by Noah Hale

Alice

In “The Poetry Talent” you write that poetry “shifts and confuses.” I know that more now than ever. My perception warps from the thoughts as they make their way between the lines. I sink so far into the possibility of it all that I start to lose all sense of direction and begin to reexperience the poem as an impossible extension of my vitals: once in a while my headspace glows with the poem’s beautiful beyondness. And at its best its composure requires a diligence equivalent to the force behind the great achievements of other arts. Shifting and confusion are symptomatic of the body’s extra-visceral connection with the allure of the unknown. Where does all this greatness come from? You mention music and its particular demand for harmony. Its need for some remarkable texture if the composer seeks after originality. How large its asking is. When I read your work I think about the consistency inherent to all significant art and how that can lead to obsession. I think about how Brahms destroyed a dozen string quartets—years worth—before gathering the confidence to publish his first; how Beethoven labored in his notebooks in pursuit of absolute note-to-note inevitability all his life; how Dutilleux overperfected  himself to the fault of narrowing his output as he obsessed over the details of his piece. Facts of music are generally true for poetry, too. That poetry is based “on the rise and fall of the voice—repeated intonation patterns,” composers know that. But you write and speak in such a way that you break through wall after wall of all the common familiar patterns that can sometimes get in the way of discovery (219). You called the voice the organ of the soul but you used it so relentlessly, so methodically it became your whole nervous system. You knew how to best embody the voice’s universally formless form, its reverberatory concatenations; you were one of the most skilled incantatory mechanics of our contemporary lyrical engine, and you could hammer-out the essence of a moment within the fluid borders of the lyric. 

While it takes an enormous amount of familiarity for the poet to carry out the task of creating with as much effect as possible, the poet’s vocation still remains mostly illogical. You write: 

But poetry isn’t like philosophy because its traditions seem up for grabs at any instant (philosophy is of the academy and thus conservative), and it’s more about the act of thinking than of concluding. It collects sounds, words as it’s thinking and you’re inside thinking with it, as if thinking were what we are always in (220).

Words collect us, too. To have the ability to wage oneself against the comforts of rigidity is a constant prerequisite of poetry. In collecting ourselves we are always adding an element that wasn’t there before; we incorporate the thoughts that were only potentially taken seriously. Writing abolishes the illusion of stable identity in the present tense. The poem transforms you once you’re inside of it. You’re grabbed by some unknowable hook in contrast with reality, invaded by the mystery, songlike. But there’s also some deeper, inner self that poetry enables one to locate. In “The Poetics of Disobedience” you make the intuitive claim that “Much of poetry exists to communicate with this entity. Is that one of our responsibilities? 

You don’t directly say. But in the same essay you talk again about the music. I think it’s important to consider the etymology of music, from mousike tekhne (literally, “the art of the muses”) as it directly relates the sound of poetry with its text since you begin with the following universal statement: “One has always used music for company.” And I think one always will. But how would you describe this kind of company? Is it a mythical group like the muses or a collection of feelings? The way I feel when I open to one of your pages and start to hear your humming? In your overtones I hear the ghosts of civil disobedience who will repopulate the voice when your work needs to be done again. And I think about the act of reading out loud. How the blue of my voice can’t help but see you. Organ of the soul: are you following the sound of these thoughts taking cover in the music? Can I follow you there? Sometimes I’m impressed by a voice I didn’t know was there until it shows up on the page. In the same essay you lament the growing departure of poetry from companionship. How it “hived off.” You were aware of the growing inclination for the poet to self-introvert away from her responsibilities to the republic of the reader. To consider why we were droning away and where we were going required an acute sense of these emergencies of contemporary poetry. Yet it’s also pointed out that this shift is not forever. Good company doesn’t simply disappear; it only goes away, stored somewhere else for some amount of time, and in my experience the voice subconsciously assumes the task of recovering these missing persons.

I mentioned responsibilities. I know I should be wary when talking about what an artist owes to this world, whether they provide for something or someone, but here I don’t mean responsibilities as an outward-facing social utility easily perverted by the tyranny of who’s in charge. Let that happen naturally. You know that the responsibility of the poem lives on primarily as the live archaeology of the deeply universal. You write, “Poetry has absolutely no responsibilities as an abstract noun. It is an ancient art, the closest to reality if not coincident with it. It is measurable, layered, and vibrates across itself, like one does; what you should ask is, what are your responsibilities to it?”¹I thought if I wrote this letter to you I might be able to better understand this sympathy I have with the lyric that cuts me into equal hemispheres of speaking and listening. These voices linger everywhere. As Steven Zultanksi writes, “The question of voice . . . is not only a matter of recognizing a distinctive authorial style, or of representing polyphony; it’s a question of what voices do, what effects they provoke, and how these effects feedback with each other, in poetry and in life.”² This feedback lives forever—like you—and you who have recently looped so much into the real life soundscape of dreams, you shift me back into the utmost gear of the ancient act/art of rediscovery, on and on into where the spirit complicates itself with my heart. In reading the body of your work I get the strong feeling that I’m participating in a sacred conversation with someone you placed in front of me. You have crafted new portals for the voice to wonder and explore, new crests of possibility which we owe you for aspiring to. There are so many more artifacts of voice to be (re)-discovered in your work. Recently the ones you’ve laid in front of me have made me ask myself whether this voice I have and use is really mine in the first place. Whether I can really claim either the ownership over this spectral residue inside me or the innate power to effect its properties on demand. Sound in time, you said, life in time. “I think we all (poets) should keep talking about that.”³

I admire you for waving time away. You knew how to cohere the world and all its phenomena to the voice in spite of the world’s impermanence. But you were committed to the temporariness of what we can glean from things-in-themselves. To concretize the ephemeral in the live act of reading. I don’t mean to veer too far into poetics. I’m only trying to approach the confluence of all these voices to witness the actual light of their performative core. But maybe you’d call that a fool’s errand on behalf of the ego. I don’t know. It’s not that I want to perform for the sake of intelligence—I want to access the artlessness of receiving the voice—to differentiate myself through the ancient aural-oral plectrum of the lyric. To approach the voice’s organizing dynamo, restless in vision, breathless in pursuit of something infinitely larger than myself. I only know that I can’t stop myself from going forward. Something pulls me constantly by the tongue and it’s rare I know where I’m going. Sometimes there are signs. When you were still propelled by that motion, you described it as a kind of stepping into poetry, “the ghoulish, timeless state.” I guess I would find a way to consider that haunted condition as the end of the road, but in a way it’s always just beginning. I have come to realize there’s nowhere else I could inhabit. If responding to the poem is the responsibility of the individual poet then it matters little what she chooses; the predicament the poet finds herself in is always the “This poem, the poem / always / my country.” 

My country. But I feel so small in front of a poem. You said it best in “Mysteries of Small Houses”: “How can something so finite / so petite and shallow have / the infinite center I sense there?” In this case you were writing about poverty, but it perfectly encapsulates the lifelong question of the poem’s allure. Poetry is just another kind of poverty. It took everything away from you in its “mystery vortex” and left you in a constant state of uncertainty. To me that’s how you thrived. And for that we can only thank you for leaving behind an enduring record of possibility.

Noah

Notes

¹  Alice Notley, “The responsibilities of Poetry,” Eurynome’s Sandals (Rouen: Presses Universitaires de Rouen et Du Havre, 2019), pg. 165
² Steven Zultanski, “Thirty-Odd Functions of Voice in the Poetry of Alice Notley” (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020), pg.1
³ Alice Notley, “American Poetic Music at the Moment,” Coming After: Essays on Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2008), pg. 146