I Went Down There - Alice Notley
It’s not transparent what is happening behind the poem, what made the poem, where these images came from. I found Alice Notley’s Certain Magical Acts from Pegasus book exchange. I am almost overwhelmed by the spacing of her poems. top to bottom thick lines covering half the page. I have not made it far through yet. I now hover over the poem I Went Down There.
I want to be in well-lit rooms with comfortable chairs, / but I wish I knew how to live. I’m walking in a forest; / I understand trees and plants. I don’t understand / the harnessing of nature to light up a city with neon…
I am stuck I am caught. This is not abstraction, this is literal description. It is just removed each time, a moment here, a moment there. Is it like paper-mache. Taking newspapers dipping in-until their soaked and laying one on the other, each from a different time, a different place. One little bit does not do justice to what I am talking about. It is pages and pages of this, confident, supported.
I’m crouching inside a dark space, near other / bodies, waiting to dock, hoping we’ll make it across / this small expanse of water. Too many bodies. I / don’t want him to take another wife…Do I / need him? Do I really have to have this life?
Each of these excerpts begin their own stanza. It is how I am given the well-lit room, the crouching inside a dark space and then I am pushed off, the next lines depart. What is the thread in this. There does not need to be a thread. The thread of association.
I have no words for / what I need. I think it is what we need; but do we / have to need something? Not very much. I’m / starting to see something, I’m starting to hear, / but I know I never really arrive…
I wonder how many poems just these lines could spur out of any poet to take the time to linger with them. This personal to me, feels like an acoustic performance close up. But it is not really that she is giving me anything more or less than so many other poets it is unpretentious but this is a cop out of a critique.
I have to put / up with these people who keep forming me, I can’t / stop changing as they tell me what to do, / even though I resist them; I say I do but / I can’t. Change will arrive suddenly for me…
I feel this deeply, the last line, that for months on end I am in a perspective and then suddenly something shifts, a line does it, a bit of an interview, then I can not longer see how I did see recently before. These poems come from later in Notley’s life. Her first out in 1971 and this collection in my hand coming out in 2016. I need to read her earlier work alongside. A poet’s voice changes, as it should, as all of ours should, or to outrun ourselves in this way that accepts the sudden change at the same time of getting in where it fits in.
The light took my face. That’s all I want to think about. / I only want these moments between me and the / elements. If I could see, I would still see, I know it. / I’m anxious, and my mouth is distorting: I need / to wear a hat to cover my hair. I have to / cover up a lot of parts of me. Everyone does…
Mixture of obliqueness and transparency. Memorialized mundane. The layers to having to cover up a lot of parts of me. Part of this is an excuse to write out words I admire. This has become a place I have certain thoughts, I write with a certain mind. Leave the space changed suddenly back to something else. I’d like this to be an act of magic, or shadows that cant be made with hands against the cave wall. Where is the fire burning in this poem?
I have always wanted to be / outrageous, but outrageous seems to be large, / the biggest sculpture in the world. I would go in my / mind where others wouldn’t come, but then / they came. I let them in because they needed me. / I must need you, but why? I don’t know. I / don’t take anything for granted. I don’t want to / believe, and I don’t. I don’t ever want to be corny. / I’m sentimental and I like it. I take a thought / and hold it close and pet it. I ‘m dying on this / parched field…
- Written 9/25 - Long Live Alice Notley
