by David Grundy

There’s no such thing as nothing, Alice Notley says she told her friend Anselm Hollo as he was dying. And because there’s no nothing, when we die, “there’s no nothing to go to”. Even in death, it’s impossible for us to disappear, even though we are no longer there in physical form. And so when we die, “we become communication”. 

When we die, we talk to one another and thereby hold the cosmos together. The only possible thing that’s holding everything together is communication [...] That’s all there is.

For Notley, it’s poetry itself, the poem itself through which we can access that form of apparently impossible communication, that language existing beyond whatever individual speaker produced it, whatever individual used it; beyond sender and recipient, speaker and listener, addresser or addressee: what a person was condensed into words, the Word, or at once condensed and dispersed. Communication in its etymology means to share out or divide, scattered like the limbs of Osiris. This is not a smoothed-over whole, but a broken one, a hole, its signals flickering on the edge like radio transmissions through static. Notley’s work in recent years has so often addressed ghosts or the dead, a one-way traffic where only one speaker is alive (‘At Night the States’ being a shining example) or in the late work moving beyond any speaker altogether, any I, even if “I say ‘I’ so you can understand me”. 

In For the Ride, Notley tries to write as if in a new language that is in the middle of being invented. “It’s always mutating, always”, she explained. “The object throughout is to create a language with no gender references and in the present”. Or “the voice”, she wrote, “is always stronger than I am”—a voice in voices, in pieces, a multi-voiced voice, a channel—even as that work became more and more singular, more and more a kind of poetry that only Alice Notley could or would write. It was if she’d become one with poetry, downloaded her brain into the poem, a friend says. Or: writing as if you’re already dead or a ghost is a way of keeping yourself alive, I reply. Poetry, communication is alive with or without sender and receiver, and so Alice Notley is alive because language is alive, a way of keeping things alive, even at a time when language is increasingly weaponized to justify murder and hatred, everyday murder and hatred. In this living death, more than ever, poetry tells us that we are alive and that that life continues even after we die. Alice Notley knew this.

But in whose language, and in what language. Living in France amidst a language that flickered on the edge of comprehension, living immersed in the depredations and declarations and ubiquitous assumptions of English, that global form; what histories catch in those long lines from which visions emerge? Perhaps it was leaving the US that opened the historical scope of Notley’s poetry, enabled it to access displacement or to figure itself as displaced. Or perhaps, as a poet, if you tune into it, this happens from wherever you are. (Simone Weil talked about decreation, and “Why I / am almost exactly Simone Weil”, says one of the speakers from Waltzing Matilda, though Notley was suspicious of Weil’s obsession with hierarchies, with self-abnegation.) But in this I and with this eye shaped by the terrible western world, Notley’s work is shot through with the violences of English, a sense of its inequalities and imbalances, while refusing to give it up as a space of visionary transformation, the work the poem does on language, a kind of open-heart surgery. The languages of conquest and gendered violence that inform Alma, the everyday brutality of homelessness on New York subways that informs the underworld descent of Alette: visionary transformation here is not an escape from such histories—for, as Notley said, no poet has a right to forget grief or poverty—but it is an insistence that poetry is a real place, though an impossible one, to surmount them. 

All elsewhere help us to understood a here, I mistyped as a kind of invocation or prayer as the bus bounced across London in the close and clammy heat. What I meant to say was, all elsewheres help us to understand a here, and in attending to the cracks of what is here we might glimpse an elsewhere. That’s the dream tradition, the visionary tradition, into which Alice Notley was writing, the condition of epic that explodes into and out of the bounds of lyric, as both lyric and epic are story, and prayer, and song, and in the end, all of these are subsumed into voice, the silent voice, the spoken voice chanted or declaimed, the wail (Baraka) and howl (Ginsberg) of a centuries-old lament, a centuries-old tirade, and that continuing benediction, also centuries-old, that poets make to counteract it.  

Today, especially when poetry is more than ever devalued, to live there may be almost unliveable but it is also the only place the poet feels that they can live. For going out as this far into faith in poetry or language is a lonely place, as Notley knew. Dwelling on the past, on mourning, lost loves, the murdered women of Alma, she also projected into that sci-fi future we find in For the Ride. Ghosts, the figure of the past, and aliens, the figure of the future, both becomes presences in the now of the poem (and here I hear too Jack Spicer’s “spooks” and “Martians”). But paradoxically, that loneliness opens out into a collective far grander and greater than the shrunken norm of the well-made poem or other such de-boned, de-politicized, de-poeticised understandings of what poems are and what they can do. Notley turned to her own variant on the epic form as a way to go beyond the limits of the bounded I, the poem as truncated autobiography or CV, but she did this precisely by going into the self, “to find out what the self was, what was permanent or impermanent in myself”. To dive deep into the I, the unconscious; to dive so deep that you go beyond it, below it, oceanic; where life begins and where it ends, cosmic. It’s hard to come up from there, “my life forgotten from sleep or / the unconscious which must rise up  / wounded from the escape, dripping blood.” “Jack would speak through the imperfect medium of Alice”: to be a medium, to channel those voices, to enter that realm of communication that the dead have become, to be haunted is to be possessed by a voice not your own. As Notley knew, that’s merely the condition of language itself, the place we all inhabit everyday. But most of us tune that out, imagine that we’re speaking from or of a stable self, that we make what we’re given. The poem, as Notley hears it, refuses to do so. One can never close one’s ear.

“At night the states / whistle. Anyone can live.” Which is, as the poem knows, at once promise and not enough. You can hardly hear the tune beneath all the broken martial music, the war parades, the bombs and drones and screams, the noise. You have to hear the tune in the noise, the noise in the tune. In one of her last interviews, Notley says that poetry doesn’t just address other poets or other artists, it addresses the entire universe.

It’s not made for other artists. It never is. Sometimes they’re the only people who are your audience in the now, but actually you are talking to everyone who ever existed and will exist and whatever planets and non-planets there are outside of this planet. You’re talking to everything. Poets just have to trust the future.

Poetry, in this understanding, is for the universe, for every star, for every blade of grass, for every syllable—as a syllable, too, is part of the universe, as a poem too, is a part of the universe, beyond its poet, as a poem and its poet never dies. Alice Notley knew that I is an other and that that is the beginning, one of the beginnings, of revolution and that sometimes the only place where the revolution lives is in poetry, and that that is not enough, but that it is what she was given: I and not I, Alice Notley and the communication, the voice, the poem with which she is now definitively joined, that which holds the cosmos together, that which she has now definitively become.

Citations

“there’s no nothing to go to”. Alice Notley interviewed by Ariana Reines, “Alice Notley: Prophecy is alive and well and living in Paris”, Gagosian Quarterly, September 2024:  https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2024/09/27/interview-alice-notley-prophecy-is-alive-and-well-and-living-in-paris/ 

“I say ‘I’ so you can understand me”. Alice Notley, “To Remake It w/ Microtones”, Being Reflected Upon (Penguin Books, 2024)

“It’s always mutating, always”. Alice Notley, “Notes on ‘For the Ride’”, The Poetry Foundation, March 2021: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/featured-blogger/85382/notes-on-for-the-ride 

“Why I / am almost exactly Simone Weil”. Alice Notley, Waltzing Matilda (Kulchur Foundation, 1981)

“the terrible western world”. Frank O’Hara, ‘Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets’. Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (Grove Press, 1960).

“the wail (Baraka) and howl (Ginsberg)”. Amiri Baraka, ‘Wailers (for Larry Neal and Bob Marley’), Allen Ginsberg, ‘Howl (for Carl Solomon)’.

“No poet has a right to forget grief of poverty”, paraphrases the following statement: “I am conscious of the facts of grief and poverty, and I think that no one should ever forget that they exist. No poet has the right to.” Alice Notley interviewed by Hannah Zeavin, “Alice Notley, The Art of Poetry Alice No. 116”, The Paris Review, Spring 2024: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/8263/the-art-of-poetry-no-116-alice-notley 

“to find out what the self was”. Ibid.

“my life forgotten from sleep”. Alice Notley, “Change the form in Dreams”, Disobedience (Penguin, 2001)

“It’s not made for other artists”. Gagosian Quarterly, Op. Cit.