Reading Alice Notley

I read Coming After a few weeks ago, and I have picked up The Descent of Alette and given it another try--the first try having been unfortunately stymied by my reaction to the quotation marks. I do understand them, and have gotten used to them mostly, but they still seem intrusive to me, like being read to. While it is interesting to me to feel the disparity in how I would hear the phrasing if not being so micromanaged, it's still somewhat affronting. I dislike audio books for this reason, and honestly, sometimes, some performances of work I know well. Still, we all direct readers in this way, with punctuation, with line breaks, with space. We use these and other devices to create a poem that will be heard by the reader the same way we hear it ourselves. The goal is to make the experiences as close as possible. Isn't it? And I am enjoying the book, and her phrasing, even when forced to ventriloquize against myself. It's a less solitary kind of reading, if that makes sense. I think my main objection to the quotation marks is not the new purpose she assigns them--to indicate her measure, the cadence of phrases--but that their traditional purpose is so at odds with this new purpose. It takes a bit of retraining (uh, perhaps particularly for someone trained as an editor/copyeditor) to read this book. Even reading each chapter/poem/piece twice or three times, and being halfway into the book, I can't help but hear some of the phrases, particularly the one-word and shorter adjectival phrases, as being enclosed in "scare quotes"--one of my least favorite abuses. It's a valence I don't think the author intends, so I find it problematic. Also, where there is dialogue the marks are just ugh a nested mess. Notley's note on the marks makes good sense there at the beginning, on its page, and she knows she's being controlling: "If I had simply left white spaces between the phrases, the phrases would be rushed by the reader--read too fast for my musical intention. [...] Finally they may remind a reader that each phrase is a thing said by a voice: this is not a thought, or a record of thought process, this is a story, told." Notley is so concerned (to generalize from this statement and a few of the essays) about her voice, that I find myself asking (as a reader, in this case) "Where's my voice?" Her anxiety about controlling the way I read her comes through. And I feel necessarily less like a collaborator in the experience of reading the poem. It's uncomfortable for me.

Which is not to say that I am not marveling at runs like this one (to chose a random example):

"I walked" "into a car where" "everything was membrane-
like" "thin-membrane petal-like" "& veined"
"Fetus-like" "fetus-flesh-like" "In shades of pink" "purple black &"
"brown" "Thin" "reddish veins" "Fetal flower" "soaked in

subway light" "The car walls were translucent" "orchid-
flesh" "The seats were & the floor--" "All was naked flesh"
"We were naked" "A fetus" "delicate" "tiny-faced," "eyes closed,
concentrating" "curled" "almost spiraling," "floated high" "in the

air." "We sat naked on our" " membrane-like" "tan benches"
"All of us" "smooth & wrinkled" "brownish, or"
"darker," "or paler," "palest" "were as if" "within a flower"
"as if" "within us" "This" "This is" "simultaneous," "I understood"

"Uncontrolled by" "the tyrant" "Someone else"
"in all of us" "is this lovely" "fetal flesh," "flower skin"
"We are being this" "this flower" "And then" "the flower
vanished" "I was clothed, there was" "no fetus" "Gray subway car

of people" "riding quietly some sleeping" "Someone's earphones"
"turned up too loud" "buzzing wire" "vaguely song"

In her essay on The Descent of Alette in Coming After, "The Feminine Epic," Notley says "I don't think you can write a real epic (as opposed to the twentieth-century Big Poem) without some, even a lot of, regularity of line. I wanted something regular, but also catchy--not some prosy long-line spinoff of the what-had-come-before; I'm afraid I wanted something all my own. As I worked on the first part of Alette, the line of the previous two poems evolved into something I could depend on, not think about, have to invent while I was inventing the story. I needed more freedom to tell the story than a constantly changing metrics would allow me. Thus I arrived at, and stuck with, a four-line stanza, each line of which usually consists of three to four feet or phrases[.]"

One thing that's particularly fascinating about reading Coming After, much of which is Notley's articulation of the feminine and its intersection with poetics, and The Descent of Alette is that in Alette she chose to work with 1) the epic model which is 2) a narrative stucture 3) a regular metric (tho her application of both regular and metric is idiosyncratic) and 4) allegory (the Tyrant and Alette being symbols as well as characters, particularly the Tyrant) and in Coming After talks about these choices using phrases like "freedom" and "all my own."

Here is where I get to a point. I'm trying to write a long, somewhat narrative, not-exactly-a-novel-nor-a-poem book now, with a principal female character. One the problems I am attempting to solve is how to write accurately (oh more to be said about accurately) about the historical past (as opposed to the autobiographical past, which is more forgiving) without hobbling it with been-there-done-that methods. Results? Giving myself the same template as Notley gave herself for Alette, I'm not sure that I wouldn't feel so oppressed that I couldn't write at all. I have had to admit (and not for the first time) while reading Notley, that my feminism is, uh, reluctant. (I'm no longer talking or thinking about her; this is personal now.) I resent the pressure I feel (and have always felt) to make my gender an issue in or focus of my writing. As much as I admire Notley, I bristle at some of her feminist bristling in Coming After, and similar bristling by others, not to pick on her. If this were an essay and not a blog post I'd give examples. I realize I'm not saying this well. I don't mean I disagree, don't understand her, or am unempathetic. I simultaneouly accept (identify with) and reject (deny the truth of) the circumstances of being a woman poet she describes. Part of this is no doubt generational. And maybe part is wishful thinking.

Update: In looking up the online store links to give you impulse-clickability I had a hard time finding The Descent of Alette. It's a shame, but the book seems to be out of print. Hello, Penguin? Anybody home?