“ALICE NOTLEY has been hailed as one of the United States’s greatest living poets. She is the author of more than 25 books of poetry and the recipient of numerous awards, including, most recently, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Certain Magical Acts is her latest book.”
“Notley’s work, which consistently pushes up against the limitations of language, seems to issue from an alternate reality. Among her most notable works is The Descent of Alette, an epic poem about the narrator’s katabasis into the subterranean bowels of the subway.”
“The narrator’s mission: The elimination of the tyrant who is responsible for the suffering of all those he has banished to the dark, dank underground.”
“Earlier this month, Notley, who lives in Paris, read the book-length (148-page) poem in its entirety, over two nights, at The Lab in San Francisco. I met up with the poet at her hotel in San Francisco on the morning between those two readings.”
“SHOSHANA OLIDORT: Your reading of The Descent of Alette last night was really beautiful but also painful and pained. I felt as if I were descending with Alette, with you, into the cavernous underground. Can you tell me a bit about how performance informs your writing?”
“ALICE NOTLEY: I always think of poems as something to be performed. And I always think of how they’re going to sound. There wouldn’t be poetry without that. It’s utterly important. And people should read poetry aloud. Reading aloud is key. I read each poem aloud in my room after I’ve written it, and I often picture myself in a room performing it.”
“You’ve referred to The Descent of Alette as a feminine epic. Why was it important to you to write a feminine epic?”
“I wanted to write an epic in which the hero was a woman. The epic was held as the epitome of writing — a hero, a man who changes everything there is by entering into combat with something. The entire history of the epic is that, in every culture. But then I found one that wasn’t like that, the Sumerian Descent of Inanna, in which the hero, Inanna, is purely interested in finding out what death is. It’s an inquisition through experience. I was interested in how there was no action, and how she didn’t really kill. The way it was set up was very dreamlike. She was the hero, and what she wanted was knowledge.”
“So who is the tyrant of the story?”
“In The Descent of Alette, the tyrant is us. The tyrant is what enslaves us to our forms. The tyrant is the form of our life, the form of our politics, the form of our universities, the form of our knowledge, our thinking we know something. All of that is the tyrant. The tyrant is a liberal. The tyrant isn’t Trump. He can be part of it, but this tyrant is an extremely accomplished man who can do anything. Alette’s about the liberation of women, but it’s also about the liberation of everyone. If you keep half of humankind down, then everybody is oppressed.”
“You talk about the voices that you create, or give voice to, in your poetry. Can you tell me what voice means for you in your work?”
“Voice is everything. I’ve been writing more and more pieces where there are voices, and, more and more, I don’t know who they are.”
“What does that mean? Can you tell me about the process? Where do you find these voices?”
“I sit down in the chair at kind of the same time of day in the morning. I open the book, and I see if there are any words that want to come to me. But now they seem to be coming to me from other people’s minds a lot. They’re all dead people. Living people you can talk to in the flesh. Dead people talk to me. They’re there. It’s just that I’m never 100 percent positive that it’s they who are talking to me.”
“I am sure that the dead are alive, but I don’t know what they are doing precisely. A lot of my recent work is trying to find out what they’re doing. Because there’s another society, there’s another group, there’s this place where there are all these people who can’t have power over each other because they can’t kill.”
“How and when did you first start speaking to the dead?”
“People in my life kept dying, and each time they died I stood at this chasm, and the wall between the living and the dead collapsed. Gradually I just had the ability to see into this other world because these traumatic things happened to me. Ted Berrigan, my first husband, died in our apartment. I was 37. A few years later my stepdaughter — his daughter — died, and the year after that my brother died (he’s the impetus for The Descent of Alette). The year after that, my good friend Steve Carey died. My father had died in 1975, when I was 30. After some time passed, I started to dream about him. He would give me quite good advice.”