From Issue 4.2 (Spring 2024): IT IS WHAT IT IS
This interview took place over Zoom on January 2, 2024, after Alice gave a stunning reading of her poem “Malorum Sanatio” — a long poem featured in her new work The Speak Angel Series (Fonograf, 2023) — that left us both breathless. While this conversation grounds itself in that impressive new volume, this interview follows many of he threads that weave themselves through Notley’s life’s work: the vibratory energy of subjects, both embodied and in spirit form, and the ways that language both harnesses and yet fails to encapsulate that energy; the slippery and completely subjective experience (and thus reality) of time as we age, grow, lose, grieve, and learn; and a relentless pursuit of ethical relationships with all people and things, regardless of their stature, agency, or what we think we know about them. I exit this interview a touch healed, a touch hopeful, brimfully curious, and ever more open to the world’s pastings-on.
— Deanna Fong
I am healing you with paste it on the collage danger
Anger’d backwards frightened till he as if menial
Tried to slip away crowded as if he could be forgotten
No one will be and you must exist dead or alive
I stole healing slab of crystal kept in a grey pouch don’t
Come in here a voice said but I have brought back every dimen-
Sion that I am mentioning till I find the one in the pun you are
No one gets out of here unhealed
— Alice Notley, “Malorum Sanatio”
Deanna Fong
I’m thinking of John Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Batter My Heart Three-personed God.” This kind of tough-love healing. “No one gets out of here unhealed.”
Alice Notley
People think you’re only supposed to heal good people, but actually you’re supposed to heal everyone. There are no sides in the healing. That’s what that means when I say things like that. No one’s excluded. It’s a very hard place for people to go because everybody’s on a side. But things have to heal on both sides for anything to happen, really.
DF
Yeah. That’s a tough position to conceive of, and an even tougher position to live. I’m glad we’re starting with that poem. One of the reasons that I was so keen to interview you for this issue, which we are titling IT IS WHAT IT IS, is because of all the different ways that your work engages with ideas of concreteness and affirmation. The concreteness of the poetic form. The affirmation produced through speech.
I wanted to start with a personal anecdote, which is that I heard you read the poem “Malorum Sanatio” at a dinner party at Erín Moure’s house in 2018 — six years ago, now. Your reading of this poem completely knocked me to the floor. It was up on Literary Hub at the time, and I kept that poem open on a browser window on my phone for a year and a half after I heard you read it.1 It seemed to me at the time a kind of talisman, a protective talisman, to carry with me wherever I went. It was during a time when tough-love, hard-won healing was necessary in my life, and that poem was something that helped me to do that. I wanted to use this as a springboard to talk about the concreteness of poetry — and not necessarily in the sense that we usually talk about it, in terms of its materiality as language or that sort of thing, but in terms of the effects that poetry produces when it circulates in the real world among a readership.
AN
Of course. I’m actually being asked a lot now to be retrospective about myself as if I were going to die or something, because I’m old. I don’t feel old, except my body’s kind of old. When I started writing, I started as a story writer. It hadn’t occurred to me to write poems yet. I didn’t know how to write stories and I had no idea how to go about it. I didn’t have a sense of telling a story, and what I had in mind when I wrote my first stories was seeing the story, action by action, and writing that down, as concretely as possible. I realize now I’ve always stuck with that aesthetic. Even though I’m making it up, I’m making it concrete.
Poems, a lot of the time, are supposedly not made up . . . but they’re all made up. Everything’s invented. The notion of concreteness is therefore very slippery. I’ve always wanted there to be something to see, and poetry is about the tangible and what you can hear. It’s about the form, it’s about voices, and it generally is about telling things. We tell each other things, and so I allow a lot of voices in my poems. I can’t seem to keep them out. I consider them to be concrete entities. At this point, when I write a poem, it seems like a community of voices. My voice is perhaps overpowering, but I don’t know what my voice is. So then other voices come in and I try to let them speak, but I don’t always know where they come from. I make them up. Sometimes they’re people on the street, and sometimes they’re people I know. But that’s concrete. Voices are concrete.
DF
Yes. This delicate balance between everything that is made up and everything that is real and true — both, simultaneously, and not one at the exclusion of the other, right?
AN
It is something like that because it’s hard to know the difference between the made up and the real. It always seems to be like we’ve made up our society. We’ve made up what we see. We’ve made it all up. I mean, there’s something there, but we’ve decided as a species how to shape it, based on what our sense organs tell us and some very strange sense of time that we have. So, we’ve created this sense of order, and we say, “That’s the concrete.” But for me, the most concrete thing is the voice — the sense of myself and the sense of the other person, and what the two voices back and forth make talking to each other.
DF
Following on that, I wanted to ask you about this idea of polyvocality in the poem. I’m thinking of books like To Paste On in which what we call the quote-unquote “objective reality” of the world — in the sense of real-world events — make their way into the poems. At the time of that book’s composition, the war in Syria and the police shooting of Michael Brown . . .
AN
On your continent. On this continent there were the attacks here in Paris on November 13th, 2015, which come in at the very end of the book. It shocked me into some sense of the concrete in the writing of the book.
DF
Yes. You have this reminder in the introduction of Speak Angel that the poem isn’t personal, it’s public. And so, I wanted to ask you: when the real world does make its way into the poems, what are the guiding ethics, then, in speaking through or in channeling voices that are Alice and not-Alice, especially when it comes to representing things outside of oneself?
AN
Well, I listen. I listen to see if it’s working. Sometimes the voices are just very real. I hear real voices. I hear voices that I’m not sure are real. Sometimes it seems to me I’m making them up, but then I’m not sure. It’s a very shaky place to be where you’re dealing with voices in the way I do. To make it be authentic, you have to give your whole self to it.
At the time when I was writing The Speak Angel Series, I was living here in a very lonely way, and I was very involved. What was happening between me and the presences that came into the poem . . . It took me over and now that’s how I judge whether I can do it or not: if it’s really real for me. That’s valid. Because I was thinking, I don’t really check with the outside world. There’s this other world that’s valid, too. The validity of where the voices come from. This world that’s supposedly the imagination but is some other dimension. It’s valid. And I don’t have to listen to what people say is the right thing to say.
DF
I was thinking about how, around that same time, Kenneth Goldsmith published that conceptual poem about Michael Brown that was just a rehearsal and rearrangement of the autopsy report — which he caught a lot of heat for, and rightfully so. But I think there’s a risk and a vulnerability in implicating oneself in the channeling of these things. Your named presence in those poems — Alice — makes it come from a different sort of impetus.
AN
I bring love. I worried about Michael Brown’s mother the whole time I was writing it.
DF
Yes, and there’s something in this gesture of bringing something of yourself to that situation. A gift that’s offered.
AN
Yes.
DF
While we’re talking about the ethics of writing about or representing the world, I really love what you wrote in your introduction to Speak Angel. You write, “I keep saying collage is the form of everything, the way you are a monkey, a horse mane, a bird-throated breasted-animal flower-organ species-eater . . . ” [Alice laughs]
I’m thinking about how, in collage, which seems to be a method for many of the poems in the book, everything is put into relation. But they’re not flat relations. They’re manifold and in tension. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the collage’s form and its uneven arrangement of relations between people, and actors, and things, and registers of speech, and voices.
AN
Well, for me, the world isn’t tidy at all, and it’s not pure. I make collages all the time. I’ve been making them since I was very young. I make them as a visual form. When I started writing that book, I realized it had to be collage. But I don’t mean collage the way other people do. I don’t know how to explain what I mean. It’s like . . . it’s like we’re all together, and all times are all together, and we’re all pasted onto each other. We’re always deciding what can be pasted and what can’t be pasted. And so, in this remaking of the universe that’s at the centre of the book, I invite all the dead and live people to paste whatever they want onto this complete void that’s been created at point zero, presumably.
DF
The abyss.
AN
We have to choose something. We have to choose something to be in the new universe. So anyone gets to paste on something. And there’s a continuous choosing all the time that the poem’s going on. And every time I say “pasted on,” then that’s being pasted on. Everything’s also evanescent, transitory, and what’s left is a sense of each other’s presences. And that’s not pasted on. I mean, we’re really there. We’re really here. We’re real. So there’s something behind all that. A real form of us inside us that isn’t always picked up on by the outer world. The most concrete part of us is invisible.
DF
There’s something about that part that is maybe open to all this further articulation, in the form of “pasting on,” but at the same time is quite immovable.
AN
Yes, we’re fixed. Yes, it’s more fixed than a lot of people would have.
DF
I wanted to circle back to this idea of articulation or “pasting on” and think about how that takes shape in poetic form and language itself. I feel like articulation is something that lives in the ambiguous syntax of the line — there are so many different ways to read the lines and connect their pieces.
AN
Everything slides. All syntax slides and everything has many layers. I conceive of it all as being a form of originary chaos, which is not the same as the chaos of war, or the chaos of a negative kind that people talk about all the time. The chaos in creation stories is gentle and dark. There are things that happen. There are forces or entities or presences that come together for a while and then go off and form another one. But there’s a darkness and a kind of floating again, and then there’s another one. And that’s kind of what’s going on in the book.
There’s a gently chaotic formation of happenstance, but it never turns into a line. It goes off into another thing only to return reformed. It goes around and around, and things come back. And there’s something happening over time, and you can see what the structure of it is. But that’s all an illusion. I mean, that’s just things we make up. So, in my poem, nothing totally forms that way. It goes away or it comes back, but the people and presences, and something about the forms, is consistent. But the forms change book to book.
DF
Yes, absolutely. There’s a line that returns to me from The House Gone, which says, “There’s nothing going on anywhere but an / Ever-changing because new / Moments keep being noticed poem / Out of the past connected to the equally trans- / Forming now” — which I think really gets at that notion of ever-blooming chaos.
I’m interested in this idea of the event in the poem. We arrive at a threshold where an event has happened — or somehow, in the aftermath of everything, we will have come to see that an event has happened. That even this ever-transforming thing can parse into a before and an after.
AN
Well, I can never remember what the events of the poem are. I’ve read the book many times now, and I’ve read aloud from it a lot, and they escape me. Then I read a poem and suddenly recognize it again. Like “Malorum Sanatio” I hadn’t read in a few years. I read it yesterday and I read it and thought, “This is amazing.”
DF
It is, yeah!
AN
I had forgotten it. But, for example, there’s an event in The House Gone where the narrator has a meeting with a quasar, and I always forget that that happened. Although when I have to remember events, I know that that’s an event — that the narrator actually communicated with a quasar. The universe is conceived in the book as being sad. The universe needs to be healed. The cosmos needs to be healed.
It’s our conception of it. Since we are sad, everything becomes sad, or since we are violent, everything becomes violent. But we don’t know what anything is like. When scientists don’t know what anything is like, they know that they’re seeing these things and that they’re getting more information about the origin of the universe, but everything they call something is violent. And it’s because we are conceived of as being much smaller than whatever that is. So, one of the things I do in this book is say that we’re all the same size because we all have these internal forms that are the same size and we’re all the same. I’m the same size as a quasar. I can talk to a quasar, and the quasar can talk back to me because we’re actually the same size.
DF
This resonates with this radically inclusive approach to healing too, right? No one gets out of here unhealed — however big, however small.
AN
Yes.
DF
So, thinking about this multifaceted, manifold, scalable web of conversation . . . This makes me just think about the poet’s attunement to speech — your attunement to speech — which I think is the product of being a good listener. I was thinking of the different discipline-specific ways that we listen, and I was wondering if I might ask you what the poet’s techniques are for listening.
AN
I don’t know if I can answer that. I’m thinking. There’s a way I talk about it in an essay. I just had a book of essays come out called Telling the Truth as it Comes Up. There’s an essay in it in which I talk about sleeping in this this particular room in the house I grew up in. As I got older, I would have to sleep in this particular room. Particularly when my mother was dying, which happened right before I wrote The Speak Angel Series. And in that room, my mother kept my Aunt Edna’s collection of . . . I keep forgetting the names of them. They’re these glass pyramidal shapes that are on the tops of telephone poles. She had a collection of them. I can’t remember what they’re called. They may be called something like transformers or something like that, but they’re essentially these small glass things. They’re about this high, and I think they curve down. My mother had gotten them from my Uncle Bill when he died. He had kept them when his wife, Edna, had died, and then my mother had them.
She put them on this shelf and the bed was next to it, and the freight train goes by at night, about a mile and a half away. And every night at midnight, the freight train would go through, and I would be falling asleep. I might already be asleep. Suddenly I would wake up and I would hear the train. But what I would hear would be all these little glass forms vibrating against each other. And I realized that was what I heard when I was listening to a voice properly. That was what poetry did: it made all the little shapes vibrate.
DF
I can hear it in my mind’s ear. Something about it makes the roof of my mouth tingle.
AN
It was totally uncanny.
DF
This calls back to a line in “Malorum Sanatio”: “I search for the one lang- / Uage to heal in which infants recognize when anyone sings.”
AN
Yes. I noticed this before: if you start singing around a small child, the child will be transfixed by your voice. Small children are completely attuned to the singing voice and the chanting voice. They can’t resist it. Then, as they grow up, they start resisting it. But there’s something very primeval about singing and the way children react to it.
DF
Is that connected then, too, with this polyphonic poetic voice? Something underpinning all the individual voices . . . ?
AN
I don’t know how I hear the voices. Because a lot of the voices I hear come into my mind — some as I’m falling asleep or as I’m waking up. They’re rather uncanny and I’ve always heard them. They say a line to me, and the reason I want the line is because it’ll be unlike anything anyone would say. One word in the line will be different. It will be like out of a dream. It’ll just be odd. But if I listen really hard, I’m just told something in words and it’s not about the quality of the words because I’m actually told it in my own voice. Then there’s a mental voice that I hear things in and it’s kind of my voice.
Nobody understands what thinking is. When we think, what goes on in the mind is completely unexplained. I’ve never read a proper explanation of it. There’s a mental space and there are many things that happen inside of it. Some of the things that happen inside of it involve thinking in words, but mostly we don’t think in words. If you try hard, you can think in words. When people are writing, like, papers, they think in words. But most of the time they don’t think in words.
DF
I could drive myself totally nuts just trying to think about this.
AN
Well, that’s what you’re supposed to do.
DF
Yeah, exactly. Anything that is a given, when subjected to close-enough scrutiny, will drive you nuts.
I thought I would offer one closing question, which is a big and very vague one. We’re embarking upon a new year — today is the second day of 2024 — coming off of a year of some of the most devastating world events in recent history. The concept of this issue is that when we say “it is what it is,” it’s not that we’re sort of complacently accepting what is and there’s nothing that we can do about it. It’s more about this idea that when we say “it is what it is,” we affirm a world that we desire to be in and a part of.
So I’m wondering, since Speak Angel is a book about remaking the world, what the role of poetry and writing is in this kind of refashioning through affirmation. I guess I’m just asking for some hope.
AN
Poetry remakes the future. It never remakes anything at the time that it’s written. It rarely does. Poets seem to be on a future track. They seem to be seeing into the future. I seem to be a couple of decades ahead usually. For example, I wrote the poem “Desamere” in 1993, and it’s all about a global warming desert — how that came about and what one is supposed to do about it, and nobody paid any attention. There were other books in other genres, and nobody paid any attention. So, you write into the future, and then somehow the future does catch up with what you’ve written.
If you’re writing poetry, you’re not doing anything bad. You’re just sitting by yourself writing something that is likely not to be published or to affect anyone. So, it’s a good thing. Something is happening where we are constantly deprived of the ability to be alone and get space around ourselves. I think that’s one of the things we should all be demanding.
- Alice Notley, “Malorum Sanatio,” on Literary Hub (May 17, 2017), www.everand.com/article/347910636/Malorum-Sanatio. ↩︎
