conrad and notley

fascinating conversation ca conrad had over email with alice notley, at phillysound.

notley: great interiors and o'hara's birthday

recently resuscitated from the ephemeral twilight by tim atkins, alice notley's sonnet sequence great interiors, wines and spirits of the world would be important alone as a followup to her first book, the sonnets of 165 meeting house lane. but it's also part of the (to my knowledge) primary chunk of uncollected notley poetry from this period, the special issue (#4, 1974) of out there devoted to her work. in her note to the onedit reprint of great interiors, notley writes:

OUT THERE was associated with Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and edited by Neal Hackman (later Ravi Singh, the yogi.) The issue was a special "Alice Notley issue" and had a knockout cover by Rochelle Kraut. Neal did all the work: typing, proofreading, collating.

indeed the whole issue is worth looking at, as it runs to at least 50 or 60 pages and thus is longer than some of notley's published books. nevertheless, i think tim was right to reprint great wines in particular because, from my quick middle-of-the-night look through out there #4 at his place, i got the feeling that the sonnets were far and away the standouts. (it is llikely that some of these poems made it into notley's next two books, which both acknowledge prior appearance of some poems in out there.)

the temptation to compare the sonnets of great interiors to those of 165 meeeting house lane is perhaps unavoidable: the familiar motifs of dreams, clothing and unease are present, and it's also curious that jealousy is sounded twice in the fourth sonnet of each sequence. notley herself even draws the comparison:

I wanted to write a second sonnet sequence, having written 165 MEETING HOUSE LANE, which was heavily influenced by the later sonnets of Edwin Denby. To make this one different, I tried elongating the line (Edwin’s diction is clipped), though reverted from time to time to medium-length lines and sometimes short ones. It was summer [1973] and Ted and I, with baby Anselm, were renting a room in someone’s apartment, in a brick tower block near Battersea Park.

it's more than just the line-length, tho, that distinguishes these sonnets from their predecessors. these sonnets often retain that sense of unease from the previous cycle, but there's a quality of thought and expression that strikes me somehow as marked by greater discontinuities than before. here's the opener:

Old Chinamen--what room there is!--each pf us on one foot from
        his mother's attic
Dancing; though I'm on one foot sitting sort of tilted
        knockkneed
We can't keep our lines aligned nor however our feet down--our
        most serious tics
Star our marrings of "the natural the solid"--
Smell of a lemon shampoo, smiles' cornerings of cheekbones, a
        cylindrical-wax
White, a sheaf of red, reveals Battersea, wide, gree
        un-qunadary
I gather up my tics & tilts, my stutters & imaginaries
        into the "up" leg
In this cancan where we're taxed just to flaunt it
That calf curved from a supercolossal waylay
The way ray strikes shade loss: less screen more flesh
        bluffs
Cool bay things; change greenly to stream
Through face & feet, jangles tendrils free and reft of conscious
        dark,
Made own piano surgical appliance
Pliant as the expert, expecting you to catch her whole act

As much as this poems sounds a note of extreme awkwardness -- on one foot, titled, knockkneed, with tics and tilts and stutters -- the theme is picked up in the qualities of the anguage here as well. the linebreaks, the punctuation, even the assonances and internal rhymes all seem off somehow. ("We can't keep our lines aligned" indeed!) The associative leaps -- from, for example, tics and marrings to lemon shampoo, cheeckbones, white wax and a red sheaf, much less how these things "revela Battersea" (lines 3-6) -- seem quite extreme. Even the intriguing soundplay of the last 5 or 6 lines move sounds forced, and the succession of images (shade - screen - flesh - bluffs, feet - tendrils - dark - piano - surgical - appliance) remain as bewilderingly disparate as any in notley's poetry so far.

again, themes of dreams and unease, the latter especially as manifested through clothing, persist here. sonnet 2 claims, "We're looking for just the right clothes," but the serach is obviously unsuccessful as one item after another is rejected, "no fit." as is so often the case in notley's poems of the period, intimacy and tenderness emerge as a kind of remedy or palliative, and to manage one's own continual unease in the world one offers to comfort an other: "A cup of coffee's a complication, extends / Caresses my cluttered something that's beautiful / and true: / Like an allegation of a tree: / My shade -- / Let me shade you." (Sonnet 3).

other themes from earlier collections, however, are not as present: motherhood, for example, is not nearly so present here as it was in incidentals. instead there is a new interest in art and paintings, starting in sonnet 8 and appearing again in sonnets 10, 13, 15, 16, and 17. additionally, the wine of the sequence's title appears at several key moments in the second half of the sequence, leading me to wonder if the discontinuties of these poems are something like the leaps of drunken though, an invocation to the "great interiors, wines and spirits of the world" as princes, thrones and dominions -- a hierarchy of demons to reign over incoherences. for all their intriguing leaps, these poems do not cohere like the meeting house lane sequence does: the theme of painting and art emerge in what could be the logical or emotionalbalance of the poem; instead we have, in sonnets 15 and 20, nearly wholesale importations of found language that push the sequence away from coherence.

*     *     *

for frank o'hara's birthday contains 25 pages of poems and thus, as a smaller collection appearing in the same year as a larger one, it would seem to being playing the same role with respect to alice ordered me to be made as phoebe light played to the larger incidentals in the day world, something like an appetizer to the main course. there are some interesting if not long-lived experiments here, especially in short-line forms that, in the case of "View of the North Sea," border on imagism. "She's a Friend of Shirley Niebank's" reads like an exercise in loose english-to-english homophonic translation, while "Education Villanelle" is a study in old forms.

mot significant to me are the sequence "3 Dreams" and an untitled prosoid piece that begins with the epistolary greeting "Your Dailiness,..."

"3 Dreams" continues a by now familiar motif in notley's work and again have the feel of being nearly straight, unedited transcriptions from a dream journal. what strikes me as significant however, is how the third poem in the sequence marks a major transformation of the dreaming process.

THIS MORNINING

                I had my old, half-awake dream
Of my performing a lascivious stripping
Dance in front of men in ancient
Roman surroundings--have had this
Dream since earliest adolescence (too
Many Historical Romances, & movies
Of the Roman Epic sort). The quality of
The half-awakeness is my ability to
Control the dream.

                    This morning,
I changed it completely:   my own
Lasciviousness became tempered by my
Desire to dance really well.
The end of the stripping was not the
Climax of the dance (as frustrating
As a climax); instead I
Continued to dance naked, as well anf
As beautifully as possible. I fel
Lascivious too,
Satisfiedly.

among the many dream poems in notley's work so far, what's unique here is the idea of the lucid dreaming in which one can actually transform the dream content. and notice how it's transformed: instead of simply being the passive object of the male gaze, the dancer "tempers" the dance from chiefly erotic to chiefly aesthetic: the point is not to induce climax but to do it well, and beautifully, and while still retaining the erotic aspects. the dancer's own control and satisfaction is made more important than that of her male audience. this i think has all kinds of implications for a poetics that i won't spell out here.

the other piece in for frank o'hara's birthday that holds significance for notley's trajectory as i am trying to construct it here is the prose/epistolary concluding piece, addressed to "Your Dailiness." on the surface it's a piece of autobiographical or even confession narrative, focusing chiefly on death as experienced through the speaker's relationship with grandparents, in-laws and poet friends. this all gets complicated and conflated with birth as well: "A few weeks after Granpa showed me himself as a baby, my son was conceived." and between birth and death, death and birth, there is the haunting, the spectral: ghosts emerge here in an important way in notley's poetics. it's not the first time, and i feel like i have to go back through the books i've already read and discussed in order to find where. but here are some relevant passages from "Your Dailiness,..."

I wrestled with the ghostly, to emerge real, and I wrestled I think with evil for it must all be in me all of all in the world, kill, kill yourself. A few weeks after Granpa showed me himself as a baby, my son was conceived.[...] Why am I not one who's suicidal or who's evil? I wait as for the ghost but I'm haunted by knives, and I work I write.[...] Last Sunday I walked barefoot through the cemetary, came home and wrote '...And the dead the golden warm & shady earth/ I'm comfortable with/ ...Sights & insights endless as the dead...'  Intimacy with all, spreading, Your Dailiness."

powerful stuff, and anyone who's following notley's career today knows how important the lucid dream, death and ghosts are to her work. stunning to me, and giving for frank o'hara's birthday an important place in notley's trajectory for having such a powerful and prescient piece concluding what otherwise seems to me a lighter collection and a prelude to what is still for me the crowning achievement of notley's early poetry, alice ordered me to be made.

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notley: incidentals

incidentals in the day world (angel hair books 1973) complements notley's other book publication from 1973 (phoebe light). and i do mean "complement" in the etymological sense of "to complete" -- as i said in my previous post, phoebe light feels a bit slight relative to this 56-page book.

on another level though, both books are pretty consistently working through similar thematic terrain: dailiness, dreams, unease, and increasingly motherhood -- especially in poems and sequences like "it," "i keep feeling my baby's / expressions...," "three strolls" and "3 postpartum exercises." again it's worth nothing that the second-to-last poem in phoebe light is also the second poem in incidentals, "dear dark continent" (the only poem the two books have in common). the different placements suggest that whereas the poem was a kind of emotional culmination or conclusion for the former book, it is now in incidentals something of a starting point. this might further suggest that the new role of motherhood, the making way of the self for a new sense of self that is inextricably linked with child and husband -- taken as starting point rather than culmination of conclusion -- is something with which the speaker is now at greater ease:

                   In excitement it all
fits cloudy mysterious with lissome vocab-
ulary "I".

                                     ("Expanding Rooms")

even though the unease will never be fully reconciled. here is one of my favorite poems from this book, which i like partly for how it reflects the insistence of desire and combines it with a kind of universal impersonal ("one wants..."). i reproduce the poem in full here, though i am not sure if the indented lines are meant to be long lines that simply could not fit in the typewriter margins.

              LATTICED CULOTTE AND STARRY BLOUSE

What one wants of course is the clothes to contain one which
            are one,
flexibly enough for the breasts' ease,
            somehow
aesthetically accomodating to the elbows' awkwardness,
if one stoops as a heron might it smacks
            of truly amazing grace,
grace that's a tender smack in the face:
one wants one's own form of clothes.
            One wants it
in bright colors that are a duller, felt background
            for nuances' play of face,
infinite polkadots stripes stars yet a softer,
            polyphonic line to those nuances,
and at the same time one eschews that vocabulary
strides forth in essence irregardless!
            who has
born a baby (and married a husband) and is suddenly
            skittish within form,
would punch holes in it,
make monster faces at it is it to test it in every way? Just
            it, one day
it is simply a privilege, 
to be one for long and so specifically
            --how scary how exciting
a privilege--to expand to the fullness of the specific one.
There is work to do to do it,
            a letting fo constantly
to find form, every muscle must relax in the working.
The eyes caress the clothes in the mirror without looking,
the skin feels them like a friend's admiring
            look,
when both peple are comfortable in the admiration.
One is a connection, and one is a sun, facing sun, the rays
            of both one.
One has lost the thought thread and is simply
            breathing in bed with one's husband, latticed
culotte and starry blouse glowing
            from the closet

i mentioned in a previous post how clothes are charged with gender roles and expectations in notley's poetry, here reflective of the changes a woman's body goes through during and after pregnancy. "one wants one's own form of clothes" i.e. that fit the unique shapes of one's own body but also a form of clothes that are unique to one's own self -- tailor made rather than off the rack as it were. childbirth makes one "skittish within form," uncertain and uncomfortable and restless.

but just as easily "one day / it is simply seen as a privilege, / to be one for long and so specifically / --how scary how exciting a privilge--to expand to the fullness of the specific one." the speaker recognizes in the midst of her discomfort and unease the awesome ethical responsibility of childbirth. "one" is no longer the impersonal universal but "the specific one" to which one must "expand to the fullness of." the enlargement produced by carrying a child is also an expansion of the ego and the identity of the mother to a fullness that includes the life and identity of the child as well.

"There is work to do to do it, / a letting go constantly / to find form," the speaker continues. The search for form is no longer a restless labor but one of love and patience -- precisely because of this sense of ethical connection to the other. "One is a connection, and one is a sun, facing sun, the rays / of both one." Not "both ones" but "both one" -- no longer separate entities.

there's a sense in which the effort "to find form" in which one feels comfort and ease, clothes that will help the speaker to feel less uneasy, restless and "skittish within form" -- this is the effort that the poems of incidentals in the day world are undertaking. (and it never hurts to recall the etymology of "text" being that of "textile" and "weaving," through which clothing and language are linked; there's also the idea of language being the clothing of thought that comes from somewhere, offhand i can't recall exactly where.)

this effort to find form is most successful in the 9-page poem that gives the book its title. what's most remarkable about this poem is not simply the language and syntax and quality of thought which merges the highly personal with, dare i say it, the surreal or visionary aspect that really emerges fully in her later work. there is a sense here too of a form utterly adequate to this language too, specifically the stanza as a kind of integral unit in the poem's overall movement and argument that i find in a masterwork like "at night the states."

if i have time i might attempt a longer reading of the whole poem, but for now let me just offer the first page and some comments:

            INCIDENTALS IN THE DAY WORLD

You and baby you know me and I am
my ankles and angles and cavern-
haired particular whim

a bank of violets devours
deposits itself again and again

in the flame boa heap with diaper pins
the Chanel for the monthly bath and the invisible Rodins

Our moving cars through the rain
I'm grabbing the road
trees can turn fish or rock
underwater    (or city like toad)
our compacted gyre, common load
setting out to win a face
child was is me, and me, and no one
spangled with charm apparently flesh
you in me with me mean mind clear and fleshed

Lovely and wise in a number I

poignance is a spear in use bossed, with dew
numerical I overcome Sandsjoy
numbers are my face when I am flow
when I perform a number I'm in num-
ber's silver clean, exalting hollow
"Thought it was the Reader's Digest but
it was Life": number's deepening deepening hum

the poem begins in what is by now familiar territory for us, the merging of the speaker's identities with those of husband and child; immediately however we are met with an unusual synechdoche ("I am / my ankles") and two metaphors, "and angles" (associated by wordplay with "angles") and this stunner, "cavern-haired particular whim." the next two couplets heap up more unusual and intriguing images from the natural and material worlds, from motherhood and sensuality and sculpture.

i can't really explicate the rest of this excerpt with any confidence except to say that with the "compacted gyre" (a yeatsianism if there ever was one, the first of several i've neglected to point out in notley's poems so far) and with "number's deepening deepening hum" we seem to be in a realm of mythopoesis here that again looks ahead to notley's mature work.

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notley: sonnets and phoebe light

there are so many other things to say about notley's wonderful sonnet sequence, but i feel i must move on or will never get anywhere with this projected read-thru of all her books in order. so i will pick up on one theme i teased out of the first two sonnets in 165 meeting house lane, namely the speaker's unease with the state of things in which she finds herself. i suggested that she is critical of male domination in the literary and sexual domains, in which women's only recourse is to "ingratiate & divert / Upstairs stay quiet inviolate." to find a response to this situation is i think in part the goal of these sonnets. poem #3 begins:

The new way through town, snow still clean, warmer
I walk erect loose arms & red shawl scarf
New antique shops I'll never enter
Plenty solid houses no people: TV's
Who wants an old velvet dress good brown
50 postcards of old little girls & such
Anyway? I do, prefer to live in this town
On present means means no work as such [...]

the chance to stay with friends in the hamptons might offer a break, a fresh perspective; instead, it's the same old commodity culture that the speaker realizes is empty and hollow but is nevertheless drawn to all the same. in a culture that does not value poetic labor, the speaker wears this lack of means as a badge of honor: "I'll take to my own device," she says in the last two lines of the poem, "Being part in part outside the premises." That is, she knows she is complicit in a system that she tries to resists; she knows she does not "belong" in the hamptons according to her class status but will remain there defiantly. "This house came gratuitously," she writes in sonnet #4, "Christmas new friends their / Summer house / Jealousy keeps / To stun from where / To escape I speak" -- again, she is both complicit and resistant, willing to accept the invite of a free place to stay but also jealous of the means by which the friends afford such a place. "To stun from where / To escape I speak" -- remarkable lines that might serve as something of a motto for the sequence as a whole. notley wants to stun us into a new consciousness of our surroundings and their contradictions: she speaks from this place in order to escape to an alternative. (again, the flight/chase motif from earlier in the sequence).

theses sonnets are not always filled with such confidence, and often the speaker reflects self-doubts, flagging energies for the battle, or simply the need to be comforted by the other. "Sometimes I think I just do / As in 'You'll do'" she writes in sonnet #12, while sonnet #11 begins "Sometimes you asleep / I go there to be with you / Love's my lazy streak." Sonnet #16 is for me something like the emotional center or pivot of the poem, so i'll offer it here in full:

Hour less close to feeling bad & restless
Spent bath food & drink while you've been sleeping
Now reading I hear you walking past my door shut
& back to bed, no words none needed, how can
I think of what's not done when there's an easy doing
Always now? Between us. As we're going each
If we reach there are words too, & walks & books to-
Gether, tether we pull tighter, after
It turned surprising into the prize for staying
At it, see there are some sometimes, prizes, that aren't
Lost when found out, & it isn't even like winning
Which is what gets to be being over fast, it's like
Being, & spreading, & air we're breathing

Here the speaker finds comfort in the ease of being together and in the present moment, as if the concerns with what lies ahead can be deferred while the present is enjoyed: "how can / I think of what's not done when there's an easy doing / Always now?" there is a collaboration in and with language here -- "If we reach there are words" -- and persistence pays off, "the prize for staying / At it." the speaker reassures the other, "see there are some sometimes, prizes,... & it isn't even like winning / Which is what gets to be being over fast, it's like / Being, & spreading, & air we're breathing." that is, the payoff for persistence does not have the feeling of winning, of victory over something or someone: instead it's as easy and natural as being, coextensive as breathing.

the remaining 8 poems in 165 meeting house lane, however, do not maintain this sense of ease; the 24th and final poem picks up the motif of breathing from the 16th poem, but this time with an altogether different tone. "Pretty soon all I hear is breath / Not calm as it is one listening / For words to make languor into ease," the poem opens, but it concludes "Only completion's breath / It's calm, I'm less not" and we are returned to the state of unease that largely persists through this book.

*     *     *

a 36-page saddle-stapled chapbook, phoebe light (big sky book, 1973) somehow feels lighter (or slighter) to me than the previous 24-page sonnet sequence -- perhaps in part because it is a collection of individual poems without the unifying themes and structure of the sonnet sequence, but perhaps also because of her additional 56-page collection (incidentals in the day world) that came out the same year. given that one usually takes the publishing opportunities that are made available to you, i'm nevertheless left wondering what kept phoebe light and incidentals from being combined into a larger collection -- or perhaps more importantly, what keeps them distinct. from a quick glance they appear to have only a single poem in common: "dear dark continent," the second-to-last poem in phoebe light and the second in incidentals.

Dear Dark Continent:


                      The quickening of
the palpable coffin
                    fear so then the frantic
doing of everything experience is thought of

but I've ostensibly chosen
                           my, a, family

so early! so early! (as is done always
as it would seem always) I'm a two
now three irrevocably
                      I'm wife I'm mother I'm
myself and him and I'm myself and him and him

But isn't it only I in the real
whole long universe? Alone to be
in the whole long universe?

But I and this he (and he) makes ghosts of
I and all the hes there would be, won't be

because by now I am he, we are I, I am we.

We're not the completion of myself.

Not the completion of myself, but myself!
through the whole long universe.

this is a stunning account of the responsibilities of parenting and especially motherhood. i'm reminded of ted berrigan's famous declaration "I'm only pronouns, and I am all of them" (from the poem "red shift") here some ten years earlier anticipated with a vengeance! i'm also reminded of "diving into the wreck" by adrienne rich: "I am she: I am he. [...] We are, I am, you are / by cowardice or courage / the one who find our way / back to this scene" and how fraught pronouns can be -- in notley's case, utterly fraught with the complications that motherhood entails. recall how "quickening" occurred in the opening sonnet of 165 meeting house lane with a sense of renewal; here it's associate with death and ghosts, since the speaker recognizes that with motherhood it is no longer "only I in the real / whole long universe," that "I and this he (and he) makes ghosts of / I," essentially killing of the "only I" and replacing it with an "I am we."

the closest phoebe light comes to maintaining this kind of intense emotional weight is in the confessional mode of the poem "to my father," where we read

The centre of me
                is always & eternally
                                  a terrible pain--
a curious wild pain--a searching
beyond what the world contains, something
transfigured & infinitie--I don't find it,
I don't think it is to be found.

which further nuances our understanding of the flight/escape motif first sounded in the sonnets. as this poem concludes, it is tied to both the ghost motif and the idea of the poet's work, also from earlier: that "centre of me" that is "a curious wild pain,"...

It's like passionate love for a ghost.
At times it fills me with rage,
                    at times with wild despair,
it's the source of gentleness & cruelty & work.

it's that insatiable desire for the beyond that both crushes and uplifts, that's the sustenance of human life.

there are plenty of other great poems in phoebe light -- a number of dream poems and list poems and "things to do" type poems that are characteristic of the new york school -- and perhaps it's a good thing that they are on the lighter side, since to keep up the emotional intensity of "to my father" and "dear dark continent" might very well be unbearable. there's also a quasi-autobiographical sort of prose poem called "the development of my mind and character," part of which again has a wonderful satire of traditional gender roles and expectations--

        I robe the bank, to have friends come from far countries. I clean the stove, the pilot burns, pure blue gas. When I was a good and bored little girl I was secretly afraid I would do all horrible things: stop going to church, fuck, be dope addict, be lesbian, commit suicide. I forgot to mention have baby out of wedlock and lose contact lenses. It never occurred to me certain things would become 3-D like a room with wondows and light and big boy firend. And the map the highways of the US. Nor are elaborate speeches and slick alacrity, yet.

--only to conclude "Then I became a lesbian, had a baby, killed myself, chatted much."

one thing i see new in this book is a kind of compressed syntax that one certainly sees in passages of the meeting house lane sonnets, but here extended over an entire poem like

FROZEN DANCE, SOUTHAMPTON


Cloud logic weeps a cloaked laugh
Moon-eyes make illusions on earth
Inanimate pinnacles backyard
Cultivate mirror regions farcical
Beyond grief
                Foliate scowl
That rain should sleep
Passions' assignment the brain awaits
By streak space comes
Through mirth insight collision
The lunatic under the ice-swell
Waits rake burned, born reprobate
Clicking gestures ingown iron

that strikes me as some of notley's most challenging writing yet, and already in only her second book. and it's the kind of thing i recall seeing and feeling in those mid-1970s books of notley's i have already read.

but we are not quite there yet.

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notley: sonnets

this is the first of what will be an ongoing series of posts, over the next six weeks or so, on the poetry of alice notley, book by book in chronological order. i've only come to notley's work within the past few years: i remember finding a remaindered copy of close to me & closer . . . (the language of heaven) and désamère at labyrinth books in NYC and buying it to give my friend jean since i knew she was a big notley fan. of course she already had a copy so i kept it for myself, reading it and finding it intriguing but rather disorienting or something. but it was perhaps chiefly through the recording of notley reading (MP3) "at night the states" that peter gizzi included in the exact change yearbook #1 (1995) CD and now available at pennsound that really opened my ears and eyes and brain.

i then began rummaging through the anthologies lying about at home for whatever poems of hers i could find but not finding much more than scattered poems, tho i did find her early sonnet sequence in the all stars anthology that tom clark edited in 1972. at some point i picked up disobedience and read it straight through, thinking it the best long poem i'd read in a long while, perhaps ever. also somewhere around this time i heard notley read at the lannan poetry series at the folger library here in DC and was again blown away. next i got descent of alette and was not as compelled by the mythopoesis constructed there but still found it a remarkable work. then mysteries of small houses again blew me away, poem after poem, through which i could see the growth of the poet's mind as it were. i then happened upon songs for the unborn second baby (powell's online had a bunch for a good price) and, as i wrote earlier, found it a rather jarring experience, full of discontinuties and ruptures that i was unprepared to find in notley's work. then, just last month at tim's in london i read as much of his notley as possible, especially finding alice ordered me to be made a brilliant collection that started putting the pieces of her overall trajectory together for me.

essentially i've come to notley's work backwards, starting with the more recent penguin books and sort of ping-ponging back and forth through the earlier work. this is unfortunately all one can do when significant portions of a major poet's work are allowed to remain out of print. the talisman selected may have proven useful in keeping some work in print for a time, but the table of contents gave no indication of what poems were form what books. the forthcoming grave of light: new and selected poems, 1970-2005, due out from wesleyan this fall, should help matters considerably. but of course there's no substitute for the individual books themselves. so this is an attempt to start at the beginning and move forward to construct a trajectory of her work...

*     *     *

notley's first book, 165 meeting house lane, like many of the classic 8-1/2 x 11 side-stapled publications of the mimeo revolution, is presently rather difficult and costly to obtain. (this one from ted berrigan's "c" press, 1971; serendipity books has a copy currently fetching nearly $90.) indeed the book's final page tells us: "This single limited edition consists of 250 copies, mimeographed, with offset covers, front and back, drawn & printed by the poet Philip Whalen. There are also 4 copies hors commerce, lettered A, B, C, & D, which are cloth bound and contain each an original drawing, & a photograph of the poet." (wonder what one of those goes for!)

as i suggested earlier, a reasonable alternative text for these poems -- one that has the added bonus of including generous samplings of poetry by michael mcclure, clark coolidge, dick gallup, aram saroyan, ed dorn, ted berrigan, ron padgett, philip whalen, james schuyler, robert creeley and ed sanders (alice the lone woman in the crowd!) -- can be had from all stars (ed. tom clark, goliard/grossman 1972). in fact, there's something wonderful about notley's sonnets in all stars being followed by her husband ted berrigan's sequence winter in the country, very likely written at the same time and place as notley's sonnets. indeed the same last page on the "c" press text that contains the publishing info also contains a bio that states notley resided, during "the Winter of 1970-71, at 165 Meeting House Lane, Southampton, Long Island, New York. This book, her first, was written there." hence of course the book's title. in fact, since the book bears the dedication "For Jimmy Schuyler | for Anne & Fairfield Porter | & for Tom Clark," my suspicion is that notley and berrigan were spending the winter months of 1970-71 with schuyler and the porters at the latter's southampton home.

one could also take a more recently written author's note, one she wrote for tim atkins' recent reprinting of a subsequent (1973) sonnet sequence, great interiors, wines and spirits of the world (from the notley issue of the chicago magazine out there) as an additional indication of the occasion for 165 meeting house lane: she describes this sequence as "heavily influenced by the later sonnets of Edwin Denby." certainly denby and berrigan himself were the chief practitioners of the sonnet sequence in the post-WWII, new american poetry tradition, and one could fruitfully compare notley's sonnets with these to discern the stylistic and thematic differences between these sonnets and notley's. but i'm more interested for the moment in taking notley's sequence on its own terms.

here is the first poem:

I dreamed of a clipper ship
Gold on blue THE CHASEY ALICE
Until he'd seen which Captain You said
He'd seen nothing. I woke bold
Chased you to get caught in the hold
Back to sleep 2 nightmares
Solid ones down not to be told
Woke not wanting to be in life
Wasn't, outside warmed
To my blood clean cold quickened
On the way to town for food and
Back for toy, though I was still
A little sulky & grim
So you fucked me back in.

wow! while this poem could be seen reiterating a typical new york school concern with the dailiness of routine experience, right away it sounds a number of concerns that recur throughout the sequence and make notley's work distinctive: dreams, as both aspirations and darker perturbations; flight, escape from or unease with one's present surroundings; and sleep/sex with the significant other as a refuge or sanctuary from these concerns -- or in this case, a rather stark and perhaps even coercive return to the real world. those last three lines are great not only for their frank and even coldly aggressive treatment of sex, but the words "a little sulky" have a wonderful childlike quality that makes the lines sound very coy and playful as well. i can't help thinking too that the alternation between the gutteral and hard "uk" sounds (sulky, fucked) and brighter "i" sounds (still, little, grim, in) contribute to these qualities.

a word here too on the remarkable quality of notley's syntax. since the poem describes a dream experience it would be reasonable to expect the poem to have a fragmentary, notational quality: we tend to remember dreams in bits and pieces, and anyone who has kept a dream journal or otherwise transcribed his or her dreams in writing can attest to this. freud even talked about how dreams as we remember them are subject to the condensation and displacement of the stuff of which our dreams are made. you can see this taking place in the very syntax of notley's poem. lines 3-5, for example -- "Until he'd seen which Captain You said / He'd seen nothing" -- are quite nearly impossible to parse: we don't know who "he" is (the captain? you?) and we don't know what "which" refers to (the ship? the dream? the captain?), so all we can say really is that the speaker/dreamer is experiencing a contradiction regarding the facts of the dream. and again if we think about it, this is not so uncommon: things in dreams often seem contradictory, and notley's syntax is literally making the reader re-experience those contradictions.

there are also a lot of omissions or ellipses in notley's syntax. notice how there are only two sentences in this poem -- actually one complete sentence and one long incomplete run-on sentence that begins "I woke bold" and technically never ends. the "I" who "woke bold" carries through as the implied subject of a string of subsequent actions in the poem that are also compressed or have omissions: "chased you," "[went] back to sleep," "woke," "wasn't [in life]," and so on. there is a notational quality to this syntax, as if the words are jotted down as they come to the speaker in a rush. the brain does not always think in correct grammar and syntax: it can think "outside warmed / To my blood" and then realize that the blood needs to be described or modified further, not once or twice but three times: "clean cold quickened."

i'm tempted too to go back to those themes and concerns i mentioned earlier -- dreams, flight, the other/lover -- and even psychoanalyze the dream a bit. for example it's interesting that the name of the ship (THE CHASEY ALICE) and begs the question of what the speaker is chasing after, but then when she says that she "Chased you to get caught in the hold" it's not clear if it's the pursuer or the pursued that is getting caught here. perhaps the speaker is caught by her need to chase after things? hard to say at this point, better simply to put those questions out there. and also note the sense of flight and escape expressed upon waking from the dream: the lines "Woke not wanting to be in life / Wasn't" are powerful stuff, showing clearly that if the dream world is filled with uncertainties and perturbation, the waking world appears to not be much better.

rather than linger over these matters, i want to look at the next poem in the sequence:

Outside the man upstairs stops me
Is everything ok?  3 days 3rd time
Yes, late pink & gold I see
On snow new as our home
Shirt-sleeved Swede old spits on snow
I have on a dirty schoolgirl coat
Show him colors rainbowed icicles, bow?
Not exactly but ingratiate & divert
Upstairs stay quiet inviolate
To noise of records bed
Typewriter keys, above the noisy sit
Come down if you want to say your placard
His wife of the delusions
Invisible upstairs in seclusion

without claiming that we now suddenly have all the answers to the questions raised in the previous sonnet (about the speakers dreams, unease, etc.), we certainly have a very particular situation or scenario from which we can learn a great deal here. and again, without claiming that the event described in this sonnet "occurs after" what was described in the previous one, i think we can say with some confidence that the answer to the question posed by "the man upstairs" in the opening lines of this sonnet -- "Is everything ok?" -- is clearly and on some level no. the fact that it's "3 days 3rd time" the speaker has been asked this question implies that whatever the problem, it is and has been noticeable by others and ongoing. the speaker denies this by answering "yes," everything is ok, and perhaps it really is, as we have no immediate reason to find this speaker unreliable or untrustworthy.

the poem quickly moves to observations of the surroundings -- "late pink & gold I see / On snow" perhaps being colors of a sunset reflected on the snow-covered ground -- and the interlocutors, the "Shirt-sleeved Swede old [who] spits on snow" and the speaker wearing "a dirty schoolgirl coat." these are not inconsequential details: spitting on the snow is not especially appealing or attractive behavior, and the "dirty schoolgirl coat" is sexually suggestive, i.e. the kind of coat or girl that a dirty old man might find attractive. (an aside: the speaker in these poems frequently gives detailed descriptions of her clothing, which i'll show later are nearly always codings for gender roles and expectations.)

from here, the speaker seems to pose an option for what to do or how to behave in this situation: "Show him colors rainbowed icicles, bow?" again i can't make certain sense of this, the "colors rainbowed" perhaps referring to the "pink & gold" on the snow, as if to say "shall i call his attention to the sunset and the colors it ahs produced on the snow (which he has just spit on), perhaps as a diversion of his attention from my dirty schoolgirl coat?" i dunno, i admit this is pretty speculative here.

but what follows is far more interesting and indicative of the themes and concerns of these poems. the next five lines pose an alternative repsonse to this situation: "Not exactly [show him colors] but...

                ingratiate & divert
Upstairs stay quiet inviolate
To noise of records bed
Typewriter keys, above the noisy sit
Come down if you want to say your placard
His wife of the delusions
Invisble upstairs in seclusion

essentially, instead of confronting the man or elaborating a response to what is perhaps the confrontation of his own initial question (Is everything ok?), the speaker plans a line of flight: "ingratiate & divert," make polite and get the hell out of there. go back in the house, "upstairs" where one can "stay quiet inviolate / To noise of records bed / Typewriter keys" etc. increasingly this poem is working though gender politics, the traditional role of women being to remain silent, to remove themselves so that they will not be violated or profaned by the worldly "noise of records bed / Typewriter keys," that is the domains of music, sex and writing which are better left to the husbands. "Come down if you want to say your placard," an interesting choice of words that seems to suggest that slogans and platforms (whether for politics or advertising) are all women can aspire to contribute.

the final two lines, however, put an intriguing twist to this whole situation, as up until now we have assumed that it is the speaker envisioning herself retreating to her "proper" place upstairs and outside the public sphere; but when the poem concludes "His wife of the delusions / Invisible upstairs in seclusion" we have to think that while it's possible she could be talking about herself as "His wife" ("he" being the husband inside typing), it's more likely that it's the old swede, "the man upstairs," whose wife is the "wife of the delusions / Invisible upstairs in seclusion." regardless, there is an identification going on here of the imbalance of power between the sexes that all women, including the speaker and the swede's wife, experience: the delusion on the latter's part is not seeing the imbalance, which secludes women and prevents them from being equal participants in the "noise of records bed / Typewriter keys" -- certainly ground for what the previous sonnet described upon waking. "not wanting to be in life / Wasn't" is in this sense not by choice but by design, by the position to which society has already assigned her. thus, being "fucked back in a little sulky & grim" is a reluctant acceptance of this design in which the woman is subjected to the man.

[next]

onedit

chris vitiello tips me off to a great online pub called onedit, edited from england by tim atkins (depicted, left, with miles champion).

tho unstated, the editorial mission appears to be to combine new work with older, uncollected, archival type stuff. the courier typeface (produced in image files rather than text) also conveys this retro-contemporary aesthetic.

issue 5 has, among other things, an uncollected sonnet sequence by alice notley and two uncollected poems or poem sequences for the early 1970s by clark coolidge.

notley's "GREAT INTERIORS, WINES AND SPIRITS OF THE WORLD" was written in battersea in 1973 and appeared in out there #4 (1974), an notley issue of a mag published out of northeastern illinois university in chicago. she describes this as something of a follow-up to 165 meeting house lane, her earlier denby-esque sonnet sequence and first book.

selections from coolidge's AIR appeared in All Stars, a monster anthology tom clark edited in 1972 for grossman/goliard and including many of the likely NY/bolinas suspects: berrigan, notley (conincidentally, her 165 meeting house lane sonnets), saroyan, gallup, etc. at the time coolidge was very unhappy with the way poem was excerpted and printed in that anthology (seemingly random selections, individual sections broken up and run on separate pages where the MS clearly shows a three-section-per-page format that he was using in other serial poems of the time), so it's nice to have the complete text as he'd prepared it finally available.

CONGERIES is a 20-page selection that ran in julliard #9 (spring 1972), a mag i know nothing about and as a manuscript completely unknown to me. it's quite a diverse batch of stuff, prose and poems, and in my estimation ranges chronologically from as early as 1965 or 1966 to the early 1970s. "joe the blages" and "onyx" look like they date from the flag flutter and u.s. electric period. "white," "duchamp's door" and "jug ending" look like minimalist word salad, short-line pieces resembling something from space (but not the constellation poems of section 3, not the same attention to arrangement). there are various prose pieces too, "station stratum" resembling the "one's plenties" proses from the something else yearbook and quartz hearts. "the best" is an exploration in statement and the sentence as compositional unit (one sentence per line). other proses like "route five," "instant kyoto postcard," "the coca colas" and "the wrong reflection" resemble the pieces he had collected into a booklength manuscript that was never published: one's plenties: selected proses 1969-1973.

here is a smashing little zukofskyian lyric

          DEEM

          like a nail on
          the way's froze
          by shell
          from a bowl
          in a light

          the red
          stops here
          a time roll rose
          to boom eel

and this is a great little "procedural" lyric (as i call them, not many of which are collected, there's one in the THE WORLD 15, untitled, whose first line reads "the hen one comes to," it takes and manipulates lines from ted berrigan's "tambourine life)

          CARLSBAD CAVERNS

          where night         where night    where
          night will     where night will it enter      enter
          summer         where      stem see
          stem it send
          it or thirst in o where of will        no sight
          tap at the fall    the reef
          and stem laugh of it lights
          our where stem     here in out
          night lick will it
          end      not only where night will         it enter

great thanks to tim atkins for making this stuff available!

notley & bok

kap has done a pretty thorough report of the alice notley and christian bök seminar and readings last night. i'll only add that christian's response to rod's question about "the most ambitious work of poetry" he's seen or heard of was hilarious: from a machine that literally digests and shits gourmet meals as art, to a poem translated into gene sequences that are then injected into bacteria and thereby outlive us all.

i've heard christian read many times since i first met him in 1997 i think, when peter jaeger invited him and darren wershler-henry to read at the university of western ontario, they stayed at my apartment on dundas st and gave me signed copies of nicholodeon and crystallography in exchange. but i've not heard christian's forays into turntabling and beatboxing and i have to say in agreement with kap that christian again demonstrates the virtuosity he brings to whatever task he sets himself upon.

as if christian's hugo ball dirge didn't sufficiently clear the air, alice notley literally blew my little ego self quite clear of my body. (i found it in a whimpering puddle in the back rows of the ICC auditorium.) notley's observation that she seems to have a lot of unpublished manuscripts these days seemed like a perfect indictment of the poetry world: this stuff is like lightning. i'm reminded of how bob thiele, producer for impulse records in the mid sixties, told the recording studio folks basically to let john coltrane in any time he wants and record everything his group played. (or has mark wallace recently and eloqently put it: burn it all and let god sort it out.) in a more just world, everything that comes off of alice notley's laser printer would be published without delay. we need it to be so, for this is how vital and necessary her work is.

based on imperfect recollections of my converations with her after the reading, here's the situation on her unpublished manuscripts:

Alma, or the Dead Women - forthcoming from granary books (read a portion in Primary Writing #28

Grave of Light - to be included in the forthcoming selected poems from wesleyan (she concluded with poems from this i think)

In the Pines - under consideration (she started with poems from this)

Songs and Stories of the Ghouls - under consideration - devastating long poem from this she read mid-set (the poem in coconut #1 gives no indication of which)

let's go, publishers...

p.s. an how about some granting institution to help justin bring out a notley recording with narrow house?