Alice Notley, Being Reflected Upon

 

Teach them how tolove       why should anyone care
Why should anyoneanything

 

I told her ‘I’mfrightened’      it was 2:40 a.m.
so we took a walk in thedark this was a dream
when I was little I wouldwake up scared too
in the next dream no onesigned up for my class at Naropa
I am 71 years old teachthem how to love
would you take that classwhat would I say
it has to do with … nofilters
why would there be isthere anything
Love’s the only thing I canfind what is it it
is the holding together Ican’t locate a different
thing why do you call itthat       No Christian I
heard them singing Jesumeines Lebens Leben
a year ago the sopranowore a green taffeta dress
luxury of love sensationsnot ready-made
in that Protestant churchnear the Louvre
the pleasure of a thingis love of it the luxe
caring for others or allelse is that to be?
so if you in your poemcombine that with a modicum
of dross why dross I likethe word
I think you should writea poem about tiny atoms of the
self I said no I didn’t wickedloving lies
I have nothing to tellanymore I’ve been on the Cross
a lot lately in an effortto keep space and time con-
nected where I am whichmight be everywhere
I don’t want you to fallapart I love you
what shall we do

Havingpublished multiple book-length epics over the past decade-plus (although I seethrough her “Also by Alice Notley” list at the offset that I’m clearly behindon even her recent collections), I’m intrigued by the structural counterpointof American poet Alice Notley’s latest, Being Reflected Upon (PenguinPoets, 2024), a collection subtitled “(a memoir of 17 years, 2000-2017).”As her opening “Preface” offers:

I was trying to find outif anything had happened between 2000 and 2017, it was 2017 and I had justfinished treatment for my first breast cancer. Did the fact of the cancer haveany significance? and something must have happened at some point during thoseyears. I had been sitting in Paris alone since Doug Oliver died in April of thebig millennial year—what had been going on? An expanse of timelessness. Butimportantly it wasn’t a chronology, it was actual time, one thing all together.Incidents I remembered emerged on top of those of previous “times”—it wasstacked time; friends and relations died and I grieved having know them for so“long,” I would get seriously ill, or someone would, was that it, and there wasthe newsworthy, and I wrote a lot of books. It doesn’t matter when exceptinside the one thought of it. I became more obvious to myself, I discovered Iwas an unabashed location of unreported events of the Spirit, or Timelessness,the real name of Consciousness. I tried to let as many people as possible intomy mind. I changed the past the present and future by blending them. I becamethe one who held things together as they, the things, kept their motions going,being reflected upon me.

Setin a kind of conversational lyric, Notley’s narratives work a strongstorytelling impulse across fragmented threads, one that thrives on weaving,meandering and asides while still managing to maintain a book-length through-line.Her reflections blend memories, observations and dream-sequences. “what memoryare you trying to recover,” she writes, as part of the poem “What is a Thing,” “notre-upholster [.]” Composed akin to a memoir-in-pieces, the flow of her gesturesemploy a rush and a push, offering a first-person lyric flow that speaks to andthrough itself. The opening of the poem “POEM,” for example, that reads: “Itdoesn’t matter if a poem is clear or not / hard or not       It’s basic and ongoing creation / of theuniverse in terms of its particles as I speak / it the poem       If you’re reading it you hear me too[.]” Notley has long been a poet utilizing the book as her unit of composition,but it is curious to see the shift of her working that same structure throughthe accumulation of individual, self-contained poems, a structure that harkensback to a far earlier works in her publishing history (a particular favouriteof mine is her 1985 title Margaret & Dusty , for example, a book thatused to be housed at the Ottawa Public Library, now disappeared from theircatalogue). The epic, one might suppose, of small moments, individual pages.

Thepoems across Being Reflected Upon write in a kind ofstream-of-consciousness manner, writing on her late husband, Doug Oliver, or ofTed Berrigan; of encountering Jimi Hendrix, or of a sequence of dreams,threading through her observations with as much weight as events that occurred duringwakefulness. In this same direction, there’s even the occasional abstractaround thinking and thought that reminds of Canadian poet Pearl Pirie, the openingof Notley’s “Everywhere” that exists in a curious parallel: “That my mind didn’tbelong to my head as con- / tainer as if it could be so localized / but waseverywhere or anywhere obviously [.]” In certain ways, Notley’s reflectionsboth reflect on her recollections, her stories, but on the nature itself of recollection;how stories happen and are told, and retold; how stories and observances arerelayed, and how these stories connect and even wrap around each other. “thoughyour consciousness is somehow the judge already,” she writes, as part of thepoem “Before the Cognitive Organization of Matter,” “things I’ve said for thelast seven years events of my / life the earth is so used      and nothing can be new but / theMojave had remained primal you could get lost in / a few square miles of it,know what I mean? / And die of exposure why not I had a friend (not Greg) whodid / had accidentally shot and killed someone and in guilt / went out insummer away from town to sit // in full lotus position until he died they foundhim that / way my brother told me [.]” The poems here are fascinating for theirlayers around thinking and structure, with a richness quickly felt but allowingtime, and rereading, to further and fully absorb. And of course, Notley doesknow how to tell a good, if occasionally indirect, story. Or, as the poem “Whatis ‘Conscious’” ends:

Let it all happencollapse and fly out of your-
selves the only stickingtogether’s of the mole-
cules of soul to telleach other we ex-

ist that’s all the universeis vanity