Interview #40: Alice Notley
Pioneer poet caught in 2020 conversation
THE RECENT death of the Beat-adjacent ALICE NOTLEY, notable associate of the Second Generation of the New York School of poetry, drew a final line under a celebrated and fruitful life of writing and publication.
Although she was fiercely independent and did not declare her allegiance to either of those named US literary movements, her place in the post-war American new verse tradition is assured.
Rock and the Beat Generation is delighted to pay tribute to a woman, who passed on May 19th aged 79 in her long-time home city of Paris, via an interview conducted by one of our cherished contributors NINA ŽIVANČEVIĆ in 2020 in the French capital.
Živančević, who has written about Ginsberg and Dylan’s relationship and the Kerouac title The Buddhist Years for R&BG, was a friend and former student of Notley. She caught up with her over ice cream in the Parisian park Tuileries as the poet’s collection For the Ride came out five years ago…
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Nina Živančević: Here are a couple of questions that I’ve always meant to ask you, but they impose themselves on me especially in the light of your book For the Ride, which has just come out. After some serious seminal and experimental writing of yours, which you had already started in Negativity’s Kiss (2014) and in Manhattan Luck (2014) and then more recently in Eurynome’s Sandals (2019), this new one is more visual and disseminated, restructured if you will than those that I’ve mentioned? I know you’re a visual artist as well but you haven’t included your visuals in your previous books?
Alice Notley: Oh, actually, I don’t remember how I started For the Ride, but it deals with questions I’ve been always interested in: like what is the beginning of everything? What is the end of anything? I’m always interested to figure out how language started but I’ve been dealing for quite a while with the idea, with my knowledge of the environmental catastrophe..
NZ: You dedicate it to ‘ANYONE’; in the ‘Preface’ you say that the book is going to be ‘about the journey to another dimension to save Words from their demise’, save words, language, from a future Apocalypse?
AN: I talked about the catastrophe in some other books as well, but I decided to think here about the idea of after-the-catastrophe, if everything is dead, so what is THAT? One is just there, inside this glyph, a piece of language which was already there …
NZ: In your book the survivors from catastrophe have an anthology of poetry with them – you say, only poems can deal with the inexplicable. The characters in it finally become poems. Are these the ones who can save whatever’s left of the world? I mean, can poetry save the world? I remember that in the film Alphaville by Godard. He said that ‘the only thing that could save the world, the post-apocalyptic world, is poetry’.
AN: I’ve never seen Alphaville, although I was very aware of it, but anywhere that I was at that time, I kept on missing the screenings of that one, although (laughter), I’ve seen all other films Anna Karina was in!
Pictured above: Poet Alice Notley
NZ: That’s perhaps his most profound, philosophical and poetical film, as he has this old man in it who is the only one in this post-world who cries and speaks poetry. Everyone else in Alphaville has forgotten how to cry so they have to visit the old man to teach them how to cry…Let us go to the beginning of your For the Ride: As we’ve mentioned, you dedicated it to ‘Anyone' and in the very first section, ‘The Glyph of Chaos with Willows’ you say that 'One is not in time but in Chaos’. Are we living in an era which is englobed out of time which you call ‘beautiful chaos’? How do you conceive that era of ‘beautiful chaos’?
AN: I think that our reality is chaos, but the chaos in old epics is not chaotic, it is unformed and, by describing our senses and out of the things that we see, we try to make something out of chaos, but the chaos is always there underneath us, we are chaos! And, in that poem, we return to chaos; that’s what happens in a lot of my work – it’s a return to chaos!
NZ: Would you refer to the deconstruction of language also as some form of chaos?
AN: Oh, WE ARE CHAOS! We have been taught to see order everywhere but..
NZ: Were you indicating in the book that there was some kind of ‘truth’ hidden in the old forgotten languages which we are no longer able to read, some old truth has been repeating itself through centuries but we haven’t figured it out ?
AN: No, what I meant was my idea that we have to communicate. We have to learn how to communicate – communication is everything and even the molecules are communicating with one another, and atoms in nature as well… they are all talking to each other, like we do, and probably, when we are dead, we are in the state of communicating too; that’s what it is. However, I am always trying to find something as ‘the original language’, one that is older than ‘the old languages’ and, now I’m working in that area again, I am trying to find something that I call ‘THE old language’ contained in our cells or what our cells are…
NZ: I’ve got it…in terms of that you come close to the visuals, to the visual expression of what is essential to the glyph or a ‘sign’. It marked me when you said ‘One makes the truth’, like every man, everyone, makes his/her own truth and you indicate that he/she is doing it through language. I’d say this is the most ‘language’ centred poetry book of yours, though I’ve never thought of you as a ‘Language poet’. I’ve considered you a ‘Language being’ as you’re also dealing with different languages on a daily basis…you incorporate different languages in your writing as you’ve just done it here. I mean, you incorporated French in your poetry…
AN: I know, I wouldn’t have written this book if I hadn’t lived in a different language; well, I‘ve had that experience, dealing with different languages on a daily basis. Many people have had it. We embody so many different cultures and languages in one body, and somehow it works, doesn’t it? (laughter) I am deliriously amused at.. what’s going on all the time!
Pictured above: For the Ride, Notley’s 2020 collection
NZ: What I appreciated, what I loved, about this book is that once you have found the key for each chapter then you could enter it; like everyone has to find his own key to it, in a way.. You don’t give us the sort of key which is something like ‘go and find the key and you can enter it’!
AN: I did not know what the keys were here. I sort of had to find them myself in order to enter it and I was hoping that everyone else would do it too, as I did not know it, ever, what was going to happen in this book…
NZ: Here you say, ‘One is composed of Words like one makes in the beginning, chaotically’. Do you see the words as our essential elements and the only creative elements that have power to propel our imagination?
AN: We are all, each of us very unique, we are individuals, yes, we have souls, but perhaps we should say…we have poems…
NZ: You said this ‘had painted a lovely clasp singing in the head’. Impossible mental structures! Are the words more powerful than other other tools, artistic or physical, more powerful than colors, visual images, etc? What can they express more or better than other human ‘tools’?
AS: Oh, I have a lot of lines like that one…I don’t know if these ‘tools’ are better, but I think they are ‘truer’, I don’t know if they are more powerful and I love the visual arts, and I try to have vision and music in my poems, I don’t have any visual training in arts, I have musical training…I’ve never had any training in visual arts…
I fell in the Second Generation of the New York School, with Ted [Berrigan] and Joe [Brainard] and George Schneeman and they did collages and collaborations but I did it with myself, I felt that I should collaborate with myself, and what I’ve done in this book is a little bit like that…I collaborated with myself, but I have the whole body of artwork that’s connected to words.
I’ve just started talking about it, because I’ve never thought of myself as being a good artist (laughter). But, I’m going to have an Art book come out this Fall…I have an Instagram account, and I bought an Apple pen and started doing these cool drawings and you can take pictures instantly and post them and there’s a guy who wants to print a book with them...
NZ: Wait a minute…I’ve always thought of you as a great visual artist…I saw something of yours a while ago…those stockings, like Pop Art work?
AN: No, those were George Schneeman’s drawings and I supplied words; but yes, he’s a great artist…My drawings could be found in some poetry magazines, like a year ago, my collages are collected by the University of California in San Diego.
NZ: Let’s go back to your book For the Ride and to the notion of the ‘Art of Writing’: As you see the words as the subliminal ‘tools’ here, you are expressing a certain hesitation here towards the so-called tenses, as denominators of time, or time-categories which were imposed on us by history, or the notion of historical periods which were further imposed on us by the conventional education system...Can you elaborate on that, like tenses vs time?
AN: You know, part of it happened on this block! Right here, down the Starbuck’s corner, there was a hairdresser where I used to go and where I started writing this book and there came a certain point where I had to decide about the tenses; well, a Cambodian woman was cutting my hair and we had this conversation about the Cambodian language and the Cambodian tenses, apparently, the Cambodian language has only present tense, I mean, you can get tense – by using ADVERBS – and that’s what I’ve done…Then I tried to get some information about the Cambodian language but there wasn’t much and luckily I did not need any additional information. I sort of figured it out how you can construct tenses in a totally new way by using these adverbs! The Cambodian hairdresser really explained it to me; she knew a lot about the languages, and then I went home and put it into my book.
NZ: So, is this system of education (of times, tenses, periods in history) robbing us of ‘personhood’ as you put it?
AN: Oh yes, but you know, we are shaping the culture as much as the culture is making us; it is not to say that there are ‘other people’ who are to be blamed and that there is us who are the victims. We’re all doing it in a way.
NZ: For many years, centuries, English-speaking authors would slip in French words into their writing to appear stylish, well-educated, refined or pompous. I don’t find it in your For the Ride. You’ve been living in Paris for almost 30 years: has the French idiom finally penetrated your thinking, as it seems to grow organically, naturally, in this book?
AN: Yes, the language is there. I think that being in this language (French) has changed me a lot, changed my poetic line, changed my ear, changed my meter, that sort of thing…there are other languages in the poems, there’s Spanish which I learnt as a child and studied in a high-school a little bit, but the French took its place so today I don’t know it as I used to.
I grew up near the Mexican border so people around me always spoke Spanish, but also there Latin in my poem, perhaps German somewhere as well – these are all the languages I have a little bit to do with, they’re in my head, you know…But since the nineteenth-century there has been this notion that you had to know French as a cultivated person. It has been a class thing.
Pictured above: Interviewer Nina Živančević
NZ: However, in this particular book of yours, I don’t see that effort on your side to ‘appear cultivated’, as some journalists at the Guardian often do. You insert French words somewhat naturally, so my question here – and I risk appearing quite redundant here – is your new writing a kind of, say, Joycean deconstruction, dissemination of la parole which finds home in your book? You two have had a somewhat similar ‘expatriate’s path’ of existence…
AN: Oh, I never think of Joyce! Simply: never. Well, when I was young I read his Ulysses, and I read parts of his Finnegan’s Wake – I liked them a lot, but it was 40 years ago! (laughter) Yeah, I don’t think much about Joyce – there are other people who do this type of work but their names don’t come to my mind right now.
NZ: Ok, tell us something else – could the real subtitle of your chapter ‘Save the Words’ read like your line ‘One is not even French, One’s like dead’? I read this chapter as a severe critique of French immigration and ‘acclimation’ policies…How does it feel to be an immigrant-cum-writer/intellectual here? I see this book as an extension of Joyce’s, Stein’s or Beckett’s work they accomplished here in Paris. Any comment ?
AN: Actually, the book is Eurynome’s Sandals; it has to do more with the immigration than this one. I wrote it in 2006 or 2007 and it did not come out for a long time [it was eventually published in 2019] because there were two chunks in it that I really couldn’t figure out how to put together. But in that book there is a section of shorter poems which talk about my experience of being an immigrant.
However, if I say ‘I’m an immigrant’ it is not the same experience as those people who come from all sorts of other countries. It’s very difficult to talk about this subject and in that book I refer all the time to the experiences of all other immigrants. There is a long title poem in there called ‘Eurynome’s Sandals’, which is about the goddess who created the world by dancing into existence and there’s a cosmic snake which surrounds her as she’s dancing, and then they have some children...
Anyways, it’s the first myth in Robert Graves’ book on myths. They became these characters: there’s a woman Eurynome, a creative goddess, then there is a filmmaker and he is Time, and she is Divinity. They are all held in communication but there are lots of the immigrants around them and there’s this catastrophe and there’s an instant call for people and people are always wondering around telling stories about Eurynome and the filmmaker as they are these mythical beings…Well, that book is difficult to describe. That book was published 2 years ago here in France in the French translation and by a University Press.
NZ: I don’t have a problem with your universal ‘I’ because, when I was a student in your workshop, it was a very liberating thing for me to hear you saying that ‘I is just a word'.. and it was not the ‘I, I and I , and me, me and me, Alice Notley’, but simply the fact that ‘I’ is just a word!
AN: Which workshop was that? I mean, what year?
NZ: Well, it was either 1984, 1985 or 1986 at the St Mark’s Church Poetry Project..I’m forgetting all these years and periods. There’s someone thinking that I was crazy as I couldn’t remember what year I was with Allen in Amsterdam for that One Word Poetry Festival!
AN: It was probably 1985, the year of the workshop... And why would you remember all these years, indeed? I remember very clearly, well I don’t remember if it was the 1980s or 1990s, ha, but the use of 'I’ was sort of forbidden in the university milieu…
NZ: Here’s one last question For the Ride: How does one save words from themselves? Is it through a new language, through a sort of ‘bricolage’? Through a Dada experiment? Is it a technical, formal process, or is it more an aesthetic, an anesthetized yearning for the meaning of the Wor(l)d?
AN: How to save Words? Hmm.. You have to be absolutely true to yourself, without knowing what that is, of course, and you have to be absolutely true to what the world needs. And you don’t allow yourself to think anything that anyone has told you is true; you have to examine every single thing…but you also have to have fun.. and nowadays nobody has any fucking fun…
NZ: Seems we are deep in the twenty-first-century!
AN: No, but I’m totally serious- look, I mean: when you’re doing things with words you have to be in the pleasure place, YOU can’t tell the TRUTH…unless you’re enjoying the words!
NZ: Ha, you are now like a doctor diagnosing the Corona, COVID patient! Everybody’s lost the sense of fun, and that is the whole problem!
AN: Yeah! OK, like viruses are the characters in some of my poetry; there is a virus or a bacteria that makes a speech once or twice in Eurynome’s Sandals, and I also have a play which I wrote a couple of years ago and it has twenty-six characters and one of them is a virus, but the virus is dead, because everyone in the play is dead. So the virus there talks about how it is to be the virus. They are also held together by communication.
NZ: But can you give us some guidance what’s Ark for you, in the book? And what is One? And who is France? Should one go the Biblical references?
NZ: Oh, the Ark is a ship, it’s just a clipper ship. I actually went to a store where you can buy models for sampling of model ships on rue de Louvre and I bought a model-ship and I put it together – and it collapsed! But I bought a model so that I could draw a ship. It’s been made to exist out of chaos, so it was correct that it fell apart in my room, it’s correct that it is so ambiguous as to what it is…
France, though, is a character. France is someone I dreamed of while I was writing. I dreamed of this Vietnamese woman who had been murdered in a hotel room in Vietnam, and she was wrapped up in blankets and carried out of her room, and she had a retarded son, and they became characters in a poem, so they came straight from a dream to my poem… France is a dead Vietnamese woman…
NZ: Should one go to the Biblical references and old poets in order to comprehend the split language and characters in the book? For instance, you say, ‘One means something else but what is it? that One’s in and is of, émetteur quand même*/Or the sound of it.’ Basically, if Words/language is the sound, how do we master it? You asked some essential questions in this book, not only regarding poetry, but regarding the construction of language itself. And how do we live, in a gray area of language with no reference?
AN: We probably make a new culture. And that’s probably what people were doing, but One absorbs them all, because One knows all their characters and One knows that he’s dead. One goes to the City of the Dead and walks around, talks to the dead and they tell him things about language . I mean over the last couple of years we’ve been taught that language is rather simple and it is not, that’s another thing: it must be unbelieved that language is a simple thing, and that one can understand what it is. One does not understand what it is …
NZ: Yes, come to think of it…it seems that the old poets or old Masters (in any arts), have been giving us instructions all along, like we listen to them but we don’t really hear them. Do you remember the old myth of Orpheus and Eyridice? Orpheus is that legendary sound-maker and he is going to bring that original language, Eyridice, back to life, but there’s only one request: that he does not turn back! He has to go ahead, and he does not do it! He turns back and starts tending to the old language, tending to grammar, structure, etc., so he’s a king stuck in that old structure…
AN: Yeah, but poetry flows and floats, the words float, you keep on supplying them but they float! The book works on different levels: you don’t need to understand all the parts and all the characters. For different people it could mean different things, it’s a-tonal, it’s like atonal music…
Paris, July 20th, 2020
* Translation: ‘transmitter all the same’