4 posts tagged “alice notley”

Alice Notley Reading, June 24, 2008, 8 p.m., Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado

Appropriately, this review of Alice Notley's reading last night is accompanied by the pop-up noir art of Thomas Allen, an American artist who takes the covers of old pulp novels and cuts them up into three-dimensional dioramas.  Notley, herself a creator of dioramas, postcards, fans, handmade books, and other art which compliments her cross-genre writing, will surely appreciate this juxtaposition.

Notley read from the as-of-yet unpublished 2005 manuscript for NEGATIVITY'S KISS, a noir play almost libretto-like in its reminiscence of Anne Carson's Decreation, though Notley's manuscript preceded Decreation (which this reviewer saw performed by students at The University of Michigan and co-directed by Carson in 2004, subsequent to its debut the previous year in New York City).

Here is a Descent of Alette-inspired collage of Notley's language from NK:  "I want to be clear"  "Even the avant garde is mannerly now"  "Visionary"  "Honey, there's no one in charge at all, anywhere"  "Hooded, will you be my boyfriend?"  "To be a poet is to be more than a celebrated body"  "We would be sorry if you got shot once more"  "God has to have the most money"  "He wants all of everyone's money"  "Who do you love?"

One cannot help but compare this reading with the 2001 reading that Notley gave of an excerpt from Alma, Or the Dead Women (Granary, 2007), which was equally fast-paced, intense, and riveting.  My 2001 record of that reading is missing, but I can still recall sitting on the edge of my seat, straining to comprehend the whirlwind of words that ascended into the air above the audience creating a complex and beautiful constellation.  I hesitate to say that I preferred that reading because it was of an entirely different subject matter, but I will note the presence in both readings of what might be called a nervy infectiousness.

One would be remiss if they did not give some mention of the other readers who accompanied Notley.  Eleni Sikelianos, Douglas A. Martin, Anselm Hollo and Reed Bye also gave outstanding, nuanced readings that deserve more attention and homage than I pay them here.  All of the readers above read from published or soon-to-be-published books of poetry--both Sikelianos and Hollo read poetry from books to be published by Minneapolis' Coffee House Press.  Sikelianos accompanied excerpts from Body Clock with images projected on the wall above her of drawings she created in tandem with her poetry when, she said, words wouldn't come.  Bye not only read excerpts from Join the Planets, but sang a song by Allen Ginsberg that was at once funny, bluesy, and profound.  It was natural for this reviewer to focus here on the prolific and chameleon-like Notley, Alice being a favorite poet of mine ever since I first read Pulitzer Prize finalist Mysteries of Small Houses.

I met Ted at two parties at the same house
at the first he insulted me because, he said later
he was mad at girls that night; at the second we danced
an elaborate fox-trot with dipping--he had once taken one lesson
at an Arthur Murray's.  First I went into an empty
room and waited for him to follow me.  I liked the way
his poems looked on the page open but delicately arranged.

I like him because he's funny he talks more like
me than like books or words:  he likes my knowledge and
accepts its sources.  I know that there are Channel swimmers
and that they keep warm with grease because of
an Esther Williams movie.  We differ as to what kind
of grease I suggest bacon he says it's bear
really in the movie it was dark brown like grease from a car
Who's ever greased a car?  Not him I find he prefers to white out
all the speech balloons in a Tarzan comic
and print in new words for the characters.  Do you want
to do some?  he says--No--We go to a movie where Rachel Welch
and Jim Brown are Mexican revolutionaries I make him
laugh he says something about a turning point in the plot
Do you mean, I say, when she said We should have keeled him long ago?
Finally a man knows that I'm being funny

He's eleven years older than me and takes pills
I take some a few months later and write
I think it's eighty-three poems I forget about Plath and James Wright
he warns me   about pills in a slantwise way See this
nose? he says, It's the ruins of civilization
I notice some broken capillaries who cares

I wonder who I am now myself though I haven't
anticipated me entirely I have such an appetite
to write not to live I'm certainly living quity fully
We're good together he says because we can be like
little boy and little girl I give him much later a
girl's cheap Dutch brooch Delft blue and white
a girl and a boy holding hands and windmills
But now it's summer in Iowa City he leaves for
Europe gives me the key to his library stored
in a room at The Writer's Workshop
I write mildly yet oh there's a phrase "the Gilbert curve"
how a street turns that sensation to make it permanent
a daily transition as the curve opens and is walked on
of the kinds of experience still in between the ones
talked about in literature and even in Ted's library
which finally makes poetry possible for me but I've
not read a voice like my own like my own voice will be

--from Mysteries of Small Houses by Alice Notley

Uploaded on August 23, 2007
by robynne faye

 

WORLD'S BLISS

Alice Notley 

 

The men & women sang & played

they sleep by singing, what

shall I say of the most

poignant on earth the most glamorous

loneliest sought after people

those poets wholly beautiful

desolate aureate, death is a

powerful instinctive emotion--

but who would be released from

a silver skeleton?  gems

& drinking cups--This

skull is Helen--who would not

be released from the

Book of Knowledge?  Why

should a maiden lie on a moor

for seven nights & a day?  And

he is a maiden, he is & she

on the grass the flower the spray

where they lie eating primroses

grown crazy with sorrow & all

the beauties of old--oh each poet's a

beautiful human girl who must die.