In the early 90s Alice Notley wrote two books of poetry with the help of the dead. They were published together by Leslie Scalapino’s O Books (now Litmus Press) in 1995. In Close to Me & Closer: The Language of Heaven, she recorded a dialogue of sorts between herself and her deceased father, who speaks in prose marked by pauses and strangely accentuated words. (These are written here in italics, but are underlined in the actual book)
“I wrote Close to me… in ’91 and ’92,” Notley writes, “beginning around Christmas-time and concluding in February. I remember feeling very happy writing it, waking up mornings with my dead father’s voice in my head.”
I love the book, the way the father (or, yeah yeah, Notley via the father) tries, in his/her ordinary yet prosodically eccentric way, to describe nothing less than the afterlife and the metaphysical unity of all beings, living and dead. I can’t really think of much else from the 1990s (or that half of the century) that rivals the magnificent ambition & earnestness of that kind of project. It may be vague (oh well), or maybe I don’t understand it. I can try. Notley’s father helps with this, commenting not only on the metaphysical, but on writing, on the book in the process of composition:
“The dead… are helping… And I’m being part of that. Everything… is a part—but inside, every person, is a whole thing. The whole thing, hidden. Being dead… I get to start… uncovering it. Each of us… anyone… knows, & can’t speak it—the whole thing, the deal. The words for, knowing what you know, get stuck—or lost—you forget about it. They don’t speak to the, dead, enough, nowadays, anyway.”
“They don’t speak to the, dead, enough, nowadays, anyway.” Demotic Arizonian trance poetics. Against a world abandoned by the dead, or which refuses contact with the world of the dead, and thereby abandons “the whole thing, hidden” within & without.
The way Notley’s father speaks reminds me of my grandfather (lost too) from the Texas panhandle (post-stroke aphasia layered over already laconic pastoral speech): the substitution of “the deal” for whole concepts & phrases, the dilated possibility of each pronoun, a reaching thinking-through that marks the difficulty of language…
The writing, too, with its commas and ellipses, inhabits this difficult reaching, though perhaps not from a sense of frustration, but something more meditative. Typing these passages out, like reading them, requires slowness, grants a weight to each stuttered phrase, each backtrack, each revision or expansion. In the empty space of this slowness, the way the underlined words feel like a chime on a rolling plain… Reading this now in the middle of the night, short on sleep, I find myself letting words find themselves more slowly, like Notley’s ghost father…
The Plains of Heaven by John Martin, 1851
“I need to add something. I think… your poetry… I mean poetry is like the way we… think & speak here. I see that now. We are… intimate, in intimacy (I like that word) that way. Except I speak so, slow to you. Like the way I did. In your poems you speak as humans – & also… as the piece of heaven you are. You try to be… in a flash, in someone’s mind or heart… & that, that’s heaven. And you use… the dark… of being before we’re born… to… is this right? Call out from it the things you say.”
Intimate… I like that word, too. Not just because of its sexual dimension (& the passages on sex in heaven are fascinating). A making known, making close. Or making known what is already close (& closer), that is, the heaven that is already close, at hand.
That is to say, in mouth. Speech as creation, figured as flash in the dark. Creation figured as poetry, as the flash which makes close by bridging the darkness between us. Dark distance as something used (a potency?), and as site from which things are called out.
The figure of a pulsing poetic speech which flashes out from some potent darkness helps us understand the rhythms of the father’s oracular voice. Bursts of vision traveling from somewhere else into Notley’s pen (or keyboard? but I imagine it’s a pen), coming close. A slow rhythm of intimacy with the dead.
“Cause there… there’s heaven you... Can you make… that you… talk… That’s… the problem. I guess you… think… that if it talks in a… kind of… rhythmical way… it… is… more… heavenly?”
I fell asleep while I was reading and dreamt (I now realize this was just a dream) that Notley mentions in her intro how she sang her father’s parts into being, while playing slow chords on a piano. An intimacy with lyric’s origins, dreamt. And why not? “Because / the dead live in / the middle of / Dreaming… / Who’s the / dreamer though”
Gustave Doré, Paradiso
“The center has to… be… the center of all that. That’s god, but sometimes… anyone. Heaven is… for that. I know you’re… afraid… that there won’t be… words here. Though I keep mentioning it. That words… it is being that… finally. You are… that is word. You… catch up with it. You aren’t away from… anything… by being you. The part on earth… they don’t get right—not your feelings, mushy, & not… a thought in the head—they don’t connect you. To truth. It’s just when—you’re being there… nothing special. And you… say a thing… you don’t think about it. You just are—whatever you say, too. There is always… our sort of saying… here. We say. Say. If god says nothing… That’s saying. How you are… alive… is how it is. It all is. What else… could be true? But not just humans, of course, how… a rock is… or squirmy thing… Or a greasewood bush. They say… nothing… just like god. Inside nothing… is all that room. Where words go. The thoughts. I am… sometimes a word… sometimes the nothing that… has it in it. Words… fill… god. Words fill… heaven. They are… exactly right. They aren’t… a language. They are… being… coming out. Goes outside. To a you. We don’t… have to… What they mean… that would be a — this is hard — a… second thing… it is. No. Not a second thing… another word.”
The pure saying within, and inseparable from, the nothing. Not thought or feeling but a saying as real and true as the silence of a rock or “a greasewood bush.” Like Spicer’s “real lemons,” Melo Neto’s “education by stone.” Or Lispector, perhaps: “This is life seen by life. I may not have meaning but it is the same lack of meaning that the pulsing vein has.” Pure union of sign and referent, epistemological intimacy performed by & through poetic speech, poetic silence.
Eventually, Notley’s voice is overtaken by that of the father, and vice versa; the two become prosodically intimate, indistinct.
“(She speaks)
Only poetry can hold the… depths… of heaven… in one still place. The only way on earth… we might say what we know… in the all-at-once way… that we know it…”
A poetry of the all-at-once, a magic that folds time into something instantaneous and sews it shut, puncturing sequence with the help of the dead. Then opens, somehow, sequence again as we turn the page. The vision ends with these flickering unions: time & timelessness, father & daughter, speech & silence, living & dead. One assumes this flickering continues off the page.
Steven Zultanski writes: “[Notley’s work] creates a sense of on-goingness. Talking, like thinking, doesn’t cease. There’s always a response coming, a tangent unfurling, or another voice speaking, just out of earshot.”
The poem ends, or doesn’t end:
“How can I live on earth?
By living in heaven
The dead will help
The dead are there with you”
[reading notes is a series that records my first impressions of books I’m reading, dashed off in one sitting. stay tuned for further installments!]