A couple of weeks ago I attended a talk by the poet Alice Notley. She wore three masks which were gods, and she told us that humanity fell out of heaven when it discovered the texture of colour: when we no longer saw colour as transparent, when we gave colour touch, rough sensory touch, then broke out of geometry into the subjective realm. When we began to see ourselves as capable of possessing something of colour, capable of making it our own. When we realised that by pulling the grass out of the ground we could take and keep something that was green.
The Fall is the birth-hour of the word.
Essence is captured by the word: life is captured by the word. And I mean captured in its most negative of senses: Notley describes the Fall as a Fall of possession. Human narrative staking claim to something it does not understand. Words staking the impossible claim to people.
‘It begins in pieces and ends whole, narrated by an I who doesn’t know her name and whose name when she finds it means appendage of a male name; her important name is I.’
The above quote is from Notley’s essay on The Poetics of Disobedience. Disobedience is central to Notley’s work: she has notoriously refused characterisation, be it of genre, theme, or literary movement. The word to Notley is not of importance: she is simply I. To name, to narrate, would for her, be to experience possession by another, to become mere appendage. Poetry is not, for Notley, words, it is colour. And to attempt to name colour would be redundant; it is an impossible task. Grasping at colour means recognising the impossibility of possessing transcendence.
In The birth-hour of the word Eve in her ruins* became Eve the mother of the word which kills. She spoke fearfully, and each poet who followed her spoke in solidarity. They spoke of their fear, in flux, and birthing new voices they followed her. I speak with fear. But had I not spoken with fear I would not have spoken at all. There is a reason why these days we manifest with such intensity. We know that we can speak into being, we know that we create ourselves through the act of speaking about ourselves. Through word-acts we possess ourselves and occasionally others.
I have inserted above one of Notley’s calligrams from her book-length poem ‘For the Ride’. In it we can see clearly how she imagines poetry and language. In For the Ride Notley’s protagonist One boards an ark alongside other beings who appear seemingly out of thin air. They have survived a disaster of some kind, and their task is to retain the words which they believe to be most important. The poem is about speech before the Fall. Before the Fall, words were arranged not in lines, but in colour. Notley is not creating a new mode of speech, but rather she is returning to a narrative from before, where words are not bound to death via male appendage. Notley is returning to the time of Eve.
Thus we return to my first quote, mentioned in Notley’s interview, Talk to the Dead, with Adam Plunkett. I struggled to find which poem these lines had come from; interestingly, when I googled them, I was faced with a multitude of articles on text to speech software and explanations for why we hate the sound of our own voices.
‘But I’ve / not read a voice like my own like my own voice will be.’
Notley’s voice exists in the present, but it is also constantly in a process of being created. Through speaking, she creates the thing that is speech. Speech becomes fearful when we accept that language is unstable as a form of narrative construction.
In the post Second World War era, language was fragmented. Pieces here and pieces there: it had been split apart by the horror of the bomb. Poets struggled to find a language to describe a global catastrophe.
The Letter kills but the Spirit gives life.
Alice Notley is not a Post-War poet. She is generally written about as a poet who transcends historical time. But there is a reason why she gave that talk to those people in that place two weeks ago. The poem-play that she performed to us centred on catastrophe, much like For the Ride and other poems. The context was this: cities are at war and the gods had been forgotten. Notley told us that she wrote her poem-play alone during the pandemic. She did not read it, she performed it, and it has not been published. She wore three masks. Language was not only fragmented, but impossible. She called upon her audience to simply be I. Not even the calligrams of For the Ride could have expressed what she wished to express in that moment. What is the use, she seemed to say, of narrating the unnarratable.
‘It was a poem men took because it said ovary’
What is this unnarratable thing? Words that come from her, from the time before the Fall, before woman was dragged by the hair into the world of the physical. The category of woman is, for Notley, best expressed as colour. Her words exist in the world of colour: colour is not physical Logic*. The language of Her cannot and should not be grasped; it is colour wearing three masks. To me Notley’s poetry says one thing consistently: don’t try to touch me.
Attempting to touch colour involves a subjugation of the self: female is nothing more than a linguistic-narrative category. Through equating woman to colour, Notley highlights the imposition of male linguistic-narratives, which cannot exist outside of the physical realm and are incapable of understanding a time before they spoke themselves into being.
Referenced Texts
Walter Benjamin On Language as Such
Ananda Devi Eve out of Her Ruins
St. Paul II Corinthians 4 [3:6]
Alice Notley Logic
Alice Notley interview with Adam Plunkett
Alice Notley The Poetics of Disobedience