tyrant. Alice Notley included us in this vision when she shaped us, her readers, in the mirror of her writing, as in the final paragraph of her 1998 essay “Poetics of Disobedience”:

It's possible that the reader, or maybe the ideal reader, is a very disobedient person a head/church/city entity her/himself full of soaring icons and the words of all the living and the dead, who sees and listens to it all and never lets on that there's all this beautiful almost undifferentiation inside, everything equal and almost undemarcated in the light of fundamental justice.

She hands the charge to the reader. The reader is that place where her vision instantiates and perfects. Her poetry is the blueprint. So now we must do it.

We must listen for the dead.

We must change the forms in dreams.