An Interview With Alice Notley at Poetry Northwest

At Poetry Northwest, Sierra Nelson interviews Alice Notley, who read from Certain Magical Acts in Seattle in April of 2017. "The whole evening was recorded and later made into a vinyl record by Portland’s Fonograf Editions, an extension of Octopus Books," writes Nelson. While thrilled to hear about the recording, Nelson was also "a little afraid." "But what does it mean to record a séance? Would the ghost come through in the picture, the knock sound in the groove? Would I need it to, to hold onto that first experience I’d felt in the room?" From their conversation:

SIERRA:
What you said earlier about the body—“the material body as analyzed so far is just not all that’s there”—reminds me too about what I’ve heard you say about dreams. I would love to hear you talk a bit more about how you work with dreams and visioning in your writing process. And I’m sure you’ve encountered people too who are dismissive of dreams, or accuse poetry in general of a “dreaminess” that seems to imply it lacks tangibility or practical use. I disagree with this view, yet I have also struggled with trying to write about dreams in a way that is interesting (to anyone besides the dreamer). Somehow when trying to carry the information from the dream back to waking life, retelling it in words, it often seems to go flat or become boring. The dream image or action that was so charged in the dream dissolves like fairy magic. Yet in your poems you seem able to bring the dream charge over to this side — you’re able to keep the images potent, and we feel it as strongly as if we are dreaming it ourselves. How do you do that?

ALICE:
The key to using dreams (and visions) in your work is really to admit that the experience of them is equal to your waking experience. If you do that, stop pointing to them as dreams but accept them as experience, too, then you can intermix them with the other parts of living you refer to. I don’t say which parts of poems are dreamed and which aren’t, unless there’s some reason to — it’s all in the mix for me. And I don’t always know, when I re-read my poems, whether dreams are being used or not. My dreams, when I manage to have them, are as important to me as my daily experience. And that is an example of something you’re really not supposed to say.

Read the full conversation at Poetry Northwest.