True Writ: A Review of Alice Notley's In The Pines
Those who self-righteously value their own contradictions are mighty on this Earth.
- Peter J. Carroll, Liber Null
The poems in Alice Notley's 2007 collection In The Pines are extremely challenging to some conventions of writing. A single narrative voice, clear causality, and linear chronology are all absent--leaving the reader to try to follow the speaker's personal symbolic language and unreliable memory. The poems are deliberately difficult, alternately resembling prose and lyric, full of pronouns, images, and ideas which have no clear antecedent. The title poem offers the most difficult reading, and seems to be where the poet's intentional disruption of what is expected from poetry is the heaviest. The poet, however, does give clues as to how to read the collection starting with the very first page: "It is time to change writing completely." This statement demands that the whole book is to be read as a kind of thesis on the direction writing should or could be going.
"The Black Trailor," the middle section of the book, introduces some of the first singular narrative voices in the collection. Poems with a stronger, more conventional narrative like "In the Garden," and "Household," are placed among the continuation of prose poems which are at the same time expansive and recursive; they repeat and inexactly reflect images and themes throughout the book. Ominously described as a "noir fiction," the title poem of the second section transitions from the furious urgency of the beginning of the book to a place of clearer recollection. Themes of past drug use, present illness, hospitalization, relationships, and denouncing of gender roles all continue over from the first section of the book. Also particularly interesting are the comments on writing life and criticisms of the poetry and publishing world at large: "Any syllable of the prior self which comes from out of nowhere is worth more than a poem by a representative of the institutional holdings." The voice here is clearly placing the experimentation, the spontaneity, the immediacy of emotion and expression of a prior existence above the conventions of writing, and the idea of writing as an immutable institution. The poet is both disowning certain ideas about poetry and engaging them by writing this work.
In "Hemostatic," the book's final section, Notley affords us the perhaps more comfortable visual orientation of lineated verse as opposed to the previous vast blocks of text reaching from margin to margin. "Culture Scarf," a viper-tongued distillation of the anger and conflict in the collection, assures that "This is all true writ." From the very first line ("Why should I respect, or convince, or even interest you?") through to the collection's very last question ("are you someone?") there are interrogations toward certain people and also toward abstractions. These questions are definitively more important to Notley than any proposed answers.
Steeped in contention rather than contrariness, these poems seem altogether sorrowful, doubtful, and angry. References to drug addiction, the "mind-body" problem, conflict in relationships, gender roles, and the larger world of writing and poetry, are sometimes described using a violent vocabulary and imagery that reflects something so visceral that perhaps it could not be expressed in any other manner. The strength of these poems is their unapologetic charge toward the goal, of "changing writing completely," even at the risk of losing some readers. The collection stays true to this goal, although the bold form of the first section may lend, in contrast, a certain slowness to other subsequent poems. There are many clear themes and positions, many stories told simultaneously: because a human experience is not a conveniently organized story to tell. It is full of multiplicities, full of doubt; full of conflict and contradiction in every movement. This work is effective because it reflects the reality that not all speakers are reliable, time is not always experienced the same way, and the work of the poet sometimes involves breaking the rules to achieve a higher art.
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