St. Marks Review by Peter Buller

The Poetry Project: Alice Notley's Voices
Written and Edited by Peter Buller

Alice Notley's poetry blossoms from the written word--almost as much as her work dances from the page. Her feminist epic, "The Descent of Alette," (Penguin Books 1996) reads according to a meter of quoted phrases, invoking a human voice in the reader: "There are singers" "There are corpses" "There is substance" "of darkness" "And emotion" "strong emotion" "The air" "is all emotion" (4) Unlike line breaks, the quotations create a verse for the reader's voice. Notley surrenders her voice to Alette as much as the reader, as only then will Alette descend to slay the tyrant. With the same interest in weaving her and her reader's voices in the text of a poem, Notley read from an as-yet unpublished manuscript of her latest work, "Voices."

At first glance, Notley's "Voices" operates under a similar conceptual framework as Jack Spicer; though instead of recording Martian transmissions, Notley translates the diverse messages of spectral voices. The content of these messages, as well as their speaker, varies from poem to poem. Some cry out, wanting "to be a star blown on the river, one of a thousand," while others more humourously quip, "buy twenty peacocks." Others cry out more eerily, claiming to "have a diploma in lost breath," alongside assertions that, "now's the time to make dream-blood run." Interspersed within are jabs on social issues, most prominently regarding feminist critiques, exemplified when one voice laments that only "at some future day" can she "be a master in style." For all of these reasons, the speakers of the voices are hard to identify. Are they ghosts who speak of "the world, the universe now a fossil of our former thought"? Or are they entities similar to the mytho-surreallist figures Alette encounters on her journey into the underworld? One voice remarks how they're "glad I died young so that I know these things," as another speaks of "gestures no one recalls the origins of..." Nothing appears immediately or clearly enough to discern, which Notley uses to paint a fascinating portrait of that fuzzy image of a half-remembered dream.

Notley's reading of the piece further suited this end. Her tone fluctuated between excited, vigorous cries of how "there's repetition built into time to make it timeless," and slower-paced, somber urges to "keep going... so we can understand what's going on in this forever." Notley's calm, confident delivery emboldens the power of each voice, as if they each possess a name and a face one cannot glimpse past their masks of anonymity. The realm of her poetic imagination contains a written poem that speaks and a spoken poem woven into the fabric of a page. Although multitudes of readings gather in her poetry, perhaps the greatest testament to her mastery is her voice. Both in writing and in oration, Notley's voice imprints a lasting ethereality upon one's mind, leaving them in a soothing trance of words.