19. “where the firing squad has nothing to aim at”

It’s the opposite of the blind oracle.  It’s the allegory of the cave but in the inverse. Also, it’s not just an epic.  Or it is an epic for ghosts and paranoiacs.  There is very little future here.  How does one write an epic for an end, when everyone born is of a new species, made from the needle (the defect)?  The new species might not even have song. This is “the year of our president” and there are other problems:  literature as it is is useless for the vision of the new species; it is made up of either stories that “love whatever people do” or poetry (the poets “tinker”).  Also the forms are made by men, and this literature that can change this is not the literature of men.  The seer is weak: “Part bird.  Part rat. Part Voice.  Part Elephant.”  Finally, there is the question posed on the first page: “If you detest everything about your society, you say, why are you writing?”

“It is time to change writing completely.”  

We are never girls in our visions.  But this does not mean we are men.  Once I almost died and in those minutes met a man just like Satan, but in a spaghetti western and more bureaucratic, and after I that I saw a doctor, with his Grecian formula and cowboy boots. I swear Alice Notley's In the Pines is a dialogue with that same satanic bureaucrat, the one who is always sitting on the foot of the hospital bed.

“What can I trust? he said.
Your death?
My death, he said. For that was right.
Mine will not be right, I say.  For I won’t have vindicated women. I won’t have seen the fall of male power. I won’t have helped to heal the earth. Why should I die and men still hold power? Why should I have lived to be treated like a woman?”

This is a politics.  The other reviews I’ve read of this are trouble. It's like they are eviscerated by the poem as a  necessary function of the poem. This is a part of the literature the escapes “the critical apparatus.”  This is not a faux-metaphysics; it is “I always knew the house was on fire. It was one of the first things I knew.”  There is nothing on which one can be Aristotlean here and also, to write criticism of these later works of Alice Notley is exactly like launching a missile at a ghost.  One imagines exactly an egg, “appearances,” and also the egg being cracked.  I've got nothing like science here.

12. "myself!/ through the whole long universe"

It was a little great to get a surprise photocopy of Alice Notley's 1973 chapbook Phoebe Light in the mail only a few days after I had listened to her read some poems from it on Penn Sound.  1973 was the year I was born, and I remember nothing of it but family pictures,

but there is an Alex Katz cover, peeking out of an envelope, its hand-written title as charmingly faux-naif as the poems inside. A friend said, "Do you think that is Alex Katz's handwriting? " and yes I think so, it is thin like his paintings and the letters sit at angles similar to his lines. At least I want to think so, holding in my imagination, as I do, that encouraging myth that is the 70s,  poets un-institutional and intermixed with artists, all those brave broke bohemians "with their guts and balls." You see I was only an infant and therefore authentically a naif that year, as I guess I remain,

but there is Alice Notley in 1973 the grown woman, unafraid, as she would remain, of sentiment or experiment: "antediluvian bang in arched fur willful & exploded pussy" and (in its entirety)

THE COMFORT

I needed a long bus ride up-
town like a new hole oh well
my only comfort the possibility
you're unhappy, insane, etc.

This is early work but nonetheless the work is defiant: "My second year I read THE CANTOS (1-95) of Ezra Pound.  They were just like everything else."

Like an oracle, always, is APRIL: "broke the bed fucking."  And in its entirety:

PHOEBE LIGHT

The great cosmetic
Strangeness of a normal deep person. 

5. "I have made a megaphone / MUTATO / NOMINE"

Do you remember in Alice Notley's essay The "Feminine" Epic when she asks "And what if I therefore owe an epic?"

and also when she writes:

"[We] were being used, mangled by the forces which produce epic, and we had no say in the matter, never had, and worse had no story ourselves.  We hadn't acted.  We hadn't gone to war.  We certainly hadn't been "at court" (in the regal sense), weren't involved in governmental power structures, didn't have voices which participated in public political discussions.  We got to suffer, but without a trajectory  We didn't even get to behave badly, or hurt anyone as a consequence."

and when she writes:

"I wanted . . . to avenge my sex for having 'greatness' stolen from it."

and/or

With the name changed the story is told of you.

*

"IF YOU FIND A MAN WHO IS WITHOUT A FAMILY
A MAN WHO THE CITIZENS DO NOT KNOW
OBLITERATE HIS NAME."

*

Stacy Szymaszek's Hyperglossia from Litmus Press would be a feminine epic except that it is not feminine.  

That is, it is a book that avenges not our sex (woman's sex) but the condition of being sexed itself.

It is an epic not like descent, but  ascent. It is not of one soul moved to observe the world of many, but of a many-souled person who must make sense of the world which insists upon the oneness of each. 

The book begins when "She" wakes up with a "fake door where intercourse can occur" and "her speech-producing anatomy" irrepressible, but language does not work at first:

"ka ker flutt"

"simian figure tissue massager            ggenerosity"

The language moves, at first wrecked but reaching, wavering in and out of the territory of social/linguistic sense.  The "she" begins to become the "he" of the book, Eustace, and "I was once a private person before this / verbal hippopotamus / but it's hard to shutt up"

The boy Eustace "he wears his hair short" "his crop would grow" "his beard comes thick like the tongue of a water / bird"

but "released from a system of adhesives / a man can / be municipal."

But this is a narrative of a woman who is a boy who is a woman, always kept on the border between public and private, overlapped with identities, taxed and untaxed.,

There is this feeling of mistake here: "Eustace is dittographic a copyist error"

also of repression, that "mangling force" which will make our new epics:

"the forgetting preference of a civilization"