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Alice Notley: Grave of Light. New and Selected Poems 1970-2005. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2006. 364 pp + xi. ISBN 978-0-8195- 6772-7, US$29.95 hb. [= GL]

Alice Notley. Coming After. Essays on Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. 192 pp. ISBN 978-0-472-06859-3, US$19.95 pb. [= CA]

I am writing this review in north London, which is where I first read Alice Notley's work in the 1980s, thanks to Kelvin Corcoran, who introduced me to How Spring Comes (Toothpaste Press, 1981). It took me a little while to work out where those poems come in this new, and authoritative, collection of her work, because, as she says in her preface, her “publishing history is awkward and untidy, though colourful and even beautiful.” (“Author's Note”, GL, p. xi.) For this reason she has dismantled her previous collections to present poems by the year in which they were written. No doubt also, this awkward publishing history was due to the small press publications of her work, although this has ceased to be the case in the last decade.

Those poems I first read actually date back to the 1970s and form part of her earlier work, and the years in which she was most influenced by Frank O'Hara and the New York school. Indeed, she saw herself as a second generation poet in the New York school, and this is one of the meanings of the title of her recently published collection of essays, Coming After. I'd like to focus on a poem from the earlier work called “The Prophet”, and I assume the title is an ironic comment on the then immensely popular spiritual and proverbial tract by Kahlil Gibran. Notley's poem is full of contradictions and, like Walt Whitman, she embraces contradictions: it is an advice-giving poem which warns against giving advice. It is very funny. That has to be one of the things that strikes you first about Notley's early work, its humour, and in this too, of course, she resembles O'Hara. She refers to it in an important statement about her poetics:

The poet places her/his sounds quite literally in me. I therefore want two things of the poet. One is a sort of constraint – I don't want to be violated or incited, no one has that right. The other is, I want to be amused. 
       (CA, p. 143)

Notley's work is always at its best when it's amusing and amused. When she becomes too 'grave' her lucidity flickers. When I say 'amused' I mean in the best sense, in the tradition of Laurence Sterne, as quoted by Ezra Pound: “Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind” (ABC of Reading, Faber & Faber, 1961, p. 13). As Notley says in “The Prophet” (GL, pp. 94-106): “It is important to stay / Amused […] You'd better get serious, kid, is some / good advice. Seriously / Almost everyone is luminous.” (GL, pp. 103-104).

Another quality of the poet and this poem, central to her work, is the urban context. As she writes in the preface to her essays, explaining why she has reviewed particular poets: “It is important that all of the poets dealt with … live or lived in cities … I am that sort of poet too, and in that way I am always of the New York School and its friends” (“Preface”, CA, pp. v-vii; here p. vii). I identified with her descriptions of city life, of, for example, the neighbour:

                                                 […] If you've yet another
                       downstairs neighbor who hates every
        Step you take on your floor, his ceiling, ignore him to the
                        extent that you
       Must breathe & walk about & have lots of fun […] (GL, p. 100)

She reflects the tensions and dangers of city life, as well as the equally vivid pleasures. There is a sense of constant activity around her, not least because she is that rare thing a female heterosexual poet with children. “There is no place in America for heterosexual poets with children / […] except for / in your house” (“The Prophet”, GL, p. 102).

“The Prophet” is a long poem which, like the type of 'Desiderata' it mocks, and in a Beat litanic style, is held together by the 'you' it addresses. Although there are many uses of the pronoun in this poem, some of them contradictory, the person addressed is primarily Notley herself and other women. Notley has always been intensely aware of what is to be a woman, and especially a woman poet, and her exhortations to women in “The Prophet” are funny and serious, and imbued with optimism: “The bionic man is not / Stronger than the bionic woman […] Do not die in a / monument, like / Cleopatra […] Be a / Noble girl” (GL, pp. 105-106).

Having touched on some of Notley's themes and something of her wit, I want to discuss her poetics, which becomes increasingly important as she tries to forge a new style in the 1980s. The poetic statement I quoted earlier talks of the “poet placing her/ his sounds quite literally in me” (CA, p. 143). Like the New York school poets, Notley is concerned with the 'voice' of the poem, and the need for the poet to discover their own voice. Her allegiance to the importance of the spoken voice brought her into conflict with Language poetry in the 1980s, and its famous “I hate speech” dictum. Clearly it's absurd to hate speech, but, on the other hand, Notley seems at times to be driving herself into a “I hate prose” camp, which seems equally limiting. In fact these two extremes are never fully adhered to. Notley explores her poetics at some length in her collected essays with clarity and expertise. At times I feel that she is too concerned with the discourse of traditional prosody, and too suspicious of more recent methods of poetic analysis. She felt marginalised by the new avantgarde, as the old avant-garde was dismissed, and her response was to try and find a way of circumventing the avant-garde altogether and following her own path.

As well as 'the voice', she is concerned with the verse 'line'. In particular, and this can be seen in the quotes from “The Prophet”, she has a liking for the continuous, wrap-around line. This was a form that she shared with her first husband, the poet Ted Berrigan. She writes of his work: “The overflow of sentence to end mid line, and the frequent commas, are characteristically Berriganesque method of breaking up a long line into units which are somewhat linelike themselves” (CA, p. 139, also Notleyesque). She emphasises that this is not a consistent pattern, but that there are constant variations. There is, nevertheless, a [desire for continuity expressed in Notley's use of this line, which is closely allied to her growing interest in story telling. In “The Prophet” she writes: “I seem to mean stories. Half-story half-true, like everything that's / some knowing.” (GL, p. 99). In the 1980s Notley moves from 'story' to 'epic', eventually writing “The Descent of Alette”, as a new female epic. To do this she needs what she calls a “generative line – a line that pushes itself more of itself so that the poet can forget about it and tell a story” (CA, p. 136). She explains: “I wanted to write an epic, specifically a 'female epic', a narrative poem with the woman as hero or principal actor” (CA, p. 136). The 1980s was a time when Notley felt marginalised, not just as someone associated with a superseded avant-garde, but also as a woman, when the poetic canon continues to coalesce around a small number of dead white males.

She wants to revive the epic poem and she no longer wants to be seen as 'coming after', but as doing something new. In “Homer's Art”, she compares her poetics to those of Homer rather than, as we might expect, other long or 'epic' modernist poems. This sometimes seems surprising, and even perhaps lacking in solidarity with other modern women poets, such as HD. It was probably a necessary exercise for Notley to establish her own authority. She needs to be a visionary thinker, as HD was. In “Homer's Art” she is interested, less in the female figures of the Homeric epic, who are “pieces of a male mind” (GL, p. 188), than in the parallel of stupid wars. She hopes that her female narrator-hero might recover “some sense of what mind was like before Homer, before the world went haywire and women were denied participation in the design and making of it.” (GL, p. 188).

At times it can seem like wishful thinking and the desire for some golden age that may never have existed. A 1980s poem, “Mother Mask”, seems to risk that fallacy: “Mother Mask has twigs in her hair / she is all eye that sometimes closes shut / stars on her eyelids.” (GL, p. 188). This matriarchal myth making does, however, become more convincing in the context of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. This is particularly true of the poem “White Phosphorus” (GL, pp. 190- 198) which derives its intensity from the death of her brother, who never recovered from the trauma of being a “sniper in Vietnam” (“The 'Feminine' Epic”, CA, pp. 171-180; here p. 171): “Money is numbers / dead bodies are numbers” “dead veterans are numbers like  / hours we've worked” “country of numbers” “mother of numbers”/ “your child will be numbers” (GL, p. 193) in a section which ends:

      “I wear this mask, but”

      “leaks” “skin of the planet” “leaks” “leaks” “white phosphorus”.
                                                                                                               (p. 194)

Stylistically this poem, like her feminine epics, demonstrates her desire for a greater “regularity of line” (CA, p. 173). In many ways it seems like a return to something closer to Beat poetry than the New York school. This is certainly true in her heightened emphasis on the musicality of her poetry, and the importance of music to poetry. She cites Bob Dylan as one of her influences, but in these epics I am reminded rather of Patti Smith: there is an insistent, hypnotic rhythm, as well as thematic affinities. Notley would like to have the popularity of the rock singer or balladeer, and is reacting against the 'difficult' poetry of the new avant-garde. Another feature of her new style is the use of double quotation marks to denote 'phrases or feet' within a line, or across a line. I am not entirely convinced by this device on the page, which is very distracting visually, and it is not something that she has persisted with.

In her ambitious spiritual quests, I sometimes feel that Notley is becoming too immersed in the 'grave', although this is understandable when the quest was inspired by the deaths of those close to her. I feel this particularly of the title poem, “Grave of Light” (pp. 289-92), written in the late 1990s. It is written in long, unpunctuated prose lines, which make use of word play, and even infraverbal disruption, and yet the overall impression is one of unbroken continuity: “a door oh rood spell backward recent supersti interstices” (p. 290). Her passage from the grave to the light is laden with symbolism, and insufficiently leavened with humour or the quotidian. Unusually for Notley, this poem was written in the country, in the French mountains, and it begins to remind me of certain sober, symbolist or quasi-theological trends in French poetry. She has travelled too far from New York in a journey which ends: “x is the door rood the oo the exhumed air itself breathy light tinged faintly with blood red.” (p. 292).

I heard Notley read at a conference in London in 1998, with Bob Perelman, Allen Fisher and Gavin Selerie. She obviously felt under attack from the Language oriented avant-garde, and on the defensive in her use of the 'voice' and the first person pronoun. Although the gathering of poets and listeners at that conference argued for the complexity and fracture of innovative poetry, Notley, at her best, has more in common with modernism and post-modernism than she sometimes admits. She gave a mesmeric performance from her wonderful long poem “Disobedience” (GL, pp. 255-59) which avoids all the dangers of excessive solemnity. It is classic Notley, with her distinctive New York voice:

          What do I use my personality for? Humor was there from the
                                                                                   beginning … And
          the behaviour of certain elementary particles seems rather humor-
                                                                                                             filled;
          certainly unpredictable […]
                                                                                                            (p. 258)