In the Wake of Alice Notley’s Death
Jennifer Soong
Place me back in the course of my anger
at the center of what inspires
considerable being, with no part
but all of me. One day there’ll be, for me,
stranger’s love, but this
is not normal times.
Nights abroad and wander tenderly, I end up
finding out about. And knee-length branches
and knee-high flowers touch, at my knees.
So what
I’m a large tininess, remembering what
it’s like? Not that rain stopping briefly
ever wrapped me snow.
If I’d to guess, to want for this more and more
is what loving something means. An I
few believe in repeatedly until I break it—
requires an impossible anger.
oh, It’s neither mothers
nor fathers but children who after all
expect people to behave. Lichen flakes gilded
cereal-like; the truly creative see to it
only the minimum hurts.
Over all of england’s poetry, I’d hoped
a woman’s scene. Imagine the poems
are as they say, the feat
of a ‘complex’ man and in my opinion, compensatory.
The work isn’t the mistake.
Only as low sprig through a fleet of city
bikes and my hair packing loam and
oil, I remember how you got
yourself more than anyone else, things most can’t feel
entirely renew.
I’ve known it, since seeing you,
you aren’t me in my poems but you—
hadn’t I heard that
somewhere, on and on like
the robe that’s looked how soft it’s been?
5.21.25
———
Note: On Tuesday May 20, 2025 at 8:14 am, the poet Dom Hale texted me that Alice Notley had passed. I was in disbelief: just days earlier in Amsterdam, I had been talking about Alice’s work with Steven Zultanski, who published a book on her in 2020. I was in Oxford, England, away from home, and spent the next day reading poems on social media and listening to Pennsound recordings while wandering the city. I then had the feeling that I should quit God knows what I had spent the last two months doing (everything but writing, it seems), sit down, and at least try to be a poet. I owed it, somehow, to the kind of life Alice had lived, the kind she showed was still possible to pursue and make, with unapologetic ambition. “In the Wake of Alice Notley’s Death” was written on that day.
Jennifer Soong’s recent books of poetry include My Earliest Person (The Last Books, 2025), Comeback Death (Krupskaya, 2024), and Suede Mantis / Soft Rage (Black Sun Lit, 2022). She is also the author of the critical monograph Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and a number of essays, available at Critical Inquiry, Post45, Textual Practice, and Modernism/modernity, among others.