Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome’s Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.
ALICE NOTLEY
It's all-inclusive – poetry– and everything is poetry in a certain way, and poetic measure is like what we're composed of, so I can do anything with it I want to. And I admit the possibility of every possible audience.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You have some poems–"Blinding," for example. You said in a previous interview that it came from a place, like you heard it as a voice. You just heard those words coming to you, and you just embodied them.
NOTLEY
I hear voices, I'm in touch with voices. And I can't write unless there's a certain kind of vocal thing going on, which is very hard to describe, but I wouldn't be able to do this if I hadn't paid a lot of attention to the formal aspects of poetry. I probably know more about those than anyone else I know. And I have used them for this other purpose, not to present my formal capabilities, but to find things out. To listen to the voices of others, to incorporate them into my poetry, and sometimes to speak to the dead. You know, it's all the same thing. The formalism, and the mysticism, and the everyday qualities, and the extraterrestrial qualities. One wants them all to be the same thing, the way that one is a person walking around being one thing.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You had said how a poem comes alive when you speak it. Do you see that a poem is not yet complete unless it's had its aural life?
NOTLEY
I tend to write long poems. The two that I read so far are unusual. I tend to write long poems, and I work on them every day. But I have to try them out, and I read to myself a lot alone in this room. I read everything aloud and make sure it works as a spoken entity or I can't incorporate it into the book. It's hugely important for me.
I spent a lot of time in the '90s having arguments with people about whether or not everything was language. And I guess what I think is that you can't separate language and image. There's no way of separating it out for any of us. We only have what's inside of us to know with, and we know with all of it at once.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I want to go back to your use of pronouns. So you're using the pronoun "one." Thinking about pronouns, or personalizing things, you have "I the People." Tell us a little bit about that, because it's bringing things into a personal domain, of what was broader.
NOTLEY
I wrote "I the People" in about 1985. I was living in New York and it was one of those years when it was an anniversary of the Constitution. There were these posters everywhere that said "We the People." And then there would be, "We the people...in order to form a more perfect union" – the Preamble to the Constitution– you would see this block of letters. My first husband had died a few years previously, and I didn't feel like I was part of any "we." But I did feel that I was "the people," somehow. So, I just changed it to "I the People." It seemed to me that that could be something that anyone might say to themselves, I the people. And so I wrote this poem, "I the People." It's about my relation to the body politic, and it's not unfriendly at all. But at the end, I say I'm split. I'm split off from the "we." Am "I."
The first year I was here, I made friends with a woman who sewed curtains at Bastille. She had an atelier, she was an artisan. She knew no English and I knew no French and I would go talk to her. She basically told me her life story without my understanding what she was saying, really. And I mean, it was a very intimate kind of relationship. I would sit there for an hour once a week and she would sew. I would talk to her, and I would try to speak French with her. She had these shattering things that had happened to her in her life. She would tell them to me. And she would have to repeat them and I would figure it out. I'm still thinking about that because so much of our communication isn't that totally specific. Communication is very complex at any moment. And it's not just words and it's not just gestures. It's something in the minds going out to each other. I keep positing telepathy.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
It is interesting when you're at different levels of language acquisition. You know, like children tend to be more direct. Usually. Not that they can't make up stories. But also, I guess the more language you acquire, the easier it is to hide what you are thinking and feeling. So it's interesting when you come to a new country and you're not quite fluent, but your other senses are maybe more open because you have to be more vigilant, and you're taking in all these things.
So, I was wondering if you could describe that experience. Do you find that was helpful to your poetry in one way, the sensuality of different perception, or almost being a child again, in a language? And then as you become more fluent, you can be more subtle?
NOTLEY
It is very hard to describe. Because what happened to my language was it became more wordy. It became wordier, as if I was trying to turn everything that was going on around me into words without naming it, because I didn't know how to name it in French. And it seemed to me I was picking up things, a lot of things, without it being necessarily in the part where we were talking. But on the other hand, I couldn't have communicated without trying to talk.
A lot of the time, it still doesn't seem to me that I speak French very well. I've been here now for 28 years and I speak French every day and I read in French, but it remains continuously mysterious to me. Every day I feel like an idiot at some point. So I stay tough. It's very tough to always be dealing with a language that isn't your first language. And it's probably made me a better person. And possibly a better poet, but I'm not sure.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
That's interesting why you say it made you a better person.
NOTLEY
Well, because it's hard to be arrogant all the time when you don't speak the same language as most of the people around you. I mean, you just can't keep that going, can you?
Why did I write For The Ride? I'm not quite sure why I wrote it, except that I lost my sense of personal life somewhere along the line, and I started seeing everything in these bigger shapes. I saw global warming from 1992 to 1993. I wrote a long poem about global warming in 1993. And then it was a subject in all of my subsequent poetry, but nobody else was talking about it very much, and nobody paid any attention to the fact that I was talking about it, but I kept seeing it. Then around 2010, I just had the vision of the end of everything, possibly. I didn't know what that meant. And I didn't know what everything was at the end of everything, or what the end was. But there's a sense that something crucial is playing out all the time. And I seem to be involved in seeing and talking about these bigger shapes of things, bigger than my life.
I think people have to learn how to give things up, and that's probably the most important thing. It's giving things up, right now. There's too much clutter everywhere and it's just ruined everything. It's ruined the planet. If people could just see themselves as people, as ones who don't need to have things; and poetry is about not having things, you have the poem, you can just have it. You don't even need it on a page. You know, you don't need anything to make it up. To write it, you can make it up out of the air, you could make it with your voice. It's about having nothing. We need less. We need fewer cars, we need fewer things in the atmosphere, we need to eat less. We need less of everything and we will be happier with less.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I think that's so true. I've been asking that question of a lot of people, and actually, no one said it as clearly as that. Yeah, happiness doesn't come from the objects that we accumulate. That distances us often from things that are most important. We need food, we need air. It's true. But the nourishment that can come from a poem, the companionship– how can you measure that?
NOTLEY
No, you can't. No, it's what we are. It's what we are. I mean, we're poetry.
This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Khrystyna Tsunyak. Digital Media Coordinator is Yu Young Lee.
