At PSA: Nick Sturm Talks to Alice Notley About New LP, Live in Seattle, Among Other Things

Poet Nick Sturm spoke with Alice Notley on the occasion of Fonograf Editions's release of Notley's LP, Live in Seattle, which contains recordings of poems from her book, Certain Magical Acts (Penguin, 2016). "Because she is an incredibly funny person, my only regret is that this transcript can't show the amount that we laughed during the conversation," says Sturm at Poetry Society of America. We can imagine. A snippet:

Nick Sturm: Before Certain Magical Acts came out you sent me a note saying this is your most recent book but you didn't know if being recent matters anymore. I wonder what you think about the idea of recentness.

Alice Notley: At a certain point I realize what my next book needs to be. But I have a lot of manuscripts. Certain Magical Acts is odd because it wasn't written as a book. My last several books have been written as books, whereas Certain Magical Acts is composed of poems that are kind of in-between books. Then there's a long sequence in the middle, "Voices," which I thought was going to be book-length but part of it was in prose and I took out the prose and it suddenly wasn't book-length anymore. It took up the space in my life that writing a book-length poem takes. I wrote it in 2009 right after the election and there was this diary in it that was kept by a woman in some long ago past. It was this prose diary and somehow keeping the diary of this character enabled me to get from poem to poem. Then I realized the diary was of no interest and I pulled it all out. There's still a narrative structure behind it, kind of like muted notes.

Nick Sturm: One of the things I'm noticing reading Certain Magical Acts is that everyone thinks that they understand what change is, but actually no one understands what change is. That seems to me to push through the whole book.

Alice Notley: I hadn't thought it, I hadn't thought about it at all. But one is being change all the time, and one is the change. What you have to do is to keep up with what you're doing as a poet, you have to keep up with what you're thinking and doing and go to the exact—it's corny to say "moment"—the exact texture of things. I'm usually about ten years ahead of everybody else so if I'm publishing what I wrote ten years ago then I'm current.

Nick Sturm: That's your one submission—like alright I'll take a ten-year break for everybody.

Alice Notley: I'm afraid if I took a break I wouldn't write anymore. I never stop writing and I now have been writing so much that I'm totally inundated. I can't keep track of it. But Certain Magical Acts was really interesting because I knew those works had to be published but I didn't know how to do it because I hadn't been making collections for a long time. Then I realized I had them all...

Read on at PSA.