by Joan Alice Tate

Almost exactly five years ago, I chose my name. I’d been spending that spring coming out to friends on the phone. I was just barely starting to transition, getting high in the confederate cemetery by my parent’s house where I could be alone with my thoughts and my books. It was May 2020. Summer was coming early. The world appeared to be ending. Inevitably I came into possession of Notley’s Grave of Light, and quickly it became a holy text the way a good selected can be. I was desperate to leave the south. I was getting cat called and threatened walking down the streets in my few femme clothes. I was hooking up in garages and backyards. I was reading voraciously. 
I had not yet come out as a woman to my family, but I’d finally decided on two names. The first of a warrior saint. The second of a warrior poet. The former had values I couldn’t contend with, having already reached her katasteris. The latter was still around. Who had a value I thought I could follow: disobedience. Notley felt more tangible, a star still rising, even if already far above what I could ever imagine. As I said she was a warrior, not in a physical sense, but a societal one. In the grip of her disobedience, I found a master I could try to follow.
To liken a poet to a warrior is a tired thing. Or maybe just weary. It feels especially tired as we watch war unfold on our phones across the globe. Especially from the belly of the beast. But poets have existed in tandem to battlefields for as long as there have been both. As critics, survivors, witnesses, and even weapons themselves. Wilfred Owen. Yusef Komunyakaa. Miguel Hernandez. Lorca. Simone Weil. Randall Jarrell. Paul Celan, to name a small fraction. Do we even need to mention Homer? In the formation of American poetics we of course have Whitman the war nurse, and we have Dickinson, whose greatest outpouring of genius synced up with the civil war, and whose life so far away from it contemplated it and its effects potently, if obliquely.
As a docent at the Dickinson museum in Amherst, I have the great honor of meeting those on pilgrimages. Just yesterday, a woman came during an open house in a small white dress, identical to the poet’s, wrapped in a shawl of flowers. She couldn’t stop crying. I got her some water, asked her her name, and let Mary sit for a time in the library where she seemed to be working up the nerve to speak or to go to the poet’s bedroom or to just withstand the moment. I ushered other guests through, answered some questions, told some stories, went about my duty when at some point Mary called out to me and in desperation, “Is this where Emily and Higginson met?” 
Before I could say I wasn’t sure, she was in it. Higginson the colonel, Dickinson’s friend and mentor, the lifelong suffragist and radical abolitionist, one of the sponsors of John Brown’s Raid, Union colonel who led the first battalion of freed black men into war before being wounded, publisher, author, warrior, a man of deep integrity, a “great man,” by all accounts of the time, knocking on the door and looking genius in the eye, and by all accounts, blinking. And to his credit, blinking with grace. A disobedient man in his own right, it must be difficult to be claimed as a mentor by someone whose light shines brighter than yours.
Mary painted this picture I had painted to others. His visit after 8 years of correspondence, coming over a day late and being bowled over by a woman so pure of mind he was made to feel like “a little boy” before her, short and pale in her blue shawl, offering white lilies as gifts. How when she started to speak, she never stopped, and he was stricken as her mind kept going and going and going, boring upwards into the sky. 
These days, their levels of fame have reversed. Her star is still rising, while his has dimmed considerably in the long view of history. Dickinson died on May 15th, Notley just four days later, and while Dickinson was not a warrior or a war poet (at least not explicitly), she certainly held her own before one. She spoke with many who were considered great for their time, and rather than pedestalize them or dismiss them, she weighed them each with her mind, took what she thought she could, and left behind the rest.
It is not such a leap to make the comparison, Dickinson and Notley, these two American poets and women whose primary value was that of disobedience. Disobedience of custom (Dickinson never married, Notley's early writing documenting the taboo of motherhood), disobedience of poetic form and values, disobedience of expectations or of tradition. Disobedience of disobedience when it came down to it. The two were not above these traditions. They certainly weren’t ignorant of them, were intimately and achingly familiar with them, but they saw the limitations and boundaries clearly and chose to move beyond, constructing additions to the temples they worshipped in. Alcoves and septs and chambers and labs where new ways of worship could develop. They would race past them astonishingly. Just look at a stanza from my favorite war poem of Dickinson’s

It don't sound so terrible—quite—as it did—
I run it over—"Dead", Brain, "Dead."
Put it in Latin—left of my school—
Seems it don't shriek so—under rule.

And I have to think what Emerson would say to a stanza like that? When a friend showed me this strange hidden gem the other day, I got chills. The affect, the hard stops, the regard and disregard for tradition. It warrants a separate essay and goes on like this remarkably, but I bring it up to stress, it's like something out of her time. I compared it to Ted Berrigan when it was shown to me, ‘Dead’, Brain, ‘Dead’ and something breaks.
There’s a listening going on here, other voices which creep in, perhaps the voices of laborers on the property whose dialects she is finding music in. And also her brother, who reportedly went catatonic at the death of a peer in battle, repeating “Frazer is killed, Frazer is killed,” for hours. At the core of the lyric is this listening, this destruction of an artificial condition of the elevated lyric in favor of some deeper honesty. Dickinson knew the rules. More importantly, she knew how grief made those rules inconceivable, limiting, false. How grief breaks time, and so she broke poetry. In this way Dickinson waged her war, quietly, sharing it with her select society, ambivalent to if she were discovered after her death, for the poems were the reward in and of themselves. 
I use Dickinson as a retroactive example of disobedience as it lies at the core of American lyricism. As an almost pre-foundational text or support for Notley’s insistence on the tactic. In a later poem especially, Dickinson defended disobedience siding with the likes of Moses who could not see the promised land after disobeying God just once.

So I pull my Stockings off
Wading in the Water
For the Disobedience’ Sake
Boy that lived for “Ought to”

Went to Heaven perhaps at Death
And perhaps he didn’t
Moses wasn’t fairly used –
Ananias wasn’t –

Obeying the rules doesn’t lead to heaven. Disobeying may not be a safer route, but if eternity is up in the air either way, why not wade into the water? Why not move against propriety. One knows not what one will discover when one goes against the orders handed down. 
Notley writes in “The Poetics of Disobedience,”

I've spoken in other places of the problems, too, of subjects that hadn't been broached much in poetry and of how it seemed one had to disobey the past and the practices of literary males in order to talk about what was going on most literarily around one, the pregnant body, and babies for example. There were no babies in poetry then. How could that have been? What are we leaving out now?

The question must haunt us, what are we leaving out now? We left out babies, perhaps one of three or four states we can all say we inhabited. We left out mothers. How many voices have been buried or bowled over? either by the inherited high-minded poetics of the past, or well-meaning Whitmanic universalism that changed everything, claimed everything. It is the duty of the poet to push back on the notions of propriety. To see the things we are blind to. To feel intimately the walls, and to write not just outside of them, but right through them. 
I have to remind myself often, a poem cannot do everything, but it can do some things. It can listen. It can open. It can create. With each project, its successes and its failures (and every poet has failures), one must find a way to disobey the expectation of the society, the self, or the other. The power of the lyric is less its aim at timelessness and more its ability to break time open, to rush far ahead of what has been made available and create new roads out of the old ones. I still feel we have not caught up with Dickinson. We most certainly have not caught up with Notley. Will not probably within my lifetime. Disobedience is the cutting edge of the lyric, not out of a blind denial of it, but a love so strong, one sees where it stops and pushes it further, deeper into its light.
I feel the places where Notley is most frequently praised for this is in her grief poetry. At Night the States and A Sonnet are of course great elegies and perhaps perfect poems, thinking through conventions of refrains and forms to get to somewhere new that grief can only take us. They themselves emulate this disobedience. Enough has been written about these that it feels pointless to say anything other than re-read them, once a week if you can. But I truly think where Notley stepped into a realm all her own, where she created a new edge, waged a new war is of course with the epic mode that made up so much of her career from Alette onwards. I’d like to give White Phosphorus its flowers as a bridge between eras. A prototype of Descent of Alette as well as an experiment with the lyric I, blowing it up into a drastic, poly-vocal yet hyper personal We.
White Phosphorus is a poem which eulogizes her brother who died years after returning from the Vietnam War, deeply scarred and discarded by the state. Notley bridges the personal nature of New York School poetics which she innovated within and drastically changed, and the epic project poem form which would become a task of hers in the second half of her career, engaging more politically and explicitly with the Western tradition’s more grandiose tendencies. It depicts the agony of watching a family member’s descent, the loss of the heart or the soul or the mind as a result of war, as well as a crucial and humanizing reality of war: the people who fight it are simply people, goaded on by lies of propriety, honor, and empire. It engages with depersonalization, mythmaking, redemption, and the necessary cruelty that goes into manufacturing history. It is one of Notley’s most disobedient works, at times polemical, writing against history, against Homer, against tradition while actively harnessing the choral nature of the epic poem, using feet bracketed by quotations and inhabiting in many places, the pronoun “we.” It’s a lyric intervention into the epic. It’s an epic intervention into the lyric. It’s a deeply personal intervention into the social psyche and one’s place in it that learns to reach outside of itself, and into the future as well as the past of myth. 
At the core of this intervention is the quoted foot she would go on to master and employ in Descent of Alette. Poetry has always been a chorus. Famously in Greek plays, the chorus was a series of witnesses to stand-in for the audience, somewhere between Gods and spectators (we may ask, what is the difference). They react, catch us up, fill in the gaps, tell us what to think, to feel, believe we should take away. Instead of this, Notley turns the whole poem into chorus. One experiences her grief in the chorus that it is, broken up, stumbling, at times traditionally metrical and others, nearly sprung. 
Through these quoted or perhaps spoken feet, Notley is able to cut through to the reality which holds up the lyric and the social psyche, “they say” “some say” “some say, / war is” “the only” “reality” “The warriors mistake war for “reality, / the reality” “Because they pierce” “the centers” “the physical centers.” There’s a myopia which Notley is writing against, the way war swallows both individual and societal psyche. And she does this with the voice which is reaching desperately to find assurance. It’s a stuttering, thinking voice similar to what we see in At Night the States, engaging in a dialogue, with the self as well as with each other. Reality is up for grabs in poetry. And where Homer used the epic to house the world within the frame of slaughter and might, Notley is proposing a frame from the outside, watching the wrecks it creates and reaching towards a longer view of history. “Isn’t it more / beautiful, under the Earth?” “Or the sunlight, not history?”... “Remove us from history, but not from your air” The voices of the dead and the living, the soldiers and the victims (and those soldiers who were in some ways victims), the world around us, and the heart crying out. Notley instead seems to create a haunting out of the grief, a world of spirits bumping into one another, playing some game of telephone to look for an end.
It’s a necessary intervention to America, to empire, a civilization that has lost its soul. Before, Notley’s poetics seemed to spring from the New York School and the Williamsian legacy of American poetics, but here Notley takes a deeper stab at the center of our society which fetishizes war and honor. Which has severed itself from the Earth. The lyric I goes from being “a supposed person” as Dickinson described, to instead a mass of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, blurred together and crushed under the heel of empire, and it is trying to shake this mass awake. It’s a disobedience that comes from beyond the grave, and a stumbling through a voice designed to stumble as can be seen with the trembling weight of the voice in At Night the States but exploded and expanded from a personal grief into the grief of a planet and a people forced to watch its evisceration, and see this called history. “History’s for those” “who ask not” “to be forgiven.” 
The alternative to history which Notley posits is perhaps paradoxically, a return to the mythic. Less the homeric glorification of war and the mantle of white which Notley rebels against, but a different, more nebulous type of mythic which Notley would spend the rest of her career trying to work through. It is an imperfect turn, but a turn that offers freedom, imagination, and possibility. In dreams, her dead brother transforms, “not an albatross,” the European symbol of burden and folly. Instead, “He’s an Owl,” “not an albatross” … “intricate with” “feathers”... “white, with black spots.” The only redemption can come through the reclamation of nature, returning to the earth, and returning to the dream, the place where poems come through. “I know things only” “this way” she ends the poem converting her brother from a tortured warrior into a natural predator, a thing which truly needs to hunt to survive rather than one who engages in the senselessness of human killing. 
It is not a perfect turn. It is one that is aspirational, reaching, soaring. It’s the start of a new project, a new way of dealing with grief, fought for grit-teethed through a striving towards relations with the world. It is an earnest turn. It is an open one, trying to push beyond the western canon. What I admire most about Notley’s poetics is this earnesty. Earnesty has not been in vogue for a while now, and yet there’s a clawing at the walls which always strikes me with Notley. An earnest intensity about the stakes of living, the stakes of loving, of trying to change the world. Dickinson was about as far from an activist as one can get, but Notley had causes she was desperate to share, to engage with. One can feel her looking into your eyes, trying to make you understand, “Whose heart” “might be lost.” It is all of ours to lose. Unless we disobey.
As I said, poetry has always been a chorus. A series of voices adding to one another, investing in a calling, a vocation. We lost a leading voice in the chorus this year. Or, we will no longer be receiving offerings from this great voice by way of flesh. Alice Notley is dead, and this death is a historic loss to poetry. A gap which will fill itself with new griefs and poems and responses. It’s a gap in wisdom and witnessing and a gap in new, bold, honest, and unbridled work. An urgent work whose momentum will not end with her death. She is a leading voice, and as such, a voice we must find new and innovative ways to disobey. To follow directly in her footsteps would be a mistake, a lesson not learned. We must take what we can, fuse the genres that should not touch, make personal the mythic, seek to shake the world awake, even (or especially) if we stumble or stutter in the process. By way of grief, earnesty, love, urgency, and myth. 
When I chose Alice as my middle name, it was because she was a woman I could aim to be like. I have never been the most feminine woman. I haven’t seen the point, yet it is unquestionable what I am and that to concern myself with what “kind” of woman, poet, person, teacher I wish to be has felt irrelevant compared to what I am doing, where I am going, what I have learned. What I am given in my work to share. 
I found in Notley a mother, a writer, an unflinching force who saw through history, and was able to touch on not an asceticism of values with her disobedience, but a moderation of influence and deep activity in her occupation. There is a bravery and a wisdom that spoke to me in that graveyard, that gave me the courage to become who I am, still becoming, still developing, as she did all her life, and is in the process of developing still. She is a star that will continue to rise, and a voice waging war against the machines of empire with the tool of our souls. I’d have liked to tell her so much.

Alice,

oh thank you,

Joan