Claudia Keelan & Alice Notley

from A Conversation

September 2002-December 2003

The following conversation took place via e-mail, beginning in September of 2002 and ending December 31, 2003. I first wrote Alice in 2000 after reading her book length poem The Descent of Alette. The transcript of our discussion covers many issues, including notions of religion, authority, poetics, first influences, etc. For verity's sake, I've left some of the e-mail captions intact, because they give an accurate presentation of the time we spent together (we have never met). I also include, here in this brief preface, issues of fact left out of the interview.

Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, on November 8, 1945, and grew up in Needles, California. She is the author of over 20 books of poetry, including The Descent of Alette, Close to me & Closer... (The Language of Heaven), Desamere, Mysteries of Small Houses and Disobedience. A second-generation member of the New York School, she was married to the poet Ted Berrigan from 1972 until his death in 1983. In 1988 she married the British poet Douglas Oliver with whom she edited the journal Gare Du Nord in Paris, where she moved in 1992. Soon after I wrote her in 2000, Douglas Oliver was diagnosed and died of cancer.

Though Notley says that Ted Berrigan was "the single greatest influence on my being a poet and on the way in which I was a poet,..." she says also that she "found it difficult to be influenced by his style." She cites her many influences as: first Faulkner (she studied fiction at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop), particularly in As I Lay Dying, Blake, Dickinson, Robert Creeley ("the first contemporary poet whose work I liked,...but[I] didn't know what to do with it..."), Edwin Denby's sonnets; O'Hara and Whalen to whom she "opened [her]self enormously," Gertrude Stein, Kerouac's novels and "at a certain point all of Shakespeare, so Shakespeare's language was awash all over me and I can still summon that spirit up if I need to." It was Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer whose voices, Notley says, she was first able to develop "among":

In ways that are difficult to describe, I was probably most influenced of all by a kind of development of voice which took place 'among' myself, Anne Waldman, and Bernadette Mayer, when we were very young...Anne, Bernadette, and I heard some things in each other's voices that hadn't been in American poetry before. We heard a way a young woman might sound--I'm talking about when I was 26 years old--without imitating the literary sound of the famous dead men...I was obsessed with the fact that there was no sound in American poetry that truly presaged mine; that there was no poetry that corresponded to my experience; that there was no poetry with motherhood as its subject. I had my first child in 1972, and there was virtually nothing there in the poetry to help me know who I was...I can't overstate the case. So far I wasn't includable in American poetry, but I heard something in Anne's and Bernadette's work that might help me be included.

In all likelihood, I wrote Alice Notley because, as she had found "company" in the unheard sound she historically shared with Mayer and Waldman, I had heard in her work something I wanted in my own work. I'll call it a diagnosis, one that pointed to inequities of self-perception, of gender, of politics, of poetry, of culture itself, without either removing the self from the problem, or more problematically, using the self to propose the cure. While it was Nietzsche who first called artists and philosophers "physicians of culture," the French psychologist Gilles Deleuze pushed the definition to question issues of composition and the manner in which literary work implies a way of living, a form of life: "the aim of writing is to carry life to a state of non-personal power." In his essay "Literature and Life," he focuses on the "detours," of syntax, of point of view, in all issues of what we commonly call writerly "style," that must take place to reach this state. I point this out not so much to place Notley in a French, theoretical context (which she rejects), but to give a context for some of the questions I ask her regarding poetry and poetics.

The other context--literal this time--that Notley's work returns to again and again is the desert--specifically, The Mojave Desert, a region we now share, she by birth and I by transplantation.

Date: 9/4/2002
To: Notleya
From: Utopical

It's Claudia Keelan in Vegas. How are you? The last time I wrote, about a year ago, I think, I asked if you wanted to have a conversation, a conversation that goes on, about your poetry, etc. and you said yes. Are you still willing? If so, here's a first question.

Reading you, I've come to see that you believe poverty is important. At the same time, I can't see that you share faith with the Franciscans, or have any allegiances to system of thought or religious principles, do you? How did you come to believe that poverty is important?

Subj: How did you come to believe that poverty was important?
Date: 9/6/2002
From: Notleya
To: Utopical

Hi Claudia,
I've been jogging so I may not be quite here but let's try. It's good to hear from you--what a year it has been for everyone I know (including me--I thought I would be better, in terms of my grief, but...)! Anyway, yes to the conversation and so Poverty:

When I was young I attached great importance to certain ethical statements as received, viz. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven...And everything else about poverty in New Testament Christianity. It bothered me a great deal that I was taught these things by people who didn't practice them (it still bothers me--look at the Christian billionaire President and his praying Christian cabinet: I just read that Condi Rice gets down on her knees to pray every night...Blessed are the peacemakers, yeah). I am not a Christian, but I think the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount is a superior one. It got into my system. Poverty also suited my temperament from an early age on: I am inept and shy, and I hate to work for people doing things I don't understand. I preferred being on my own to having money and never got a summer job in Needles. Though I respected my parents' hard work and meditated constantly on why one might spend one's life selling auto parts: it required accepting cars and then auto parts, and I've never accepted cars. But I do accept the fact that my parents grew up very poor and this was a way not to be poor: I didn't think they should suffer...I became a poet and fell in with Ted Berrigan, who believed that writing poetry was work enough and that he shouldn't have to do other work that wasn't connected to being a poet. Of course, poet is the world's most underpaid job, but it was years before I caught on that no one respected it any more either and that hardly anyone really cared if there was poetry in the world or not and that was why it was underpaid. Still, I didn't want to work except for writing and a bit of teaching. I write every day. I read every day. Living with Doug Oliver I began to think more about how being poor one doesn't use, or take, what the truly poor--people in sub-Saharan Africa, say--ought to have. I don't feel entitled to more than anyone else's share of the world's money or goods. Although of course I automatically have that, even not having much by our society's standards. I have an Episcopalian Franciscan friend, a monk who has become a priest, and who took the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He told me that by far the hardest of the vows was poverty, since, for example, even in the monastery he automatically had health care and the people in his parish--Bushwick in Brooklyn--didn't. I feel clearer not having much; I don't feel part of the infernal and illusory machine which churns out jobs, objects, and the walls of the visible world.

Subj: Sources
Date: 9/7/2002
From: Utopical
To: Notleya

You sound like a Christian to me...If you listen to Bush, his politics (poetics) are more attached to the Apocalypse, which was an added book, by dumb old John of Patmos...If Bush is a Christian, then Jesus sure wasn't...But that bit in the Sermon on the Mount about how to pray, by "going into the closet and begin newly, not with vain repetitions as the heathen do..." Certainly your poems follow this?

Subj: Sources
Date: 9/8/2002
From: Notleya
To: Utopical

My mother always talked about going into the closet to pray except she quoted Paul. I always like the idea because it meant I didn't have to bow my head in public with everyone else: I detested public prayer, saluting the flag, and singing the school song. I recently attended a poetry reading where parts of the audience were supposed to respond with particular words at points in certain poems: it was quite amusing but I couldn't do it. I can't participate in a group.

I am not a Christian because I don't believe in god and I detest the idea of a male religious leader and/or model. I am extremely hostile to all the major religions. However, my thinking has been influenced by Eckhart, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Buddhism to the extent I understand it (and given that I'm hostile to the Buddha), etc.

Are you a Christian?

Subj: Sources
Date: 9/8/2002
From: Utopical
To: Notleya

Yes I am, not by affiliation to a religious institute, but by how convinced I am by the amazing gentleness in Christ's thought and his self-sacrifice. His father isn't interesting to me...just another head of state who asks his child to bear the burden of his own decisions. Jesus is a son, not a father. I love the story of his life and believe in the actions he was compelled to choose. I asked about your ideas of poverty and faith because your work, at least from Desamere, is filled with children who live in the aftermath of their father's, or a powerful male figure's, decisions. The tyrant in The Descent of Alette is both a businessman and a father-figure, isn't he? The brother is also prominent, isn't he? And the narrator, or leading figure in Desamere and in The Descent of Alette is a woman who wants to--is the word remedy? The sins of the father?

Subj: Desamere and The Descent of Alette
Date: 9/9/2002
From: Notleya
To: Utopical
Subj: fathers, brothers, tryants and bullies

Let's see, the chronology of the work is as follows: first Alette, then Close to Me & Closer, then Desamere. [Note: The Descent of Alette was first published in The Scarlet Cabinet in 1992 and reprinted by Penguin in 1997. Desamere and Close to Me & Closer is a two-book edition brought out by O Books in 1995. CK] The dominant male figure is that of the tyrant, who is not at all the same as the father. The tyrant is the military-industrial-intellectual-artistic complex; he is how the made objects of the word have found their shapes. The father in Alette is the owl; a human transmuted into a purer nature by his death, and so able to teach Alette how to combat the tyrant. In Desamere there is the Satanic figure in the prose section, who is the Human as people sentimentalize it. And there is Robert Desnos. The brother is always the victim, in Alette and elsewhere, being a soldier and having been turned into a killer despite his sensitivity.

Subj: Robert Desnos and Meister Eckhart
Date: 9/9/2002
From: Utopical
To: Notleya

CK: Your use of Desnos really interests me...he's somehow a channel, yes? Is it Eckhart's mysticism, his direct connection to the divine that influences you? Is that a stance you seek as a poet?

AN: Desamere was the first work I wrote after arriving in France--fall of '92 I believe, into winter '93. For some reason, the minute I left the United States I perceived the reality of the global warming crisis, which had not penetrated my dim skull before. Desamere is my seeing of that. I was very lonely and went to a zoo here almost every day, the Jardin des Plantes. It is one of the world's oldest zoos, very small, and I stared at the animals dreaming up Desamere. I bought and read every book I could find on global warming and the greenhouse effect. Desamere is my version of summing up the second half of the twentieth century (like all the big-fat-tome male novelists; DeLillo's Underworld comes to mind) bringing it into the global warming desert future, pinning it down into specific lives, using dead Desnos to tell the story. Yes, he is a channel. I wanted someone French, and the form of the third part is from him; the form of the first part is from Marie de France.

I'm not sure I know how to answer the Eckhart question. I suppose it is his connection to the divine. His heresy as perceived by the church was to make no difference between himself and god (though he didn't think he was doing this, it was obvious to everyone else that he was). I go with that. It is what I mean by being an atheist (which seems to me the only honorable thing to say one is right now). I like the ways he uses god and Christ, especially the latter, as metaphors for his experience--Christ is reborn in the individual soul each day. It sounds so grotesque in certain passages, and I get a kick out of that. I have a workshop I sometimes do where I lay out an Eckhart Sermon, Lawrence's "The Ship of Death" and O'Hara's "Joe's Jacket" next to each other. [A poem referencing Joseph Lesueur, O'Hara's partner. CK] Doug got a wonderful poem out of this workshop the first time I did it called "The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet," so now I do the workshop using Doug's poem too, which stands up very nicely against "Joe's Jacket."

Subj: Poet Be Like God
Date: 9/10/2002
From: Utopical
To: Notleya

CK: Well, Emily Dickinson didn't see any difference between herself and God either; it seems to me the history of Protestantism--radical Protestantism--makes that case, i.e. to be Antinomian, to go without name or company, which is why both Alette and Desamere seem to be--well, descendents--of that kind of spiritual quest. I guess I'm trying to get you to make a connection between spiritual practice and poetics. I know you say in your short essay "Disobedience" that there can be "no doctrines"! But both those poems are epics. Could you talk about your take on the epic, on the "new" protagonist?

AN: I find out everything I believe through writing. Most of my significant experiences, and most of the things I "realize" are found out through the practice of poetry, specifically during the performance, the literal writing of it. My poems seem to have gotten longer as the so-called quest has become more detailed, more exact. The Descent of Alette was a conscious attempt to write a traditional epic, first of all--not a modernist one. But what I was finding out--well in this case I had had an epiphany outside the poem, an incredibly negative one, about two things. One, I'd begun to know how bad my brother's actions had been in Vietnam in the context of that country (he didn't do anything very bad by "army standards") and of his own sensitivity (he was not what you'd call a natural sniper, if there is such a thing) and my own implication, as an American and his sister, in these actions. Second, that not one thing in the world, not one object and not one practice or habit had been invented, as far as I could tell, by a woman. Alette is about those facts, though most obviously the second one--but I wouldn't have chosen epic if I hadn't had to deal in some part of myself with the fact of that war. In the course of writing Alette, I mean in the story of Alette, there is the black lake and there is Alette's enlightenment, which is tied to her acquisition of natural "owl" powers. I became, after having written the poem, obsessed with the lake. Close to me & Closer is me wading into the lake, the black lake the other side of which is infinity. Desamere confronts, again, the necessity for a political stance and tries to combine it with the knowledge of the lake--which in this case is not the lake but the desert. Disobedience idiomizes all these themes, uses a flip, of-these-times voice and material out of a life lived in Paris to pull everything together in a more overt way. I have two other manuscripts, "Reason and Other Women" and "Benediction," in which I continue the research.

Subj: Disobedience
Date: 9/16/2002
To: Notleya
From: Utopical

CK: I'm intrigued by the detective in Disobedience and also by the notion of American-ness expressed in the first poem "Change the Forms in Dreams," where you write: "the only / thing American really worth bringing is the sense / that you must accept me, exactly. / Not as your woman." What do you mean here? Do you consider yourself an expatriate writer, and if so, what does your exile serve?

AN: The detective arose gradually out of a dream process. I first had the dream of the detective looking for the woman in the back room: he wasn't recognizable. Then a couple of other dreams fed into the construction of this figure as a character in the poem, including a dream of a childhood friend named Tommy Harward (now lives in Boulder City) whose name suggested the name Hardwood. But then I got to a point, simply writing, where the next words that came out of me, because they sounded right, were "oh sure I can, I'm Robert Mitch-ham." At that point I knew I'd be able to talk to him for a whole poem. He became my friend.

I was recently looking at those lines ["the only / thing American really worth bringing is the sense / that you must accept me, exactly. / Not as your woman..." CK], trying to remember exactly what I meant. They are addressed really to the French, not to Americans--to the place where I now live. I am saying that I am not a member of your French culture, but I will not be a member of American culture, here; I am an exact entity, exact person. I am insisting on my individuality as an exactness. But then I knew the poem would be read mostly by Americans and that the statement works in both directions.

Expatriate is a funny word; I don't know anyone here who uses it, except for certain magazine writers. I've never heard anyone say "I'm an expatriate" though I know many people who have been here for years, are French citizens, etc. I'm not talking about writers particularly. You become part of an international community, Anglophones in Paris. I suppose I'm an expatriate at the moment--I've been here now for ten years. I don't feel that I belong either here or there, but it has become more interesting for me to write from here. My viewpoint is made more complicated by my being here, and my response to poetic language is shiftier. Language seems more substantial and less precise, more about texture and presence and less about meaning in terms of individual words. The experience of speaking and hearing French has made all language mysterious to me again.

[Here the conversation stopped for several months and resumed again in February of 2003]

---

Claudia Keelan is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently of UTOPIC, which won the 2000 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Alice Notley lives in Paris and edits the magazine Gare du Nord. Her most recent book is Disobedience (Penguin, 2001). contents | previous | next