by Caroline Rayner

I thought I would gather up everything I have ever written down while reading Alice Notley, 

Another morning with Alice

I like her way of saying as she’s always insisting

Some activated essence, not in the sense of anything universal, but in the sense of absolute aliveness, being able to hear one thing beside every other thing, sounding together, perhaps like each other, calling, calling, calling, 

every thought I scribbled, 

It’s about letting things be together as whole things

In process, even in description, happening, some quality of pink

The poems amount to a sweep so insane, requiring every part,

every line I copied out,

“Joy is now high-wire joy”

“The great cosmetic
Strangeness of the normal deep person”

“A poem is about knowing something both all at once and in its unrolling in time.”

“it’s not that I’m tired of growing
lonesome, lonesomest, it’s that and that I
in this waiting, for what, is an always
that I must encompass, walking, as if
I figured to the world, more than ever”

“The poet’s job is to unsay Fate. The body’s job as a spiritual entity is to resist Fate,” 

every flash of understanding that I ran with and tried to take somewhere and make into something. I’ve taken so many notes, and it’s hard to go back and parse them all, not only because the kind of thinking I always seek to transmit comes fast and turns into a mess that I often can’t suss, but also because it’s woven with everything of living––

mornings

Country bread. Wild blueberry. Fog. No amount of crows. Voice on the radio in French 

“I woke up remembered ‘It is a day’ 
& went out to make it 
be a day” 

music, phone calls, skies, 

Broken ceramic blue

“Here are the famous clouds
again, but it is warmer”

dreams,

Walking across the river, some river, only a pair of jeans, nothing at the gas station

Three kinds of pie, one was persimmon cream

Being inside a mountain

Tornado,

memories, 

Cold spring afternoon in Charlottesville walking the hills of the neighborhood listening to The Descent of Alette, the recording of the two night event in San Francisco years earlier, floral rocks given, disappearing, and burning,“‘a mother’ ‘& child’ ‘were both on fire, continuously,’” these images unwinding something in me not just feeling the weight of windowless dark upon my shoulders but the sound its measure her reading the world vocalized, I think I was weeping,

everything,

“light, liquid, etc.”

Perhaps that’s part of it too, what I have to say about Alice, even though it almost feels too easy to put down, that being a poet, or working with poetry, moving through it, practicing it, means doing it with everything all the time, even when you might not realize, and you should do whatever you want with that, success be damned, but what you absolutely have to do is show up and trust it. A lot like pulling cards, notes on which I keep finding alongside notes on Alice, 

Four of swords, three of swords, two of cups: Resurrection is fucking hard. Does coming back open the wound again. Is healing the same as speaking from it, is it the same as finding a way to tell it? Heart to heart, there’s rinsing, not cleansing, but making it so you can see, and when you wake up, you have to face it, but how lucky is that, a blessing, 

which makes sense, because I consider divination a form that the field of the heavens takes, the cosmos, whatever. I think reading Alice is the same, or it freaks me out similarly, takes me to task, which is crucial and good.

“I am not being mystical, I am being matter of fact.”  

“Come with me amid this instability
Permit me not to know what things mean yet”

The tower, the empress, six of swords: burn it to see it and go forth with it and nothing else.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m sharing some of these notes, not as a statement, but as a record of grappling and being changed, a process that I expect will go on as long as I continue reading Alice Notley and thinking through her wild body of work and talking about it with friends and writing after it. I want to keep being changed, and I want to keep listening and existing in time and finding form and letting sing whatever wants to sing, and I never want to get it all. I know that I won’t, and thank god. After all,

“Everything is in the discovery.”