by Haley Joy Harris

Alice Notley’s “Backyard” hosts an airy polyvocality as it conjures the haunted resource of memory. It mirrors to me the wobbly nature of reality, and makes me know the contours of love more acutely. It recognizes what a poet turns to poetry for. A prism-field where what one notices, remembers, grieves, and imagines is cast into the vibrancy of now. A presence held together by the telepathy of wind. A love imprinted by (and on) all that is. 

“Backyard” appeared originally in Notley’s At Night the States (1987), a collection written for and after the death of her late husband, the poet Ted Berrigan. In its context, the poem has much to do with the nature of grief itself– a most potent windstorm. Inseparable from love. Though it seems a key frustration of the poem, embodied in its segmentations, abrupt halts, and disruptions, is a condition of being denied love, of being thrust into absence.  Inside this condition, the poem’s exigency, a reader understands grief to be strange, trembling, hallucinatory, reaching, calling out. A tiny infinity, a fun-house mirror. 

In her essay “On the Poetry Talent”, Notley writes, “I still haven’t explained it, though whenever I say a line of poetry it gets explained. Her love is only itself. Each poet is only a human girl who must die” (223). The backyard is where the human girl goes to die. I think any time we remember, we die. The self, in memory, is multiple. And who we are becoming as we look back renders the past differently. As a consequence, we live in its endless, transmuting afterlife. There is grief in this. It takes a great humility, a great death to what we think we know about ourselves, to write poetry. Notley knew this. Her work cracks open singularities into kaleidoscopes of perception. 

In the poem’s inciting scene: “The cat’s eye marble is green. / One sandal. Shade” (1-2). Entering the backyard through objects, the poem hovers in a present is. The poet observes and focuses in. Perhaps objects of memory, or perhaps objects of present atmosphere. There is an immediate strangeness, a resonant psychedelia– the singular sandal without its counterpart, a green marble emulating the eye of a cat. A patch of shade, taking on its own shape. They float there together, vibrating. 

These observations give way to a questioning of self, a self seemingly reflected by and in these objects:  “If I were a / girl from the Sagamon River, or if / I am” (2-4). Notley grew up in Needles, California, though she evokes the image of a river in Illinois– the Sagamon. A possible selfhood, an alternate girlhood, spinning by proxy. Pulled on like a mask. For the reality of the poem, this fact could be true, or is. The essence of memory is precarious, fluid, as is the poem’s understanding of origin. I am immersed, suddenly, in a childlike sensibility– a slipperiness of boundaries between self and other. Memory, coming from anywhere, grants a plurality of self. The “I” could be this, or that. Unfixed. 

Panning out, the poem itself becomes a book or memory album, flipping to the page called “Free” (5). In this position of recollection, the poet looks back on life and is able to categorize it, title it, rather than being actively inside of it. Though even this self-reflexive composition of the past gets tugged into the active present of the poem. Contemplating an alternate girlhood opens up a freedom for the poet. Plurality is an “engine” for the “intimate clime” of the backyard (9). 

I am moved by moments where Notley refuses closure of thought, abandoning lines and leaving them without intuitive endings. Where new meanings generate in the space of hovering absence. “The wind in my / hair & the church in my head / & the reticence of” (5-7). Swept again into a presence, Notley depicts an active mode of poetry-making. Animated by the breeze. Contemplating belief systems (“the church”), or building sanctuaries in the mind. It is ecstatic, and nearly sentimental, until the poet brings forth the idea of “reticence”– a quiet unresponsiveness. In this word choice, its meaning, and in the gesture of its incomplete thought– the line ending in “reticence of”–  the reader comes to know restraint, and even nebulous loss. The tumbling moment of flow is fleeting, bookended with lack. Withholding this closure registers, to me, as longing. “No I / haven’t been waiting” (7-8), a voice then interrupts. The poet, in another register, bumps up against her longing, refuting it, seeking to redirect it. These moments of conflict and disruption are what make me believe this poem. Certainty conversing with uncertainty. Flickering right next to each other. 

Later in the poem, Notley again withholds conclusiveness. Wedged between two descriptions of the backyard, “an / old plastic coffee cup in the / forest of the lemon tree” (13-15) and “White/ oleanders in sky attached to / leaves” (16-18), the poet places an elusive line: “But / what I mean is” (15-16). Reading aloud, the line at first feels like a fragment of a thought, the beginning of an idea, relinquished halfway through. Though upon second glance, a reader can play around with emphasis. What I mean is.

I’m reminded of a quote from Notley’s essay “The Poetics of Disobedience:” "I don't believe that the best poems are just words, I think they're the same as reality; I tend to think reality is poetry, and that that isn't words. But words are one way to get at reality/poetry, what we're in all the time" (Notley, 14). What is not expressed, what is withheld from language, is as vital to the nature of poetry/reality as what is expressed. Rather than stamping on poetic meaning, Notley lets the backyard speak. The coffee cup and the lemon tree and the white oleanders are the primary reality of what the poet sees and knows. They are resonant meanings within themselves. The lemon tree is the lemon tree. What I mean is. “Her love is only itself” (Notley, 223). 

“Backyard” fully animates when taking into account Notley’s ideas on telepathy. Understanding “reality” as containing many worlds and temporalities unfolding at once, and assuming only the thinnest of veils exist between them. “The world is immensely telepathic” Notley writes, “infused with the past and continual thought of all the living and all the dead" (“The Poetics of Disobedience”, 14).  The components of “Backyard” – its objects, thoughts, and gestures– are held together by telepathic communication. Each part speaks and sings to every other part. A dead girl’s voice speaks to an adult poet's voice. The trees and petals speak to the wind. The old coffee cup speaks to the marble, to the sandal. Together these conversations construct reality/poetry. Telepathy is not only a philosophical underpinning of her poetics, but is a crucial craft element for Notley. Non-written, non-verbal transmissions are alive on the page, taking up real space. Forming real relationships and making meaning.

Wind is useful for concretizing this non-verbal connective tissue. The wind in the poet’s hair, the wind that shakes “pale lavender” (12)  petals, the wind that is asked to speak on behalf of “all of nature” (18-19), let loose to prove a kind of love. The wind, to me, is what permits the poem’s free-associative nature. The reader is able to stand alongside the poet in its swirl. Wind being a carrier of all that is. Wind as a form of chatter, a lively voice in the extrasensory world– “high talk” (12) that can cure “old tired fears” (13). Wind being very akin to love. We are asked to submit to it, as the poet herself does. “It must still be love which I / talk” (10-11). 

The backyard is a malleable container as it houses the poet’s grief. Its malleability has a dual charge– abundance and precarity. Plentiful in memory, lushness of nature and vision. Dangerous in that here the “self” is at constant risk of slippage and disavowal. Within this zone, Notley burrows inward, then routes outward, moving always nearer and toward a current of air. The poem’s annular experience forgets in service of remembering newly, and again. Love, absence. Love. 

Notes: 

Notley, Alice. At Night the States. Yellow Press, 1987. 

Notley, Alice. Selected Poems of Alice Notley. Talisman House, 1993. 

Notley, Alice. Telling the Truth as it Comes Up : Selected Talks and Essays 1991-2018. The Song Cave, 2023.