Disobedience
Alice Notley
publisher: Penguin Books, 2001
isbn: 0-14-100229-8
price: $18
Notley has had a stellar publishing history with Penguin books so far; after the 1996 long-poem Descent of Alette (which she first published in 1992 in a collaborative volume, The Scarlet Cabinet, with her late husband, the English poet Douglas Oliver), and 1998's Mysteries of Small Houses -- which garnered praise from all quarters and was a Pulitzer runner-up -- she returns with a new volume that outshines its predecessors.
Disobedience, while diaristic (it is an epic-scale version of Ted Berrigan's "short bursts" method in poems such as "Bean Spasms"), carries over many of the themes of Alette: the subterranean journey, the search for spiritual life in a corporatized society, the anger at the hegemony of male dominance -- thereby crossing the worlds of the living and the dead, the real and imaginary, the particular and the symbolic, in a back-and-forth motion that vacates the events of everyday life of its assigned non-meanings and grants them wild personal resonances:
I don't want to create meaning;
I want to kill it...
You made meaning; I'm
trying to make life stand still,
long enough so I can exist.
I, truly, am speaking
[49]
Many fictional elements occur, such as a character who is variably named Hardwood, Hardware, Hardon or Mitch-ham (after the actor Robert Mitchum), but the ontological persistence of these figures is always wavering, moving in and out of focus as the stream of thought wills. Hardwood, who at times appears to be a stand-in for Oliver, seems at others to be an interior persona, the "hard," even male, aspect of her own psyche that she uses to power her defenses against the world:
Let's go back into caves
and talk to my willpower Hardwood
he's laughing at a snakejoke
"when is a snake naked
when it's a nake with no S
snake with no hiss..."
Would I want to be a nake, Hardwood?
does Alice Notley want to be a nake
[84]
The cave itself -- in which she encounters a symbolic letter "E," linked to Dante, a tourguide she rejects -- along with a series of dreams, bombings by Islamic terrorists in Paris, her anger at a certain "sect" of American poets, the rise of Le Pen through French politics, concerns about myth in contemporary society, and the fact that this poem itself is beginning to consume her -- these themes and more recur in fugal fashion, a technique that Pound promised would be an element of the Cantos and mostly failed to deliver but which Notley uses to marvelous effect here.
The most thrilling aspect of this book -- outside of its way of pulling perfect lines of poetry out of thin air -- is Notley's determination to rebel, to void herself completely of the slavery of society, and the incredible wit and beauty that she brings to the project:
No, I'm enjoying making mean remarks about everyone,
because I am the Soul, misunderstood
I'm pure, wise, and bitchy: that's not
contradictory. I intend to be grouchy throughout my eternity.
[97]
and later on this page, regarding the literary "Greats":
Fuck 'em --
they aren't "great" on the newly discovered
planet beneath Orion; and deep deep inside me, in the caverns
I haven't heard of them. I've only heard of the unnamed there
[97]
This rebellion's greatest manifestation may be in the form of time itself, which, in Notley's poem, is distended, overlaps, carries experiences across it which the newspapers would have us reject, and is otherwise uncompartmentalized, as if Jung met William James in the pages of Debord's Society of the Spectacle and decided "God" was in everyone.
One senses that Notley, who was turning fifty when writing this book, is enjoying the fruits of a lifelong dedication to poetry, one that was enacted in the underground cultures of New York and Paris and in fierce opposition to the mainstream ("The shirts in power, poetry power / still want a decorous poetry." [111]), hence the irony of her situation now as a lauded, and far from decorous, "Penguin Poet.".
The naturalness of her idiom, the distinctive and uncompromising perspective of her thought, the almost Rimbaudian zeal to break free of convention, coupled with the sense that she is, after all, very vulnerable in her struggle (hence the courage of her exposure), make Disobedience something of a comet's path of spiritual discontent, though never in a way that lessens her art.
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