by Adam Ray Wagner

Language changes when someone dies. In our literate world, this language is an external remnant. I might open a poem of Alice Notley’s and say “Notley said, ‘I like my poems. They’re / as good as rocks.’” You don’t have to believe me—you can open Mysteries of Small Houses to the poem “As Good as Anything” and see for yourself. You don’t have to remember it; the poem remembers for you.
Before May 19th, the words “I” and “my” in that Mysteries of Small Houses quote signified, at least in part, a living poet. With literary convention, we might still say “Notley says” when introducing a quote, but this act of stylistic necromancy does not keep the language from a past-tense inflection. The poet is no longer able, in our living estimation, to “say,” only to “have said.” Her language has changed.

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I knew Notley only tentatively in person, which remains my great fortune, and the memories allied to those meetings contain many instances of speech I cannot point to in a text; your belief in my retelling them hinges on your belief in me as a storyteller telling a true story. My brightest memory is her on my arm as I helped her cross a street; she looked to me and said, “How nice it is to hold onto someone.” But really, every time I tell that story she says that sentence differently. I didn’t write it down, nor did I record it. I did not carve her words into an unforgettable state. Instead, when I recall the story to others or to myself, I try and make present the gratitude she inspired in me. What matters when I tell the story is that I make your belief in me—that I make my experience yours enough to be true.
This act of remembering as mutual experience is what Notley describes as Homer’s art: “Homer’s art is to tell a public story, in a measure that makes that possible…as the story is told in this measure it becomes really true—the measure draws from the poet depths of thought & feeling, as well as memory…the story is told by a teller not a book” (Homer’s Art 6) A teller, not a book, because the teller’s meter aligns with the rhythms of experience as recalled in the telling. Meter, time felt in its passing repetition and change, makes the story public and passes memory from individual to communal. A meter must make mutual remembrance because there is no other source for belief, no place to point to. Instead, we must continually make one somewhere between us.
Memory and meter do not have to do utterly with fidelity, but with communal making. I do not know verbatim what Notley said to me; Homer varies his dactylic hexameter; at a reading in Boise, Notley said that her meter is “the meter of New Yorkers.” It is inconsistent and fast and, in this inconsistency, is a truer meter of place as it takes place in time, according to developing rhythms.

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It’s hard to say that poets live on in their writings when their written language signifies their death. I said earlier that the poem remembers for you, but the poem only really remembers what it says. Plato-Socrates worried that writing would let us think our ideas were outside of us, that we didn’t need to hold them and we could trust the world to do so, but that by doing so we would orchestrate a great stagnation: “Once it is written, every composition trundles about everywhere in the same way” (Phaedrus, 62). Secondly, as we place our trust in other than ourselves, our own memories would wither since writing would “produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it” (62). The two-fold worry: writing will stick around, not remembering but unforgetting, and will weaken the memories of writers. 
Hidden beneath this worry, made evident in the earlier part of the Phaedrus dialogue, is memory’s making power. Memory is a making thing and we, humans, are makers. A page can neither remember nor forget, it can only go on not forgetting, but the writer, fooled into feeling a maker, will forget to remember making.
Even beyond Plato-Socrates’s condemnation of writing, Notley felt language to be inadequate: “I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don’t work, I know they aren’t it. I don’t in the least feel that everything is language” (Telling the Truth as it Comes Up, 14); she offered instead telepathy and dreams. But the writing of four dozen books indicates a great faith in language, or a trust in it, at least. They may not have been “it,” but they were her method.
Her method for what? Many things—arguing, advocating, loving, wondering. And by the time of her last published epic, The Speak Angel Series, words were her method to engage a new form of memory. Two millennia after Plato, she takes his concept of unforgetting as a chance to collage. With so much unforgetting haunting the world, perhaps it is time for a rearranging, a re-making of memory where all that unforgetting might be remade to make everyone forget again so that they might remember to remember. 
In The Speak Angel Series, writing is a way to forget that would become memory—poetry is found “Underneath / What you’ve / Written” (36). Taken literally, poetry beneath what’s been written is the blank page—under the letters. Not the blank page preceding the poem, but the one that remains under it. To hold this poetics is to approach the page of composition as an inverted temporality where what would be written has been forgotten. But the project is not to remember and write what would be written, but to remember how to forget what’s already been written.

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The voice of Speak Angel travels from memory to speech to action: 

I remember how to speak      of WHAT I REMEMBER there is THAT
I DIDNn’t first LEARN IT as an INFant but RATHer I GRADually 
REMEMBERED IT

I want you to tell me how to act (183)

Formally, blank space follows the first remembrance of how to speak—the breath of forgetting in, the exhale out into “WHAT I REMEMBER.” The increasing stresses, like Homer’s “measure that makes [the story] possible” are the rhythms of recollection. If this is the meter of New Yorkers, it has become a whole street—with stressed phrases snatched and then let free in the collage form with a heightened sense for the “collection” buried in “recollection.” A gathering of voices. 
Notley read from Speak Angel aloud with a harsh staccato—letting her singular voice stutter with a crowded multiplicity. Her language was always polyvocal—dismissing a clear “I” and allowing the voice to be a stage with actors passing in and out. Like an avian syrinx which produces multiple notes at once, she sang with a single chorus voice that might include her father, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, or any living or dead voice. The more intimately she knew them, the longer and clearer their individual voice might be, but always there remains a residue of multiplicity.
With Speak Angel she works to lead the reader into her voice—to sing as half her syrinx: “I am your LEADER so you can get to HERE” (201). I take that capital, o-so-stressed HERE as literal—as the HERE of Speak Angel. Notley asks us to write with her; not just read her, but to make Speak Angel as she makes it. She is leading us, she says, “I…beseech you to follow the maze / in your own mind I bequeath you you need nothing but / an amazed spirit” (480). It is both mind and maze she has bequeathed. If the title is an imperative, we are the angels.

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Notley turns all readers into Beloveds. In Barthes’s sense, she thinks of us: 

What does “thinking of you" mean? It means: forgetting "you " (without forgetting, life itself is not possible) and frequently waking out of that forgetfulness. Many things, by association, bring you back into my discourse. "Thinking of you" means precisely this metonymy. For, in itself, such thinking is blank : I do not think you; I simply make you recur (to the very degree that I forget you). It is this form (this rhythm) which I call "thought": I have nothing to tell you, save that it is to you that I tell this nothing. (Lover’s Discourse, 158)

This “nothing” the Lover tells the Beloved opens from, and is, the place of forgetting. I say nothing to you to tell you I love you, to say that I’ve made you. In Speak Angel, Notley unites memory and love: “I reMEMber knowing I could only LOVE all of you” (199). The memory project she is pursuing is to place remembering—as Barthes allies it with recurring—back into your own capacity: 

…oneself is save in the memory project for we invented
Memory it used to be spread throughout our mass as one thing
Large and it yours was anywhere because the past (that at
The beginning is the future) was anywhere everywhere you… (38)

“is save” positions “oneself” in relation to an active participle—defined by an ongoing process rather than the past participle “saved” that would be “correct.” In this present-tense saving, memory continues to be invented and rediscovered. It was “anywhere” because memory’s communality was where you were, then—not findable anywhere else because it was inextricable from presence.
The syntax itself—mercurial and disjointed—requires a release of standard reading practices. I let go of earlier clauses to make a kind of sense of new ones—none complete, none incomplete, none dependent, none independent. As the “I” moves readily between living and dead, Notley and Not-Notley, the syntax forgets where it’s going in order to get there. She gathers this language to let it disperse. It is a strange commendation, but the highest possible, to say that Speak Angel is forgettable. Notley asks us to see the poem and to forget it—to see “the blank page—under the letters” so that we might re-write the poem (38). Unforget our way to forgetting so that we might re-remember until “the old signs are other now they are not signs” (480).
The part of us that signs language, Notley asks us to see, must die:

You have to die Some part of you has to die So you can cre-
Ate yourself then heal us Haven’t I died enough Enough times
Divided into parts One of them dies In what language (270)

The digestive logic of “Ate yourself.” The ouroboric myth where one keeps going through self-digestion here becomes the mind remembering and forgetting. Dying into language. Divided into parts. Those parts then remember to make themselves to “heal us.” In this written stanza, we take the disparate phrases—physically broken—and connect them. Primarily broken into two-stress patterns, we have to learn to take what we forget about them—their stresses that pass into past and the page beneath—and remember to make them. This form, this rhythm, that is called remembering occurs in what the written word alone cannot signify. Our voice must come into the stresses, to lift the words and see the page.

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Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey as an act of remembering them; Mnemosyne was the mother of his muses. The Gods teaching mortals to make so that they might make remembrance. 
Notley composed Speak Angel in order to allow us all to forget what we are so that we might remember we make us—might remember the work of remembering.
Forget how to read Alice Notley so that you might remember how to make her. Not that she would ever let you do that without her say. Thankfully, she left us Speak Angel as a way to say her thought through remembering: “What do you remember Read my mind Read my mind.”

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard, New York, Hill and Wang, 1978.

Notley, Alice. Homer’s Art. Canton, NY; Glover, 1990.

Notley, Alice. Mysteries of Small Houses. New York, Penguin Books, 1998.

Notley, Alice. The Speak Angel Series. Portland, Fonograf Editions, 2023.

Notley, Alice. Telling the Truth as It Comes Up. Brooklyn, The Song Cave, 2023.

Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Christopher Rowe. New York, Penguin, 2005.