Notley

 One of my favorite poets, Alice Notley, has died. I could probably do a search through my blogs and find what I wrote about her.  Back in a minute.

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https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/1055932257464975902?blogID=1055932257464975902&q=Notley

 Alice Notley, writing about Frank O'Hara, says that poetry "exists to communicate with this entity" [a secret self]. "Its thoughts have the shape of speaking, but it doesn't have to explain to itself as much as one does to another person: it doesn't, e.g., think in prose fiction sentences at all. It sees while it thinks, self-observes often, constructs scenarios of triumph out of vulnerability, etc... etc... that it melts in and out of."

Now this surprises me because it is what I think too, but I don't think my (our) conception of poetry is widely held, necessarily. It is specific to New York School poetics. Not that other poetries don't do this in their own way, get in touch with a secret self and channel a kind of stream of consciousness.  It is odd that people misname O'Hara's poetics as a kind of casualness, something easy to achieve even though it is not. Look at how Notley's own prose imitates that tentative search for a definition.  She isn't writing those "prose fiction sentences.'  

The phrase "prose fiction sentences" is hilarious, because I can picture exactly those kind of sentences. Sometimes I narrate my life to myself in those sentences, imitating the cadence of a New Yorker short story, and they could make up an ironical poem.    

I don't know how other people see poetry. Maybe it's a kind of object to be crafted, or a serious message dressed up in poetical garb. Often, people write trying to make something sound like a poem, which is what you have to do, of course, but they go about it in the opposite way.  In other words, it should sound like a poem (not just prose!), but not in a "poetic" way as conventionally conceived, with the shimmering shards of light. Prosaic and colloquial elements enter for their oddness or jarring quality, not just as a default because the writer doesn't know any better.  

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 I was looking at some poetry by Alice Notley; I was trying to find something like that as fearless and honest in Spanish poetry, so I thought of Isla Correyero.  I had seen a book by her on my shelf the day before so I took it down. I found that the intro quotes me:

"Está en vanguardia cuando no queda nada de las vanguardias; así lo ve Jonathan Mayhew, quien la cuenta 'entre los que se mantienen, todavía, fieles a las premisas de la modernidad cultural.'"  

The book came out in 2018; I don't know when I bought it, but it looks like it is from La Central (Madrid or Barcelona).  I don't remember if I read the intro and saw my name before now, but it is a weird sensation. It sounds like something I would have written, but I'm not sure where, probably in The Twilight of the Avant-Garde.  

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 I was in some kind of literary gathering. A person there, though supposedly connected somehow to NY School poetry, had never heard of Alice Notley's Descent of Alette. I approached this person and was mock-indignant. I happened to have my copy of it in my backpack and I brought it out and began to pontificate in a kind of obnoxious way about it. I pointed out that many people didn't like the quotation marks around every phrase, but that these had a prosodic effect, etc....  [A dream]

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 I'd like to learn the trick of going on, 

Not ending the poem too soon in a fit of impatience

or fear, like I always do. But what am I afraid of 

anyway?  Making a mistake? Too late for that.

"Outwearing my welcome"? But we're all on borrowed time. 

Alice Notley say fearlessness is the key to the poetic voice.

That and a sense of the live presence of the person on the page,

a rare thing almost nobody gets or even thinks about. 

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Alice Notley's poem "The Prophet" seems to be an imitation/parody of Koch's "Some General Instructions." She has advice like "I'ts not a good idea to be a taxi driver if you don't drive at all well. However / You can probably manage to so so for some months, before you finally quit, / Without killing yourself or anyone else." How do you parody an already parodic style? Notley manages it by exaggerating the ridiculousness of the advice while introducing a darker tonality. It's brilliant!