“Poems are part of our being alive, to realize
them, to say them . . . to say what we’ve done, how we feel, what we know, in
such a way that the poems we say are as much like the poems we walk among as
possible.”
– Alice Notley, “Women and Poetry”
i
I spent the final hours of May 20th alone with my notebook, admiring the wind’s maelstrom on our front porch. It was a reprieve of sorts to be engulfed in that tempest, feeling the air lift the hair from my shoulders, watching loose paper and junk mail careen off the table and vanish into the dark corner near the mulberry.
There is music in the reed instruments preferred by Pan. The gusts run their teeth through the tree leaves and do something similar to the body. Something begins in the presence of this tree ravished by wind as the mind seeks Alice Notley.
In “O’Hara in the Nineties,” Notley recounts the surprise of rediscovering Frank O’Hara’s poetry in France. “The century is your subject and you are its,” she wrote, “What you have of your own, your self, is in ‘wind’, ineffable poetry,” she continued, quoting the wind in O’Hara’s “Poem”:
and the light seems to be
eternal
and the joy seems to be inexorable
I am foolish enough always to find it in wind
Only after crossing an ocean did she reconnect with the poems of the first poet that “sounded like” her. For Notley, sounding-like becomes a source of recognition and proximity. And “poetry is intimacy,” she tells us, “an instantaneous transferral of mind” that occurs when “silent tongue” in her head found O’Hara’s “waggled like mine.” This shared imaginarium has always been a space of reference and community among poets.
A word— waggled — and a wind. A sensation that rips me from the private disorder of thought and pulls me by my hair into the sky’s disorder. Notley never extols a poem for its reticence. The poem’s voice should be “fearless,” as she put it. Wind knows nothing of fear, nothing of inhibition.
ii
Why must we return to the beginning?
Notley poses this question in different variations across her work, circling it in “Women and Poetry”: “Whole other poetry springing from nowhere, as at the beginning of the world in the hands of women? Or, perhaps even more desirably, as at the beginning of the world, invented equally by women and men together. Not, as now, already made out of men.”
For this, we need new cosmologies, new stories of creation that narrate an origin where gender isn’t the source of rupture and alienation. “Words are our poetry,” Notley says, but there are other poetries as well, other texts that warrant attention and reading— she mentions birdsongs and plant forms and patterns in the sky. “Poetry is the surface and texture and play of being, including the light that springs up in things from their depths.”
Poetry is the “feather” in the altered “You” of “Madrigal for the Newly Pregnant”. Poetry is the hankering for “a little cloud sun on the mossy fun” that edges into “Enormous Earrings”. Poetry is whatever we do with what has been done and what we are doing. Poetry is the voice that cannot return to the air “where it lives,” near a campfire where the world is told. In The Descent of Alette, poetry will “exist on a two-dimensional surface …in the shape of a rectangle,” or in the performance of that text:
“ ‘What is this place?’ ” “I asked her” “ ‘It would be
paradise,’ she said,” “ ‘but, as you see,” “it’s very dark,” “& always
dark” “You will find that” “those who live here” “are changed”
Poetry is the medium where the question “where am I?” is inseparable from the story of what I am and what we have done. Poetry is the refusal of time-space that separates the living from the dead. And sometimes, poetry is the woman on a porch at night, her tongues loose and “waggling,” the serpents rising from the roof of her mind if only to writhe across the scalp’s surface before slithering onto the page. Alice Notley taught me that. She keeps teaching.
iii
Things we are taught may take the form of permissions. A few months ago, while delivering his Bagley Wright Lecture at the New Orleans Poetry Festival, Anselm Berrigan alluded to this particular way of sharing the world. Poets give each other “permissions” which function as an opening into possibility. Notley said Philip Whalen gave her “permission” to throw what Ted Berrigan called a “clean tantrum.”
How to enumerate the permissions Notley has given— and gives? Any inventory is a dialogue with its incompleteness. Nevertheless:
Permission, first of all, to begin . . . The Descent of Alette grew from the desire to write a “female epic.” After her stepdaughter, Kate Berrigan, was killed in a traffic accident, grief brought Notley “close to large dangerous powers,” the sorts of powers that create a cosmos. The poem-sequence, Beginning with Stain, emerged from that emptiness in which Notley sought “a story for beginnings. The beginning of the universe, the beginning of living again after someone loved has died”: these two clauses sit side by side in Notley’s incomplete sentence. Incompletion has its grammar, and Notley has been true to it.
Permission to start with the stain and maybe address “the sons of bitches in Washington and Wall Street and L.A.” because “they are still sons of bitches and rich ones” at that—a permission that comes with the necessity of examining the bitches within us, the unthinking space that seeks protection from proximity to power and wealth.
Permission to mock the cult of soft power known as “meritocracy” and its attendant prize-land by addressing the invisible speakers:
true im afraid to write these things down where
come from from sayings of the dead
fro the cliches of the everywhere
— a permission that encourages us to upset the orderly politeness of comfortable clauses situated in rigid conceptions of time-space:
oh white wisp of line in the sky why and the
trees next to space travel
i am qualified to give you pain by telling the truth
Permission to remember the voice across a “future”:
Someday I will remember this very future I am in, image in space.
I will at least see her, I say to myself, she will be someone
else than one ever thought and her eyes will be blue words on white.
Permission to palpate the core that is “always & eternally” aching:
a curious wild pain—a searching
beyond what the world contains, something
transfigured & infinite—I don’t find it,
I don’t think it is to be found.
It’s like passionate love for a ghost.
At times it fills me with rage,
at times with wild despair,
Permission to be simultaneously “international and personal” in our sayings, and not to permit “any convention of thought or style to keep me from saying.” For poetry is a way of thinking, a way of articulating complex thought. And pain is “the source of gentleness & cruelty & work.”
Permission to refuse the nominal barriers between poetry and life, drawings and words, doodles and art, being and non-being, frivolity and seriousness — nothing is as lovely as this series which Notley tweeted on 12/28/13 and Rachelle Toaramino repeated yesterday:
I stole your stupid boxes that you call poems and threw them away
I stole your wealth and fame which are now irrelevant
I stole your ability to kill me after we’re dead
I stole scale so you wouldn’t be bigger than I am
I’m stealing everything that you know by knowing more
Permission to ignore L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E’s dicta against poetic voice and first-person speakers in favor of chasing our shadows. A gauntlet in these injunctions to pick up the uncool, hysterical first-person “I”-ball and risk exploring the “unified self” Notley mentions in her essay, “Thinking and Poetry”: “The pronoun ‘I’ should be given back to people . . . but deepened…”
Permission to develop “voice” through dialogues with imagination and conversations with interior selves and ghosts, including by addressing an aside to a voice:
Aside: Voice
I love your voice.
And when they die
their voices will still
live together.
Permission to narrate cosmologies and new beginnings where “A baby is born out of an owl’s forehead”.
Permission to rattle the end-stopped “dead-end” in order to discover the wild continuum. For, “finally we are allowed to write,” Notley says, where to write is to “hysterically pile up pages in a dead-end world using dead-end forms of articulation written on dead trees.”
Permission to laugh maniacally and kiss the tree as we crawl inside it.
iv
She also encourages us to use poetry as a means of studying and thinking about the world we are given, this reality, what some call ‘the facts on the ground’. For the facts on the ground are different from the facts of the ground.
In the ‘female’ epic, “the tyrant is us,” Notley told Shoshana Olidort, “The tyrant is what enslaves us to our forms.” The tyranny is present in every space that grants us awards, residencies, diplomas, accreditations, salaries . . . “the form of our life, the form of our politics, the form of our universities, the form of our knowledge, our thinking we know something.” The tyrant is the king of meritocracy: he wears his credits like bling, his subjects take that bling as a genuine legitimation of his authority. What Notley calls “the ‘female’ epic” is about liberation— ‘all for all’ vs. ‘mine for yours’. “The liberation of everyone,” as she puts it.
As I type, the wind blows my hair into my mouth. I am here and not here: nothing and something in simultaneity. The last time I cut my hair shorter than shoulder-length was at the age of seventeen. Since then, it has hung below my shoulders. There was no decision involved; no ethical stance— simply a personal desire to keep the sensation of these dead cells touching my back, moving over my shoulders, tangling in my forearms when doing backflips underwater.
There are so many beginnings. “All her jewelry will be in this envelope,” said the mortician, before pressing a button on the machine that would cremate my mother. A warm-up button. The thought had never crossed my mind.
“Add her hair,” I said, “her curls . . . cut as many as you can.”
In the poem, those curls hold the hue of sunset at the instant before the ochre ball falls beneath the ocean. The horizon, like her hair, has neither decomposed nor deteriorated: it is there whenever I visit Orange Beach, Alabama.
There is a strange sensation that returns as a shudder when the space between the bushes where I dump the teens’ hair trimmings is empty, as I always hope it will be. Imagining that the hair of my children lines the nests of Birmingham’s birds gives me pleasure, even though we have never found such a nest. Never glimpsed a bird-beak with our hair in it.
These thoughts groaned with the wind as it shook
the trees last night. Restless, unable to sleep, I admired the wind and tried
to catch up on email. There, on the porch, as I typed with one thumb, the
following “Tornado Watch” scrolled across at the top of my phone:
The time is 11:44 am; the internet signal is good; the phone battery is low; the words are excerpted from Morton Feldman’s conversation with his friend, Walter Zimmerman; the juxtaposition constructs a different relationship to the howling wind. Normally, I would go inside but tonight I am thinking of time, thinking of Notley’s “& I do & I will,” and posing to myself the questions of poems we walk among, as possible.
“What am I buying right now?” Notley says. “This is the question everyone should be asking all the time: What am I buying, in terms of thoughts and ideas, from others?”
And what is the cost of this purchase?
Referenced:
The unlinked essays mentioned above all come from Alice Notley’s essay collection, Coming After: Essays on Poetry, published by University of Michigan Press. Poems referenced include “The New Brain”; “Madrigal for the Newly Pregnant”; “Enormous Earrings”; excerpts from The Descent of Alette; “I’ve meant to tell you many things about my life …”; “The Comfort”; “2/16”;
The words in beneath the tornado warning come from Morton Feldman in a conversation with Walter Zimmermann published in Zimmerman’s book, Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians (Vancouver: Aesthetic Research Center Publications, 1976). The entirety of the quote typed into the email reads as follows: “Many times I've put myself up against the wall and shot myself. I'm into a continual perpetual revolution in my own personal response to my work, which means action, immediate action, immediate decision that only I can make, and that I have to be responsible for.”
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. She would be elated if you ordered My Heresies, a poetry collection published by Sarabande in late April 2025. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.
