Alice Notley, Disobedience

[The following review was just published in the Boston Review.]

8American literature has never been short of poets who structure their works like running commentary on their spiritual sojourns, from the weekly “Preparatory Meditations” of the Puritan Edward Taylor (“My Soule had caught an Ague, and like Hell / Her thirst did burn”) through Emily Dickinson’s secret fascicles and the hallucinogenic “beatitude” of the Beats. But with this stunning, book-length work, Alice Notley creates a new mold: that of the pilgrimage of spiritual and social negation, a poem that records in prismatic detail and with shotgun wit the poet’s efforts to divest herself of everything society has handed to her, and to resist what’s ahead:

This is the beginning of a new
spiritual and ethical position. For a woman.
Based on the supposition of harmful intent—
that another, male or female, even without realizing it
might very well want to hurt me, cause my subjugation.
I don’t propose an equalitarian lovingkindness or compassion.
I propose, for women, always an instinctive wariness.
I propose, further, meditation in separate closets, without
instructions. That’s
the whole religion. It never has to be proposed again
in order to exist. It has no organization and no beliefs.

Written in Paris from 1995 to 1996, Disobedience is in method something of a synthesis of Notley’s last two books, both of which also pursued clearly defined conceptual projects. Like The Descent of Alette (1996), it derives many of its themes and much of its imagery from dreams and conjoins the description of a subterranean journey with a concerted effort against the day world of oppressively bureaucratic, often male, society. Structurally, Alette was distinctive for its use of quotation marks to break up the line into breath units, and each of its untitled sections—which otherwise looked like normal stanzas—added up, serially, to the whole of the poem. Disobedience is also a serial poem, but each of its irreverently, often histrionically, titled sections is a constellations of fragments, some of which resemble barbed fortune cookies—“Starving because there are ‘jobs’ in our consciousness”—and others which run as long as a page. Like Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), a suite of sixty-nine poems that chronicled significant events in the author’s life (including her marriage to Ted Berrigan, her changing attitudes towards writing, and her second marriage, after Berrigan’s death, to English poet Douglas Oliver), Disobedience is written freely from an “I” and with the forthright, even defiant, lyric subjectivity she feels has been subsumed under the projects of collagist poetics with which she herself—as a member of the “second generation New York School”—had once been deeply engaged. In Disobedience this “I” becomes a troubled site, sometimes represented as total absence (the soul is the “universe’s asshole,” she writes, and later, “I am exactly material and in fact non- / existent as a self, am everyone else”) and at other times as a singular, rebellious presence, as when she revisits Rimbaud’s famous “I is another” with a formulation that reflects the friction between the “exactness” of the refreshed identity that she is pursuing and the anonymous, troubled commonality she can’t do without: “What’s exact / is I, whose particulars may not be mine. / I is never another.”

read more

Posted by Brian Stefans at December 20, 2002 12:16 AM