Notley...? I'm Afraid Not.

I've tried off and on for years to enjoy Alice Notley's poetry. (It comes highly recommended by poets I admire—Rae Armantrout, Andrei Codrescu, Anne Waldman and others. I've tried to find it interesting on a basic level and I've looked for reasons to think it profound. In fact, I snapped up a copy of her Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005 in the hope that an extensive but judiciously chosen overview of her work would make her (in some quarters) iconic status understandable.


Alas. As ever, Notley's poetry strikes me as tedious, often pointless stuff that tries to get by on mood and attitude, the pretense of saying something "deep" while frittering away its energies on incoherent surfaces. Here are a couple of examples, the second from Mysteries of Small Houses, which was a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize:

Margaret and Dusty

Margaret wrote a letter
sealed it with her finger
put it in her pocket
for the Dusty Baker

Dusty was his bat
Dusty was his moustache
Dusty was Margaret's pocket
They both got all dusty

If I had a flower
If I had a trinket of gold
          & silver & lapis
If I had a medal & a trophy
          & a fullup sticker album
I'd rather be all dusty
Like those two friends of mine.

***

Would Want to Be in My Wildlife

      hold pen improperly against 4th finger not 3rd like when I was six why won't I hold it right
      if I'm even younger four I walk more solemnly walking's relatively new but talking's even more natural and I can see you really while we talk
      if words are a sense in motion the universe has always had it
      I'm not sounding young
      though holding the pen wrong
      I don't have to sound young but I couldn't say "oil well" right
      erase all that it's not right. You have to erase whatever it is and erase before that and before that to be perfect
      perfect's here and from ever all along and if it doesn't say it right it's right and I am it from then now Alley House I am
      and get scared till I am I
      scareder and scareder
      then calm and enter where oil of I does flow
      oleanders ah touch and steps up aha oleanders oleanders and touched they make me be here in the strange scented present
      up and if I enter I have truly to enter
      stars weren't alive before me anyone's from the most ancient wildness
      that part's blue floor that part's pink floor kitchen washroom bathroom backporch all small
      it doesn't matter what happens here what matters is not to lose judiciousness which wildness has from before its befores human wildness does it isn't self-deceiving like cruelty but's unbrokenup into the parts of the bad
      that's why the house is so small and I am so simple because one thing seeing and being's the one thing there is though each one's it and though each one's different both at least from the beginning socialization's what makes us the same in the made-up way.

The Perpetual Bird Rating: