by Jennifer Valdies

When a moment felt like a moment, light expanded on a river birch against the bricks of St. Marks. The night Alice Notley died, Hunter and I met Allie in New York to attend the re-issue launch of Bernadette Mayer’s A Golden Book of Words at the Poetry Project. It’s a beautiful night, it’s a little night, there’s excitement in the air. It’s late May in the courtyard, a new tree planted for Bernadette, wine and birds, but time smooths out inside—all the hard edges becoming soft—like it does, maybe, in all churches. It’s a night for Bernadette, but it’s also a night for remembering 1978 and what the world looked like when this book first emerged. As it goes for all readings of poetry and sitting in naves, it’s a night to remember our histories. Our lineages, our lives, where we’ve been, and who’s passed through here, in the seats and at the podium. In all poetry and all prayer, we go away and return with something that clarifies our present, a moment sharpened as it passes back and forth through time.

During the reading of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” I thought about the making of a moment, the trimming or the excision of a moment out of reality. We know the jetsam clogging up a day becomes so filamental and gorgeous, the way anything does, when studied close enough—but we forget often enough, or at least I do, that whole planets align every night in complicated radials, that every day is a celestial event, that matter forms and never dies and all light ever produced keeps traveling. It’s a Monday and all the roads are torn up through Connecticut, four days after our graduation, a week of rain in insistent sunlight, May Day recently, and the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death, and Lyn Hejinian’s first birthday gone two days before, Sean Bonney’s birthday two days later. These events are fixed events. And we’re always fixed to our moment because the moment is constantly happening to us. This is the night a great poet died, I tell my memory, while in a storied, important place we celebrated the life of another, both so close and important to each other.

5/19/2025

A projection on the wall of Mayer reading “Eve of Easter” takes on all this history, and it takes on all the meaning of its future as a memory. The moment is fixed. But in returning to it in memory, in dream, while writing, we almost always find it changed. What does it do to the body to be faced first with time—to confront time before thought, before question, or was time the first question? I go back to a moment and it comes back with me more golden, cinematic, instilled with the not-yet known, could-have-never-known. To find this miraculous is the gesture of poetry—to take something real and pass it through the sieve of the imagination, the eye, only to find it more real, fluid, ambiguous, mercurial. Memory is a flint to graze against, changing form each time in miniscule ways so as to produce sparks. And so to return to oneself is this untouchably real thing—to go back to a lived moment and return with something new, to give it weight in language, to hold up a relic unearthed, sharpened and clarified in the light of the present. What we lose has its uses—it’s the truest form of immortality.

In her essay “Poetry the True Fiction,” Barbara Guest describes the ideologies of poet Stephane Mallarmé, who “regarded poetry as an art dedicated to fictionalization . . . where the concrete object is ‘bathed in a new atmosphere,’ lifted out of itself to become a fiction. The poet is not there only to share a poetic communication, but to stimulate an imaginative speculation on the nature of reality.” (26) Poetry, as a mode of altering a real form without harming its reality, practices what fiction also desires: to echo, extend, and add depth to what is real or true by passing it through the imagination and transforming it. Then to share it—to instill a shifting of light and form into language and transfer it to a reader. Poetry is an heirloom passing continuously through the mind, holding, invisibly, the lives of those who once held it too.

In “On Writing From Dreams,” Alice Notley describes how her dreams were what enabled her to write her book Reason and Other Women (2010). From her dreams, she was provided “a sense of a double world,” “a color symbolism,” and a “notion of telepathy,” which, she explains, is implicit in that the book asks its readers to understand her specific rhythms and odd word usage via their own, individualized conceptualizations of their meanings, instead of trying, impossibly, to envision them as she did at the time of composition, as a kind of clone of experience.

Notley proceeds to posit that that may be just what poetry is: 

an art form based on telepathy, a sending of complex messages through an almost immaterial presentation (a few words on a page?); or, you might say, that all communication is like that. And isn’t it? Aren’t we always communicating telepathically? So much of what we tell each other is told via air: to talk about “cues” and “body language” is to be perfectly limited: it’s in the very air between us, everything we know and try to say to each other. We read each other’s minds all the time.

We read each other’s minds all the time. Might this idea be extended to consider that we may also read our own minds by listening for its future form? Notley considered this. And poets such as Mark McMorris have written about intuition as a future version of the self returning to their past as a messenger or familiar, and about language or, more broadly, sound, as a conduit which connects us to those iterations of the self. Like the sound of rain, in McMorris’ “The Physics of Identity in Late Age”:

...But I was a microdot,
an ant, a drift of foam, scarcely more than orchid
son of an imaginary number, so that I might sing
this poem about nothing is the flower of my genesis.
As it was, so it is, and will be, for this one and all.
The song of the rain I heard when I was a boy
still falls imperceptibly on zinc roof
on tile, on wood, on glass, on string.
…
…I was a vessel the wind used
to talk to the mast. The tempo of rain is my heirloom.

It’s not the rain but its music and rhythm that follow the speaker of this poem. A bare sound, sound detached from its source. McMorris presents the idea of an heirloom as something not only passed down through generations, but to oneself, again and again; that something physical like an object or the sound of rain can act as a medium that transports us back to a moment, in a way that feels like we can almost sense our own presence in returning to it. In the same way that one might sense someone else’s presence in an artifact, McMorris creates the space to imagine that we might have a similar experience with a sound or an object within the singular circuit of our lives—and that to make it real, all we need to do is listen.

The lyric, as Notley describes in Telling the Truth As It Comes Up (2023), has everything to do with listening—not just to language’s quiet call to different parts of itself, echoing doubly in the mind of the writer and reader, calling out to its synonyms and rhymes, but to different forms of itself across time. In “The Poetry Talent”, Notley proposes that we listen for the future of a poem we have yet to write, to let what has already been written dictate its emergence as a writing practice. So might some words which form ideas and images be called in from ahead? Like McMorris’s heirloom of rain? 

“And why can’t you just know the future—the poem as it exists in the future—sometimes? It’s there somewhere.” (229-230) The untouchable future may be a kind of muse, or ghost, depending. But “[i]t’s all made out of words” writes Notley—“sometimes I believe that and sometimes I don’t. A poem is made out of words—is it? Words are made out of me and you. Nothing is made out of anything, nothing is made out of. Words are electric and change shape as you say them, and the world changes shape as you speak. That’s more like it. I am changing you, I am causing you or me. I am changing us.” (223) 

Because nothing is made out of anything, poems make a life in open space and air. But how do we turn vastness into plentitude? When we die, “we become communication,” says Notley. So how do we turn distance into contact, make a voice out from across a lake without a body to carry it?

We need time, though it need not be linear or consecutive, and we need space, though it need not be cohesive or exact, in order to share the experience of poetry in a necessarily ambiguous, radically open way. A field is only a field when closed in by a woodline or deepened by a tall grass, otherwise it’s just an infinite, flat plane. So time, though it’s an artifice, is necessary to understand each other, and to understand ourselves. 

Time’s fissure within and from itself—that there appears to be a harsh distinction between the past, present, and future—may prove most useful and most sensible when that fissure is emphasized intentionally within the mind. Time’s collapse and indistinction from itself, though superficially it might seem to obscure reason and comprehensibility, allows us to approach the invisible, outer wilds of our reality. The more open and ambiguous an idea or statement becomes, the further it corresponds across definitions and meanings. Poets know that to approach the languageless wilderness of consciousness is as much the goal as is to not become lost in it. Then again, “...if I enter I have to truly enter”, writes Notley in the opening poem to Mysteries of Small Houses, knowing “stars weren’t alive before me anyone’s from the most ancient wildness”.  Which may be why poets feel so comfortable there, or so alive—in a totally luminous form of total discomfort. 

The outer wilds, where time spirals in and out of itself, and the lines between matter and words become soft, is a recurring setting throughout Mysteries of Small Houses, and Notley’s work in general. The effortless “knowing” that we receive upon entering there is a central focus, for example, in “I’m Just Rigid Enough”— “It’s because I’m the same then when I’m writing this // I mean now and if we go for a ride in the 50’s car / it’s our Chevy / And I’m the one who already knows what I learn”. (5) The “I” of this poem blurs the separation between a past “I” and a present or future “I”  in that it does not concede to there being a past version of the self at all. This sense of being born feeling old or unquestionably like oneself is similarly addressed in “The Poetry Talent,” which, Notley states, becomes recognizable at around four years old. 

That a self in the past would have access to a future knowledge, or even further—a larger, outside knowledge, implies that there is no real boundary between us—between who we were and who we will become. “I talked when the words came but first the world / Was my recognition my just-prior knowledge of it” writes Notley—and isn’t that what childhood is like, feeling so much closer to something? Something not apart or separate, but wordless and therefore more true: “I remember everything it isn’t past it’s wild”. . .

In The Telling (1972), Laura (Riding) Jackson explores a similar sentiment:

In every human being there is a secreted memory of a before-oneself;  and, if one opens the memory, and the mind is enlarged with it, one knows a time which might be now, by one’s feelings of being somehow of it. In describing the memory, I refer to what I find in me that belongs to me not in my simple present personhood but in my intricate personless identity with all that has preceded me to the farthest, timeless reach of not-me. A like identity has each of us, reclaimable by the mind in memory-form: I think I do not present a private fancy, with this declared more-than-ancient thing of memory, rather a common potentiality of imagining back to the all-antecedent reality. I believe there to be a vestige of the Before in our Now that each bears as an individual mark, but that is, yet, the same mark, the same memory. (25)

These are the wilds that haunt Alice Notley’s work, the work of all poets. Federico García Lorca called it the rim of the wound. Percy Bysshe Shelley called it the void. Martin Heideggar called it the forest. In the wilds of knowledge, everything and nothing exists—death becomes more like immortality, dark behaves more like light. It is a kind of death, and it may be true that all poets hope, if they must, to die in the middle of a sentence. During one of Muriel Rukeyser’s last readings, a mini-stroke brought her to the floor where she continued to read in the tangle of mic wires, refusing medical attention.¹ Might poetry be a kind of death in the middle of a sentence? 

I want to say a wave passed through the night, that space bent slightly around where, in the past, a poet spoke in a church in New York and the voice carried on somewhere forever. But the sun just fell down into the floor like it does every night, affectless and miraculously. For one who so frequented the edge of these wilds, death might not feel at all like death. To remember that nothing “is made out of”.  Something lives forever for me in these lines from “House of Self”:

Now I can go inside          & it’s dark there’s
no light at all
I’m lying in my bed
in the back of the house

I well up, not telling
if I die in this wave there is no such thing
as dying, because 
there’s this wave, or surge and not

so powerful, except for
as much as needed
all that I am, as
much as that

…

I am
what I asked for
I’m speaking
I speak like this.

Notes

¹ Moure, Erín. “MR.” Theophylline: A Poetic Migration via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro, Vallejo). House of Anansi Press, 2023. pg 11

Works Cited

Guest, Barbara. “Poetry the True Fiction”. Forces of the Imagination. Kelsey St Press, 2003.

Jackson, Laura (Riding). The Telling. Harper & Row, 1972.

McMorris, Mark. Entrepôt. Coffee House Press, 2010.

Notley, Alice. Mysteries of Small Houses. Penguin Poets, 1998.

Notley, Alice. “On Writing from Dreams”. Literary Hub, 7 Oct. 2022, lithub.com/alice-notley-on-writing-from-dreams/.

Notley, Alice. “The Poetry Talent”. Telling the Truth As It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018. The Song Cave, 2023.

with lines from “Why Aren’t We Drinking Rheingolds Tonight” by Bernadette Mayer