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Nick Sturm on Alice Notley ("At Night the States")
431 Plays3 hours ago
After a long break, the podcast returns with an episode on the late Alice Notley, who passed away on May 19, 2025. Nick Sturm joins us to discuss Notley's elegy for her husband Ted Berrigan, "At Night the States."
Nick Sturm teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His book on small press print culture, publishing communities, and the New York School is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He is also the editor of Early Works by Alice Notley (Fonograf Editions) and co-editor, with Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan, of Get the Money!: Collected Prose, 1961-1983 by Ted Berrigan (City Lights). His articles and editorial projects have been published at Poetry Foundation, Jacket2, Paideuma, College Literature, Chicago Review, ASAP/J, Women’s Studies, Post45, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. You can follow Nick on Bluesky.
In the episode, we listen (twice) to a recording of Notley reading the poem in Buffalo, in 1987. That recording, along with many others, can be found on Notley's page in the marvelous PennSound digital archive.
Please follow the podcast if you like what you hear, and leave a rating and review. Share an episode with a friend! (Post it to your social media feeds?) You can also subscribe to my Substack, which I haven't used in an even longer while, but who knows what the future holds. I'm also on Bluesky, now and then.
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Transcript
Introduction and Tribute to Alice Notley
00:00:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javadizadeh, and ah it's been a while since we've been here. it's um It's been a while since I've ah recorded a new episode of this podcast, um and I've been missing it.
00:00:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And i I was thinking but before I started today's recording, I was thinking, you know, should i try to talk about why or how um it was that the hiatus that the podcast was on lasted so long? And and ultimately i think that, you know maybe the reasons are not so so interesting or or um whatever. Life got overwhelming, work got overwhelming, one thing led to another.
00:00:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
But the thing I think that I did want to say is that I've been missing having these conversations and and and I've had every intention all along of getting back to them. um It's kind of a sad occasion that, and not kind of, it is a sad occasion that has prompted me back into um this conversation.
00:01:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
mode today, um ah which is that we're here to talk about the work of a poet who has just recently passed away, a very great poet named Alice Notley, who died as as of this recording, I think, less than a week ago.
00:01:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
um My guest today is Nick Sturm, who is um you know someone I really admire and and like one ah one of the i mean one of the the great people there there there is in the world to talk to about Alice Notley.
Guest Introduction: Nick Sturm
00:01:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
um The ah poem that Nick has selected for today's conversation is one of her very great poems, a poem called At Night the States.
00:02:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
um It's a bit longer than most of the poems that we've featured on this podcast, but you know I think i think we well well worth it. um Nick will have a lot more to say about why that is and and and why why we should all be interested if we're not already in this poem.
00:02:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
um In just a moment, but first let me tell you um about Nick Sturm. So Nick teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
00:02:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
um His book on small press print culture, publishing communities and the New York School is, I'm happy to say, forthcoming now from Columbia University Press.
00:02:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
um ah But Nick is not just the the author of that monograph. As a scholar and as an editor, Nick has been um doing a lot of great work. So and In particular, are sort of pertinent to today's conversation, Nick is the editor of Early Works by Alice Notley, um which was published by Phonograph Editions and the co-editor
Nick's Work with Alice Notley
00:03:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
with with Alice Notley um and her children, Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan of Get the Money, Collected Prose, 1961 to 1983 Ted Berrigan.
00:03:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
tedbe again um That was published by City Lights. ah But Nick's articles and editorial projects have appeared at the Poetry Foundation, Jacket 2, Pai Duma, College Literature, Chicago Review, ah the ASAP Journal, Women's Studies, Post 45,
00:03:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
and the Poetry Project newsletter. um I thought of Nick for today's conversation because I know how much Notley has meant to him in his work and the sense I've had too um is in his life.
00:04:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
00:04:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
reading um that work, dipping into that work that that is Nick's work, um often on Notley and on the poets that she was um associated with um in in different ways.
00:04:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
i've I've always noted that there is this and feeling of devotion that you get Nick's work um that is a a real sense of personal commitment and responsibility to doing the labor um that will honor this writing and art, visual art as well, that he cares so much about, this culture that he cares so much about.
00:04:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
um There's a kind of humility in Nick's posture as a scholar um that that you you see you see some of this, I think, in in the sense that, and perhaps this is in part due to the poets that he works on.
00:05:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
um But that part of the kind of delicate um positioning that's going on in this work has to do with like working with family members.
00:05:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
um you know dealing with kind of complex webs of friendships and familial relations and other kinds of intimacies,
00:05:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
um So Nick is really adept at navigating that sort of terrain, but he's always also working, I think, as a scholar um with the kind of um critical um remove that one would expect of someone doing first-rate scholarship.
00:06:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
um So, you know, maybe the simpler way to say what I've just said is that Nick, in some ways, feels to me like a fan, on the one hand, of the stuff that he works on, but also like a
Interviews and Dream Anecdotes
00:06:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
scholar. And that's a that's a ah mix that I find really potent um in Nick's work and in and in the work of so many of the the poetry critics I care most about. And and find myself you know in greatest sympathy with.
00:06:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
um One of the things I really like about Nick's work is, well, he's he's a great interviewer. I interviewed Alice Notley more than once, I think twice maybe, have I got that? Nick is nodding.
00:06:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
um the The first interview in particular, i i I really love, it was for the um Poetry Society of America and and was conducted in October, 2017. I'll provide a link.
00:06:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
um to that interview. the interview is called Seeing the Future, which is a great title for, I don't know, anything, but ah an interview maybe in particular, in which at one point, Nick asks Alice Notley, what have you been dreaming about?
00:07:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And this leads to a fascinating exchange. Notley says that she's, and and for those of you who don't know Alice Notley's work, i mean, dreaming, dream work, and the relationship between dreaming and poetry, which is, of course, an ancient sort of association, is something that she's she sort of cares, has cared deeply about.
00:07:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
So Nick asks her, you know, what have you been dreaming about? And and she says that she's stopped dreaming. or that she's been dreaming while being awake.
00:07:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And that she's, you know, that people say to her that that must be so interesting, but though in fact she she finds it kind of irritating. um Though obviously have to say as an aside, like it does sound fascinating.
00:07:58
Nick Sturm
Thank you.
00:08:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
um and and then And then Nick tells her that he dreamt that he was explaining Ted, to this Ted Berrigan, her late husband's, that he was explaining Ted Berrigan's poems to Carson Daly, which which leads, I mean, this will divide, I suppose, our listeners generationally and not just, this is not just, I would be mistaken if I thought only the young people will understand that reference. In fact, that's not true.
00:08:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Only the people who are like middle-aged will understand that reference. ah Carson Daly was um ah you know a once quite popular MTV personality.
00:08:34
Nick Sturm
you
00:08:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah And Notley didn't recognize the name either. So then in the in the interview, Nick is sort of explaining who Carson Daly is to her and and then moving things along very gracefully.
00:08:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
um So I don't know, there's just something in that exchange i find that i that I find obviously really charming on the one hand, but also really illuminating and um lifelike, you know um and and in
Alice Notley's Impact on Nick
00:09:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
in tune with the kind of poetry and aesthetic sensibility that Notley represents and is part of. So I'm i'm just, um you know I'm saddened of course by the occasion.
00:09:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
I should say, by the way, you know, just so people have their bearings here that Alice Notley is a poet I greatly admired, but not someone I i i knew personally. um i should say, of course, that I'm, you know, sad about the occasion that brings us together, but I'm i'm very glad and and grateful to have Nick Sturm here with us to talk about Alice Notley today. Nick, how are you doing?
00:09:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
um What's on your mind?
00:09:48
Nick Sturm
Hi, camera. I appreciate that so much. I was moved listening to you, not because of the way you were talking about my work, but it was kind of, it was allowing me to see this kind of span of time and people that I've been very fortunate to be in proximity to for so long now. And I was thinking about all of them kind of simultaneously as you were talking to me, all these conversations that I've had been able to have with different poets at different times. And, um, it was really focusing that, um, uh, just that, that work and how it's accumulated inside of me. So I really appreciate that.
00:10:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Well, like I said, I'm, um'm you know, I'm really happy to, um that I get to talk with you today. um, and um
00:10:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
and that's interesting the way those ah those conversations and those relationships are are kind of um summoned in a way by ah the the task we have um before us today, which is to talk about um this relationship.
00:11:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
wonderful, strange, and moving poem called That Night, the States. um ah we'll We'll get to the poem in a minute. I'll remind listeners now that there's a link to the text of the poem in the and episode notes.
00:11:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
um but ah but But before we do that, um I don't want to assume, um Nick, that that great and significant as Notley was, um that all of our listeners necessarily are familiar with her or her work. um So I think it might might be useful here if at the episode's outset
Place in American Poetry History
00:11:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
you could just... um give us a kind of thumbnail version of where Alice Notley fits in to literary history, the, you know, 20th century American, you know, American 20th century poetry scene or scenes, 21st century for that matter.
00:12:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
um So could you could you give us that kind of um potted literary history?
00:12:14
Nick Sturm
Yeah, I can do that. So, um, Alice and, um, she'll, she'll be Alice for the purposes of our conversation, just because, um, she was this person in my life, um, who was Alice.
00:12:28
Nick Sturm
And when we talk about Ted Berrigan, her first husband, um, even though Ted passed away before i was born, um, he's also Ted because of those conversations with Alice.
00:12:41
Nick Sturm
Um, But Alice was born in 1945, the same year as two other well-known New York School poets, Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer.
00:12:54
Nick Sturm
And as Cameron said Alice passed away um on monday May today.
00:12:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:13:01
Nick Sturm
Alice twenty twenty five which was six days ago today and um alice is and was one of the most irreducible American poets of the 20th and 21st century.
00:13:19
Nick Sturm
Robert Creeley famously said about her, she's the boss. um Rudy Burkhart, the experimental filmmaker and photographer, who's a great kind of originary figure of the New York school, called her our present day Homer.
00:13:39
Nick Sturm
um she began publishing, um in the early 1970s and, um, published just dozens and dozens of books and chapbooks that are life prose works as well. Um, autobiographical writings, um, diaristic pieces, ah criticism and essays.
00:14:01
Nick Sturm
Um, she was an incredible, um poetics thinker. Um, she was, um, A lot of people are familiar with Dr. Williams' Heiresses, this incredible talk that she gave in San Francisco in the early 1980s. And also, she was a collage artist throughout her life from the 1970s until the end of her life.
00:14:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
and If I could just jump in one, for one moment, just to gloss something you just said, the Dr. Williams in question for people who aren't familiar with this would be William Carlos Williams. Yeah. So, right.
00:14:36
Nick Sturm
Yes, yes, yes.
00:14:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
00:14:38
Nick Sturm
and And we'll come back to Williams a little bit in our conversation about United the States. um
00:14:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Good.
00:14:44
Nick Sturm
And yeah, so um just really briefly to add on to that narrative with some particular people who populated her life and were central to her poetry.
00:14:56
Nick Sturm
um in um She went to Iowa for an MFA, actually in fiction. and became ah poet at Iowa in proximity to a lot of poets that she later kind of wonderfully says were very bad poets.
00:15:14
Nick Sturm
um And she married the poet Ted Berrigan and they had two sons together, Anselm and Edmund, who are both now poets um and terrific people.
00:15:30
Nick Sturm
um Berrigan and Notley moved around a lot. had kind of like an itinerant teaching life associated with Ted's career.
00:15:41
Nick Sturm
So they were in Chicago and Belenus, California, and England for a year. And then from the late 70s, from 1976 until Ted's death, they lived together at 101 St. Mark's Place, an apartment and that at that address in the East Village.
00:16:00
Nick Sturm
um write-off of Tompkins Square Park. And um the poem that we'll talk about today is related to Ted Berrigan's death, which occurred on July 4th, 1983. He years old And then in 1987, 88,
00:16:19
Nick Sturm
um the other thing to say is that um ah few years later in nineteen eighty seven eighty eight um Alice Notley marries her second husband, a British poet, Doug Oliver, who was had been a close friend of Ted and Alice's in Wivenhoe, England, at the University of Essex, where he'd been a graduate student in the early 70s.
00:16:46
Nick Sturm
And so Alice and Doug lived together at 101 St. Mark's Place um in the late 80s. And is around the time when Notley starts to think about the descent of Alette and she's composing the poem that becomes the descent of Alette, which is one of her most well-known epic works, this kind of mythological um undertaking.
00:17:11
Nick Sturm
And then in the early nineties, her and Doug Oliver moved to Paris and Notley lived the rest of her life there in their apartment in Paris.
00:17:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
how How did you, um Nick, come to discover Notley's work? I mean, presumably you weren't born a Notley reader.
00:17:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Can you remember what it was like to first read her poetry and sort of can you trace for us some of the the associations that got you there?
00:17:48
Nick Sturm
Yeah, there was, when I was in, not to go back too far, but there was an undergraduate.
00:17:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Go back as far as you like.
00:17:54
Nick Sturm
Yeah, when I was a history major as an undergraduate, and but I was really enamored with the English classes that I took. And i I wrote an undergraduate thesis on Allen Ginsberg's poem, America, um which is in Howl and other poems.
00:18:11
Nick Sturm
But then, you know, as you're familiar with yourself, there's a kind of um aura around um the beat poets and beat poetics where there's a kind of, there's a different way that they're approached academically where they're kind of treated unseriously um for all sorts of reasons, which are both valid and and maybe um not as well thought out as they could be at times.
00:18:35
Nick Sturm
But when I went to graduate school to do my um MFA, I had this kind of sense that I had to um like abandon those interests for for other ones that were more accepted or legible within that context.
00:18:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
More serious somehow.
00:18:51
Nick Sturm
Yeah, yeah. And ah kind of did that and i kind of didn't. And those three years passed and then I was in a PhD program where I found myself studying with Andrew Epstein.
00:19:05
Nick Sturm
who's been one of your prior guests and Andrew's class on the New York school was, it was kind of this thing I'd been waiting for without knowing it, where I was um allowed to return to that, the same impulses that had attached me to Ginsburg's poems.
00:19:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:19:28
Nick Sturm
I had been nurturing a kind of sensibility around Ted Berrigan and these people who are called the second generation New York school. And, um, which means something like they're the poets who came after John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch.
00:19:46
Nick Sturm
Um, and Andrew's class was this kind of accelerant.
00:19:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:19:50
Nick Sturm
Um, but at the same time, the, so there was this academic institutional space where I was, um, being given permission, but then at the same time, um I had moved from Ohio to Florida by myself and I was ah living alone in this apartment for about the first two years of my PhD.
00:20:09
Nick Sturm
And I had developed this like terrible habit that I still have, which is to collect rare books. And I was really giving into that collecting sensibility at the time.
00:20:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:20:22
Nick Sturm
and um you know, everything I could get my hands on, like copies of Locus Solus, which is this great New York early Ashbery and Schuyler and Koch and Harry Matthews magazine from the early 60s, which was really influential to people like Berrigan and Ron Padgett.
00:20:40
Nick Sturm
um And I was just amassing all of this material. and there's this poet whose name is Cassandra Gillig, who is amazing and hilarious.
00:20:53
Nick Sturm
And she was at Rutgers finishing her bachelor's at the time. and writing this kind of like undergraduate thesis on Al Snotley, which is um this big secretive thing that she's never shown anybody um because it's like too,
00:21:09
Nick Sturm
i just too she thought of it as being embarrassing, but I thought of it as being perfect. But she was also just this person who is telling me like, yeah, like you're doing the right thing by acquiring all these these books and thinking about little magazines. And um so the personal and then the academic spaces were talking to each other and that dialogue just,
00:21:35
Nick Sturm
um it really cemented around Ted Berrigan's work. um And then to just and to answer your question very directly, i started to read Alice Notley's poetry because I was a person who was ah reading everything of Ted Berrigan's.
00:21:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:21:55
Nick Sturm
And i knew that i had to, I had to get inside of her work in order to really understand what it meant to be inside his work. And it was through that process that I first reached out to her by email in 2015 about Ted's poetry. And, um, we were friends ever since then.
00:22:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
See right back right away.
00:22:21
Nick Sturm
She did. I mean, I was terrified, you know, and I've talked to other people who've had this experience and actually i never really told her this, but it did take me a while to get over that fear of, I don't know if it was quite fear, right? It's just that there's a certain nervousness that comes with the the responsibility of that communication.
00:22:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
For sure.
00:22:43
Nick Sturm
And, um but she was extremely generous and really funny. And she was one of the best people at corresponding via email ever met because you could tell that um she was a letter writer and that she had also,
00:22:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:23:02
Nick Sturm
um and also a postcard writer. And you could tell that those genres would crop up in different emails. Like, oh, this is a postcard email. ah This is a long letter email.
00:23:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
00:23:15
Nick Sturm
But yeah, she's,
00:23:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
I, I, I have this sort of side of secondary interest, though sometimes I wonder if it's secondary in epistolary writing and um and I teach a a class on it sometimes. And I and i um i try to talk to tell my students about the thing email used to be or seemed once like it might be, um which is closer to yeah some sort of digital form of letter writing or postcard writing. And you know it it for for lots of reasons, it is used being that. but For most of the time and for most people, though I'm sure not always or or for everyone. um
00:23:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
There's so much interesting in what you just said. And and um I know I do want to move on and move to the poem in just a moment. But I just want to sort of observe back to you that there...
00:24:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
i' I'm particularly interested by the kind of story you tell wherein as like a young person, as so many young people have the sort of literary types, you know, of teenagers or adolescents or whatever, have this experience of becoming interested in the beats, right?
00:24:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
I too had this experience, you know. um And then, you know, you get probably to, you know, if you follow up on your literary studies through a kind of university training, maybe you discover that there's something kind of disreputable or embarrassing about that taste or it's not.
00:24:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
taken seriously in the way you want to be taken seriously at that point. It's interesting to me that you've found that like in the New York school and in Andrew's class, maybe in particular, there was this way to kind of have your cake and eat it too, as it were, to like,
00:24:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
there's and it And it would be interesting to, you know, explore a bit further, like, well, what is it exactly that, you know, like, what's the itch that Ginsburg was scratching for you that, you know Frank O'Hara turned out, say, could also scratch, though he brought with him the kind of um more kind of academically sort of sanctioned kind of space within which to do your work.
00:25:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
And then it's interesting to me also to think about like, okay, so you get from the the Beats to the New York School and in the New York School, you get to quickly, it sounds like, the second generation of the New York School and to Ted Berrigan. And then it's through like Ted Berrigan's personal and literary life that you you're like, well, I need to figure out he loved and married this woman and like her work is important too.
00:25:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
And then, and so, so there's just this kind of interesting path that's followed there. That's both a kind of has to do with, I think like the institutional history of literary, you know, movements and, um and so on in, in, and in, and, and the Academy in, in the U S but then also,
00:26:06
Nick Sturm
who
00:26:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
has these sort of very kinds of personal and idiosyncratic um kinds of ligatures built into them as well. and And there's something kind of quintessentially New York school-ish to me about that kind of movement.
00:26:23
Nick Sturm
Yeah.
00:26:28
Nick Sturm
Yeah. Well, just to say quickly, is it it I mean, the the commonality across all these threads is for me, that the thing that kind of turns me on is that sociality that's shared across all these poems.
00:26:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Right.
00:26:42
Nick Sturm
There's a kind of, I mean, um and like an excessiveness and ah and a humor and it was, um it was confirming.
00:26:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:26:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
that That, in other words, you hear in America, the Ginsburg poem, for instance, and and also in the New York School.
00:26:55
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm.
00:27:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
America is a very funny poem, but also, yeah, Ginsburg is social in a way, right?
00:27:01
Nick Sturm
Yes.
00:27:06
Nick Sturm
Yes, yes, absolutely.
00:27:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:27:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right. So I asked you to come on, and and I did so with my own trepidation because, you know, I worry... um Well, you're quite obviously in the early stages of of grieving someone who is really important to you and now I'm asking you to talk about her in a public way and maybe that would feel um something like like something you weren't interested in doing or something you you perhaps even would have thought was like gauche to do in the first place.
00:27:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah But if you had those feelings, you've hidden them from me. um
00:27:48
Nick Sturm
No, I think it's it's part of the responsibility to the work.
00:27:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Well, so then, but then i so I said to you, as I say to all guests, I mean, most of the time anyway, to my guests, okay, but you you tell me what poem you'd want to do.
00:28:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
and um And I leave it entirely to you. um and And you came pretty quickly, I think, to this poem. Um, so maybe can can you do a little bit of sort of two things at once here, like tell us why you came to this poem, but also like introduce this poem to our audience a little bit.
00:28:25
Nick Sturm
Yes, Ignite the States the title of the poem that we'll listen to soon. It's also the title um of the book in which it appears, which was published by a small press in Chicago called Yellow Press.
00:28:42
Nick Sturm
And Yellow Press was edited by a group of poets who had been Ted Berrigan's students for the um couple of years that he lived in Chicago.
00:28:55
Nick Sturm
with Alice um in the early nineteen seventy s into the mid 70s. um And it was published in 1987. um It's the last poem in the book at night, the States.
00:29:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:29:09
Nick Sturm
um We talk more about the other parts of the the poems in the book when we get there. um But I decided right away that it should be night, the States because,
00:29:22
Nick Sturm
um It is ah poem that she wrote in the wake of Ted Berrigan's death. And in the wake of Alice's death, it seemed like the right kind of choice. And I've, there are a lot of poets for whom death is a central subject.
00:29:46
Nick Sturm
And i I don't even know if Alice would have said death was one of her subjects. It was simply part of her experience for so long that there were, it it is just a material fact.
00:30:03
Nick Sturm
um And I think talking about this poem allows to kind of honor that lifelong presence with death.
00:30:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
Which, you know, in a way, just to come back to something you were saying earlier,
00:30:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
it is presumably only a presence that, that, you know, a poet or anyone else would feel, um as acutely as she seemed to have, if one's life was in some kind of crucial way organized around or in relation to other people's lives and to the experience of social, right.
00:30:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
You know, like the only deaths you experience are other people's deaths.
00:30:50
Nick Sturm
who
00:30:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, and, um, and they matter to you presumably insofar as those lives have mattered to you or continue to matter to you. So it makes sense to me.
00:31:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
um I see you, or I think I saw you thumbing through as you were talking about it, your own. Is this one of the books that you've collected? um
00:31:17
Nick Sturm
Yeah.
00:31:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
first edition of it at night, the States? Yeah, it is, yeah.
00:31:20
Nick Sturm
Yeah, it's a really beautiful book. It's um it's this, um ah like a, I don't know what kind of blue this is, just this beautiful monochromatic blue cover with um white text on the front, a knight the states, Alice Notley, with a ah drawing of an umbrella by the artist George Schneeman, um who is a great friend of Alice's and other New York school poets.
00:31:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
Blue. Yeah.
00:31:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:31:44
Nick Sturm
And on the back, there's a little portrait of Alice by George. um And one thing that we can come back to in the conversation, because this um there's an illustration that proceeds at Knight the States in the original book that is a um ah map.
00:32:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, you want to describe that?
00:32:04
Nick Sturm
Yeah, it's just it's a ah so a map drawn by George Schneeman. It's ah an imaginary map. so In other words, it doesn't you know show an actual geography or place.
00:32:14
Nick Sturm
um And it's this kind of, it's an It's a state or it's an island or it's a country, but it's subdivided into um six sections with a star as if there's like a town in the middle. and And then there are some names identifying three sections of that map.
00:32:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Great.
00:32:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, I saw that book in um in James Merrill's apartment when I was
00:32:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
a writer in residence there and one of many sweet discoveries. 87, you said, do do we know when the poem was drafted or?
00:32:58
Nick Sturm
Yeah, it's um it's dated with an exact date 1985. 1985. Yeah, July 83.
00:33:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
00:33:04
Nick Sturm
it's june twenty eighth nineteen eighty five
00:33:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
And Berrigan, you said died in 83, on July, and July 4th.
00:33:11
Nick Sturm
yeah july four is eighty three yeah
00:33:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, so so two years nearly after his death. Okay, let's listen Notley. We have a recording, which is um which i'm um I will link to as well on the Pensound archive of Notley, which is terrific as as always their archive is so important.
00:33:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
um of Notley reading the poem. I think yeah it's 1987 that she's she's reading it in Buffalo. Have I got that right, Nick?
00:33:43
Nick Sturm
That's right.
00:33:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
And um ah it's a it's a long recording, so so settle in. The whole thing will take about eight minutes, I think. But you know part of that you'll hear is her setting up the poem um afterwards, which um I decided was worth your hearing. yeah.
00:34:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
So let's listen to Notley read, then we will um we will talk on the back end.
00:38:24
Nick Sturm
you
00:39:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Thank you.
00:40:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Thank
00:43:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
sir So that was Alice Notley in 1987 reading At Night, The States. um Nick, ah tell me what the experience of listening to her read is like for you. Maybe if you can sort of separate and apart from reading her poem on the page.
00:43:28
Nick Sturm
Yeah, well um I mean, Alice is a terrific reader and she loved to read, um and to talk about the experience of reading. She was a poet who really believed in writing for, um the musical performance.
00:43:45
Nick Sturm
And that was consistent throughout her entire life, no matter what style or voice that she was inside of.
00:43:58
Nick Sturm
Um, And I think it's one of the reasons why she's such a beloved poet because her performances um and this poem is an ideal example.
00:44:10
Nick Sturm
There's something about her voice and intonation, her rhythms, her musicality that remind us of a kind of primal foundational function of poetry, like this oral musical um visionary capacity.
00:44:29
Nick Sturm
even when she's not writing a visionary poem, it it seems as if that's kind of inside the poem through her performance.
00:44:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:44:38
Nick Sturm
And about this recording, I have to say too, that there's those couple of years where I was um living in this apartment in Tallahassee, Florida, um by myself, just ah developing this kind of um devotional practice with these poets, I would just play um I had like this turntable and these big speakers and I would just let these recordings on Penn sound play for hours at a time just to absorb them, you know, I'd like, and to live in the environment that they created. And um
00:45:11
Nick Sturm
this reading from Buffalo in 1987 that, that Alice gave is one of the ones I would come back to the most often. So there's a way in which like one experience is living in the sound of her poems.
00:45:25
Nick Sturm
That is kind of, um, deeply instructional.
00:45:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
I have to say there is something, um you know, to to like an a naive um listening, first listening of this recording or, you know, just what I was struck by um when you when you pointed me to this recording, you know, when as we were setting up the episode, was that there is –
00:45:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
I don't know how to put it. There's something very kind of like lively in her reading. Um, that there's something, ah
00:46:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
I'm not sure quite how to phrase it. You, I can hear in her voice, or at least I think I hear in her voice, something like, um, a kind of, um,
00:46:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
feeling of hopefulness that's being articulated in like what the voice can accomplish or or um um there's so ah i don't know whether to call it pleasure or there's a kind of high that that comes from it that it you know which which is like i say sort of um
00:46:35
Nick Sturm
Yes.
00:46:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
not what you'd expect, maybe, if I told you that the poem you're about to hear is ah you know an elegy, as she described it herself, um as an elegy um for you know a ah beloved um spouse um who who had died you know not two years before ah the reading ah it doesn't sound um particularly mournful to me, and and it and it doesn't have you know that what we've come to call a sort poet voice um either, and that there is something kind of incantatory about it and something sort of lively and in the voice that that I find really compelling.
00:47:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:47:25
Nick Sturm
Yeah, there is something really bright in her reading of it. I mean, when I decided to talk about this poem with you, it made me wish that I had asked her more specifically about this poem.
00:47:38
Nick Sturm
um We talked about the United States era a lot.
00:47:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:47:44
Nick Sturm
But I mean, if I were to be completely honest with you, I'm sure when she was standing um giving this reading, she knew this was a really fucking good poem.
00:47:55
Nick Sturm
And that performing it was going to feel physically good. um
00:48:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
that's great
00:48:05
Nick Sturm
You know, and I think that that is, and even at the end you hear her, she gets the applause and she says, you know, can I read one more?
00:48:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:13
Nick Sturm
That's part of that high and and that pleasure. And I think it's totally right. and
00:48:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
which Which it sounded like before she read the poem hadn't been the plan.
00:48:17
Nick Sturm
it
00:48:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
it She was going to end with that, but but it it left her feeling exhilarated or something.
00:48:21
Nick Sturm
Right.
00:48:23
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:48:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:48:26
Nick Sturm
And the poem, it's this I think we'll talk about this more, right? I mean, the poem and Ted Berrigan's death are not the same thing.
00:48:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's right.
00:48:32
Nick Sturm
and the And actually the poem is um articulating that distinction in so many ways, both for herself and for like the elegy as a genre.
00:48:45
Nick Sturm
And so that her, that rush of performance, it's about the poem and not the event of the death.
00:48:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh.
00:48:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
I guess in the, in, I mean, not to say that we're writing a great poem right here as we talk, but, but in, in a kind of ordinary way, we might say like, well, listeners might occasionally hear in our voices a kind of exhilaration and talking to each other right now about this thing, about this poem.
00:49:10
Nick Sturm
who
00:49:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
And, and they might say, well, we, you know, I think you get the point without my having to spell it out, that there that the um that that we can distinguish between Notley's death and and the the fact of our conversation today, right?
00:49:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
So that, right.
00:49:30
Nick Sturm
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:49:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
00:49:32
Nick Sturm
and i think And I think Alice was really, because she experienced so many deaths of loved ones and family members and her friends who were poets, um She was really clear that, um you know, one has a responsibility to account for and respond to what one knows and the knowledge one has.
00:49:51
Nick Sturm
that is love, right? that is love and
00:49:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
She said um ah a kind of curious thing in the introduction, curious to me in the introduction to to the to the reading that we just heard, which was that that this was, she thought, her final elegy for her husband.
00:50:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
um It just seems like a funny way to characterize something, like I say, less than two years after the death has happened. like
00:50:24
Nick Sturm
the
00:50:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
you know, how does she know that it's the final, like what, what would it even mean for it to be much much less like, did it turn out to be the final elegy or not? ah That, that last question maybe seems the least interesting one to ask though. We can, we can, we can ask it if you like, but, but, but like what's behind the impulse to say, I, i you know, in 1987, I think this is the the last, ah the final elegy for my husband.
00:50:50
Nick Sturm
Yeah, and that's a good question. i this it's a biographical answer. I mean, she was, you know, her, her life with Ted, um, they were married for, 12, 13 years, um, uh, before Ted's death.
00:50:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:51:09
Nick Sturm
And then there was this period of bereavement and grieving that, you know, it wass really from let's say from mid 83 forward. But then when she reconnects with Doug Oliver,
00:51:22
Nick Sturm
And they began their relationship. So during when this reading would have taken place, their relationship had was what had formed. And I think she was, I know that her and Doug were very committed to building and what they call this kind of like but this two person poetry movement, which was them in their love together.
00:51:43
Nick Sturm
And when she says that about and United States being her final elegy, of course she wrote more poems about Ted Mysteries of Small Houses, there are many examples, but it seems as if there's a certain comfort in this new poetry relationship, which is allowing her to continue, but also to really honor her marriage and love for Ted because Ted and Doug were also very close friends.
00:51:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:52:17
Nick Sturm
um And one doesn't have to look very far for evidence of that, ted Berrigan's poem, so going around cities, is dedicated to Doug Oliver and his first wife, Jan, um and they appear by name in the poem.
00:52:30
Nick Sturm
So everything is kind of entangled and there's a relief, I think, in this moment.
00:52:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:52:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. That makes sense. um Of course, the other thing, um or one other thing she says in the intro, which I think will lead naturally into a more direct consideration for us of the of the poem, is that she she talks a little bit about what is its most kind of conspicuous formal feature, which is that, you know, it's ah for people who aren't looking at the text, it's a poem in stanzas.
00:52:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
and And each stanza begins with the same phrase, which is the title of the poem, At Night, the States. um ah she she She noted, um as I recall, that there was something kind of, you know, she felt as though there was something sort of remarkable in her discovery that the refrain,
00:53:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
could come at the beginning of rather than at the end of a stanza and that that was a really great idea for her because in her words it made it completely possible to write some more like she could just write down it the the refrain again and then it would sort of elicit the the lines that followed and made up the rest of the stanza
00:53:28
Nick Sturm
you
00:53:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
So um I guess, ah Nick, I just want to invite you to say at a kind of like 30,000 foot, from a 30,000 foot view here of the poem, um a word or two about what work you think the the refrain is doing as a refrain or the the stanzaic form is doing as a kind of stanzaic form. So I think you'd mentioned earlier maybe that like Williams felt important to you here in some way, but maybe...
00:54:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
That comes in a little bit later. I don't know. So so why don't you tell us, um you know give us some kind of handle on how we how we might think about ah the refrain and the stanzas.
00:54:16
Nick Sturm
Yeah, so this poem has 17 stanzas, each of which begins with the United States. um And there are small variations of that line that are embedded inside of some of those stanzas at times, little variations.
00:54:32
Nick Sturm
um It seems to me that, I mean, this is a poem that ends a book that is, it's a book of bereavement. um and And maybe it's helpful to kind of answer that question from such a high altitude in relation to the rest of the book at night the States, because the poems that precede this title poem are very um like small, scrawled, fragmented, occasional things.
00:55:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:55:02
Nick Sturm
they're they're really They're really full of a lot of dissonance. They seem to be really personal, but also highly abstract. And um as one reads them, it's you have a feeling of like dislocation and they're not poems in the way that we're used to reading poems in a collection.
00:55:21
Nick Sturm
But then one gets to United States at the end, and um it seems to me that at that moment in 1983 and 84, where the rest of the poems were being written,
00:55:34
Nick Sturm
They were in such close proximity to the event of Ted Berrigan's death. And and united the United States now is a couple of years after, but the repetition of the refrain at the beginning of the stanzas ends up being very generative.
00:55:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:55:51
Nick Sturm
And you can you can see that in the earlier poems, there is no clear formal engine she's not looking for one either.
00:56:03
Nick Sturm
um So it's not as if there's an absence of it. It simply is a different kind of writing that one just scrawls in order to have words exist and have a relationship to them. um But at this moment, 85, you can tell that she's thinking of a kind of reorganized, um formal approach to this experience.
00:56:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:56:25
Nick Sturm
and And rather than Williams, are there There are things about this poem that I think resonate with Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.
00:56:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:56:34
Nick Sturm
um But more specifically, Alice had said that the sound of this poem is really based on Gertrude Stein's stanzas in meditation.
00:56:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes sense.
00:56:42
Nick Sturm
And all of the kind of monosyllabic prepositional sort of torque is very Steinian.
00:56:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, and as is maybe some kind of um oddly kind of mythological sense of American geography or something.
00:57:01
Nick Sturm
he Yeah, yes.
00:57:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
I don't know what exactly.
00:57:02
Nick Sturm
Yeah.
00:57:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
like
00:57:03
Nick Sturm
yeah
00:57:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
um That's interesting. um Maybe we can talk about the the refrain line just as a phrase on its own.
00:57:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
um At night, the states, I mean, at... I suppose you know you first read that and you think, right oh are the states an ambiguous word, a highly context-dependent word, I guess? um ah Does she mean that you know the states of the American nation?
00:57:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
Does she mean sort of states of mind? um Does she mean states of existence or states of being or something?
00:57:40
Nick Sturm
who
00:57:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
um I have a feeling you're going to say yes to all of that or something, but but but can you can can you sort of talk us through a little bit how you think about what work that word is doing or like what any of that has to do with night as a sort of um as a temporal locator or whatever?
00:57:50
Nick Sturm
ah Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
00:57:59
Nick Sturm
the Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So you're totally right. i mean states of being, states of consciousness.
00:58:10
Nick Sturm
um, uh, states of feeling, um, the way one might be asked, what state are you in, um, about kind of your, um, like ontological situation.
00:58:24
Nick Sturm
Um, but also, um yeah, yeah.
00:58:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
I'm currently liquid.
00:58:29
Nick Sturm
Um, and the, and then actual states, actual places. Um, and we get the names of a lot of states and movement between states. Um,
00:58:40
Nick Sturm
which, you know, as you're talking about it, you hear the parallels between the movement between different states, life and death, having a form in this world and not having a form in this world, or your form being just words.
00:58:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
oh right. Yeah.
00:58:55
Nick Sturm
Like when ah when the poet dies, the state that they exist in the world in is as words. um
00:59:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
In the sense.
00:59:04
Nick Sturm
And it's, you know, that trance, the trance, you know, well and as the line accumulates and repeats,
00:59:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, good.
00:59:10
Nick Sturm
um that sense of that one enters the trance of the poem and that's the state as well that you are are brought into musically.
00:59:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
I love that.
00:59:19
Nick Sturm
And and then the night, um you know, we everyone has, one goes through all sorts of grief and loss and you you know in a kind of visceral way that night um alone laying in bed tends to be this space where you're visited by everything that's on a unavoidable.
00:59:45
Nick Sturm
um Like the weight of experience and loss and grief are overwhelmingly present at night. And that seems to be the combination, right? This inescapable kind of experience of grief that one has at night in that enclosure.
01:00:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah Particularly, I would suppose, if if the person you've lost is the person with whom you'd share to bed. And
01:00:13
Nick Sturm
Yes, yes, absolutely, yeah. um
01:00:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
um as ah as an and and i love I love this idea of ah you know um the the poem as as sort of investigating or curious about the ah the kind of thing we've been talking about, the sense in which the, you know, the poet while alive exists in one state and once dead in another, in the sense that, you know, we,
01:00:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
kind of honoring the convention of speaking in a kind of literary present will refer to, you know, what Notley does in the poem in the present tense, the fact of her death, you know, unless we're being kind of metaphorical or stubborn about it sort of, you know, resigns us to the past tense and talking about the biographical person.
01:01:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And to think of those as different sort of states of existence is, is I think ah really, um really, uh, you know, generative kind of exciting thought for me.
01:01:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
um You know, i I'm sort of interested also just in, um like as a matter of, um I don't know what else to call it, a craft or something, the way the refrain line is handled.
01:01:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah Sometimes, um though don't make me come up with an example right now, maybe you'll have one ready at hand. Sometimes it's as though that, that, that phrase kind of leads sort of syntactically and semantically kind of naturally enough into the line that follows.
01:01:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
And then at other times it seems rather more kind of disjunctive to me, like that, like it's, um, a title or a heading for the stanza rather than the beginning of a sentence, you know, that the next line carries on with.
01:02:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, uh, Is that right, Nick? to you Is that what you think?
01:02:11
Nick Sturm
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:02:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
Or or how do you, yeah.
01:02:14
Nick Sturm
And I think, i mean, Alice, in terms of Alice is just this master of variation and of the way to pattern these kinds of techniques across the poem so that there's always just this little bit of um difference in texture or positioning.
01:02:35
Nick Sturm
um I think that's true. I think you could think of them, sometimes they do very clearly syntactically lead in to the line that follows other times.
01:02:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
At night, the states talk, period.
01:02:44
Nick Sturm
the
01:02:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's the third stanza. That's how begins. At night, the states, line break, talk. So, I mean, it's hard to know what exactly that means, but it's it sort of clearly packaged as a as a sentence, as as the beginning of a sentence, which the next word ends.
01:02:58
Nick Sturm
who
01:03:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:03:02
Nick Sturm
Yeah, and every time, it I mean, it makes the states change in their composition. Sometimes reading and listening to the poem, you feel as if you understand what the state is for like a few lines or a state or the states, but then because there that line operates differently across the poem.
01:03:22
Nick Sturm
Sometimes the states seem animate themselves. They seem like other kind of um subjects that surround you. They're not just interior or something that happens to you.
01:03:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:03:31
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:03:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Much less places you're located in, they seem to be. Yeah, right.
01:03:36
Nick Sturm
who
01:03:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. um Well, the the poem is um is too long, I think, for us to kind of, you know, alas, for us here to go kind of line by line, stanza by stanza, carefully sort of tracing through what we think is going on in each case.
01:03:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
But I do want to um see if we can't, you know, develop some way of navigating a path, you know, that begins more or less its at its beginning and works our way towards the end by by the end of this conversation.
01:04:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
um beyond the fact that the poem is in, how many stanzas did you say?
01:04:19
Nick Sturm
17. Mm-hmm.
01:04:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
17 stanzas, right? And and they're um we say stanzas, but they're not of regular length either, right? So they're of kind of varying length though. um and and and And also interestingly, maybe we could say that the the lines in the stanzas themselves follow a kind of typographic pattern, if nothing else, that is,
01:04:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
There's this kind of indentation that happens in alternating lines of these stances.
01:04:45
Nick Sturm
one
01:04:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
But is there...
01:04:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
Is there a kind of arc that you feel as though you're sensing? um is Is there a kind of um shape to the yeah to the journey that that you go on as a reader of this poem you know that begins in one kind of place and ends in another? And maybe this would be the place, Nick, to to invite you.
01:05:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
if you have an example that you know you want to talk about from somewhere like the beginning of the poem, maybe get us get us grounded um and and we can sort of dip in and out of the poem as you see fit.
01:05:24
Nick Sturm
who um
01:05:29
Nick Sturm
The third stanza um is a good place to start to answer your question.
01:05:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's a short short one. Do you want to read it out loud again for us? ah
01:05:38
Nick Sturm
Sure, yeah. At night, the state's talk, my initial continuing contradiction, my love for you and that for me, Deep down in the purple plant, the oldest dust of it is sweetest, but sates no longer how I would feel.
01:05:55
Nick Sturm
Shirt, that shirt has been in your arms, and I have. That shirt is how I feel.
01:06:04
Nick Sturm
You know, that it's so beautiful.
01:06:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, I love that one.
01:06:06
Nick Sturm
it's um it's i think it's a good place to start um because it is so clearly about this intimate relationship, this marriage, this partnership.
01:06:17
Nick Sturm
um and about the grief of that loss. And it communicates this very common experience that when we lose someone, we attach ourselves to mundane physical objects that remind us of the shape of that person in our lives um with the shirt here.
01:06:37
Nick Sturm
um But there's so much, I mean, Alice lived a life in poetry and had a complete commitment to to do that and nothing else.
01:06:49
Nick Sturm
And so these lines at the beginning of the stanza, my initial continuing contradiction, my love for you and that for me, it's this encapsulation or articulation of um like her state in poetry, um like the impossibility of it having even happened at all, which is maybe part of the contradiction um or maybe the contradiction
01:07:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
The impossibility of of what having happened at all?
01:07:17
Nick Sturm
or like of like having a life in poetry.
01:07:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
I see, yeah.
01:07:19
Nick Sturm
um But then it also might be because Alice was so defiantly herself, you know, like this, this culture of one, what did it mean to attach yourself to this male poet who for many years at the beginning end of their relationship garnered a lot more attention and success than she did simply because he was a man.
01:07:45
Nick Sturm
And so there's kind of like a, things are balled up right there um related to, I think her entire life in poetry.
01:07:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
What do you do with deep down in the purple plant? The purple plant is capitalized.
01:08:02
Nick Sturm
um
01:08:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
01:08:03
Nick Sturm
I don't know. I don't know what to do with it. I think um those those are, um i mean, it's going to be a flower.
01:08:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
okay
01:08:10
Nick Sturm
um Undeniably, it's going to be a flower. But, and she, has a relationship to flowers in the same way that Schuyler, James Schuyler's poems do, or or even sometimes that Williams does.
01:08:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:08:25
Nick Sturm
um Purple is an important color in this poem. um And there's some sort of autobiographical kind of detail that's pointing back to, but I think that's an example. Eileen Miles talked about this poem hence and described how this poem is full of Alice's perfect vagueness And there's a way that those details, they don't have to be pressurized into, um you know, what does this point to?
01:08:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:08:54
Nick Sturm
it's and alice Alice's style of the 1970s was so much focused on collage and like the sonic textures of words. And I think um throughout this poem, you see a residue of that particular style, although things are really changing for her right here at this moment.
01:09:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. and and And then, um ah like like you say, a moment like that leads, well, I was going to say kind of seamlessly, but maybe the seams are You know, we get deep down in the purple plant, the oldest dust of it is sweetest, but states no longer.
01:09:32
Nick Sturm
Sates no longer. Yeah.
01:09:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah states know Yeah, states no longer how I would feel. So that states is um like a verb. Is that right? Like a.
01:09:42
Nick Sturm
is is it Is it states in the copy you're looking at or Sates? S-A-T-E-F.
01:09:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah Oh, is it Sates? Is that right?
01:09:48
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm.
01:09:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, okay.
01:09:49
Nick Sturm
Sates. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:09:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
and yeah yeah that That makes more sense. um and And yeah, so we've discovered a typo in the Poetry Foundation ah text.
01:09:53
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm.
01:10:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
01:10:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Sates no longer how I would feel. shirt and and then it's as though like we know exactly what she means but also it's interesting to me that like language is breaking down a bit here shirt that shirt has been in your arms and i have that shirt is how i feel um you know I guess, right like you say, there is the kind of familiar and um quite sad kind of phenomenon of the belongings of someone who's died as taking on a kind of totemic or talismanic value to survivors ah and also a kind of inadequacy of of presence. But also I think there's a particular kind of poignance in the idea of a shirt as like the the garment that that a person wore.
01:10:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
you know, as some kind of analogy to the body being a kind of garment of the soul or something like that, you know, and, and it's the body that's failed, but there's some other state of Ted that is still alive, but inaccessible except via these, these kinds of material things.
01:11:04
Nick Sturm
I
01:11:17
Nick Sturm
who but i was going to say, I find myself also drawn to the stanza because of that phrase, again, my initial continuing contradiction.
01:11:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Go ahead. Yeah.
01:11:28
Nick Sturm
And it it's a, it's a syllabic, um,
01:11:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
mm-hmm
01:11:31
Nick Sturm
like there are moments across this poem where you're drawn to these very dense polysyllabic clusters amidst all of this um largely monosomatic or monosyllabic um music.
01:11:46
Nick Sturm
And it it reminds me of the, in Olson's projective verse when he's talking about the syllable, um not to say that this is an example of Charles Olson's projective verse, this very famous essay from 1950,
01:11:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:12:00
Nick Sturm
but um that when you're paying attention to syllables, Olsen says, it's the place where to engage with speech where it is least careless and least logical and where it's least careless and least logical.
01:12:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:12:19
Nick Sturm
And i ah this poem um is doing that because it's trying to navigate this the utter irreducible complexity of this loss.
01:12:32
Nick Sturm
So something about returning to the syllable and how this poem um like crystallizes this very vivid attention to the syllable.
01:12:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
And this, yeah, it irreducible is a word that you used earlier to describe Notley. um Now I hear you using it to to describe the loss that occasions the poem, you know, for Notley.
01:13:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And and i'm am I right? I'm also hearing you say that that her attention to, like, the syllable is the kind of irreducible unit of the poetic utterance.
01:13:14
Nick Sturm
Yeah, yeah, because I mean, yeah because um Alice has an essay that or talk that she gave a few years later, still in the 1980s, called Because Words Are Not Language.
01:13:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
There's a kind of, yeah.
01:13:30
Nick Sturm
And she's making this important distinction in her poetics between like, in other words, I use, I make my poems out of words, right? ah ah William Cross Williams-esque poems are, are,
01:13:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
01:13:42
Nick Sturm
Are machines made of words? They're made of words, not ideas. um She's saying poems are not made of language. And when I think about all of the kind of fractured, broken syntax of this poem, this is an example of her thinking of that poetics and practice.
01:13:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:13:59
Nick Sturm
um This is such an accumulation of words and syllables. And the poem, very clearly, you can see it being generated out of itself through the networks and patternings that happen.
01:14:12
Nick Sturm
Like every stanza, sometimes you'll encounter a word for the first time at the end of one stanza. It'll appear at the beginning of the next stanza.
01:14:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, we get an instance of that in stanzas four and five, maybe we can, and it seems germane actually to what you're saying.
01:14:18
Nick Sturm
So amidst...
01:14:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
So sorry for the, yeah, yeah.
01:14:25
Nick Sturm
About the word matters. Yeah, yeah.
01:14:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Sorry for the interruption, but I just, I thought I wanted to give you that as something to chew on as you work your way through this thought.
01:14:31
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:14:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
but um Down the street from where the public plaque reminds that of private loving, the consequential chain trail is matters. End of stanza.
01:14:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
At night, the states that it doesn't matter that I don't say them. So that's,
01:14:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
I think two senses of the word um or or forms of the word, but um mattering, um you know, I'm just thinking in this poem of something, you know, mattering as in being important or having sort of substance or consequence, but then the idea of like matter in the scientific or kind of physics realm of like um substance, right?
01:15:14
Nick Sturm
who
01:15:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Thingness. Yeah. Right.
01:15:18
Nick Sturm
and And then as the stanza goes on, we get and we get this strange hyphenation, matter simple, matter simple, and
01:15:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah it's right
01:15:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:15:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right. So, so do you want to say anything about the word matter for, for this poem or in the, in that region of the poem?
01:15:35
Nick Sturm
Well, I mean, it and it seems to have, like ah like you were suggesting, the same um dexterity as states, um the ambiguity that it has around it So um like what matters?
01:15:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:15:46
Nick Sturm
What is matter? um What is the matter? Mm-hmm.
01:15:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
she she She says at the bottom, ah I've lost count, but I guess it would be of the fifth stanza where that matter simple hyphenation thing is happening.
01:15:54
Nick Sturm
yes
01:15:59
Nick Sturm
who
01:16:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
She says, um and maybe there is this sort of kind of tendency that sometimes towards the ends of these stanzas, she gets to a place where she says something that seems kind of like... and poignant and easy to understand for for even non-poetry readers but like um but you you would always remain i trust as i will always be alone um well heartbreaking of course but but also the you would always remain i mean i find myself thinking of like the conservation of matter you know in the you know in the in the um
01:16:34
Nick Sturm
Uh-huh. Oh, yeah, totally. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:16:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
I forget which law of physics that is, but um but yeah, I mean, um it also is just sort of, it's an interesting kind of paradoxical thing to say, but but you, you would always remain, i trust as I will always be alone. um In what sense do you think the you, is the poem claiming that the you would always remain
01:17:03
Nick Sturm
but Yeah, and that's a good question because there's a lot of ambiguity around that second person pronoun. um
01:17:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Uh-huh.
01:17:11
Nick Sturm
I counted them because I was curious how many yous were in this poem. There are 32, which is not as many as I thought there would be.
01:17:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Almost to a stanza, but not quite on average, right?
01:17:20
Nick Sturm
but And yeah, yeah. and then And then interestingly, to put that in proximity to the first person i there are 84.
01:17:35
Nick Sturm
across the 17 stanzas, which is a lot. And the eye is always tied back to the speaker. And alice's Alice's poems have this very large eye that they construct.
01:17:49
Nick Sturm
And it makes sense that this poem would be so deeply populated with that eye. The U though is slippery because at times it's very clearly referring to um ted Berrigan as the subject of the elegy.
01:18:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:18:02
Nick Sturm
Other times, it seems to be the states become you. and She's addressing the states and what they do or how they affect her, how they change. And then other times, the you is herself, where she's talking to herself in the second person and kind out of that kind of removal um that is often occasioned by tremendous loss.
01:18:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:18:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. right um I can easily see um or i think of sort of instances of the, the say the three and not that, I don't think you were suggesting that those were the only three kinds of reference for you, but I can think of i could think of instances where where those are the reference.
01:18:40
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm.
01:18:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
but and And on the one hand, one is tempted to say, well, like, right, there's a kind of... um you know, the the the word can refer to this or it can refer to that or it can refer to this other thing.
01:19:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
and And also maybe there is another sense in which what what that's kind of um pointing to or or a kind of product of is that there is a slipperiness, not just at the linguistic register,
01:19:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
in in terms of the predominant use of that word you, but also that there is um there is a kind of, at the level of the referent, there is a slipperiness between these categories. Like, you know, maybe, you know, or the plainest way to say that would be maybe to say that, well, Notley is in a place in sort of composing this poem where the distinction between Ted and her,
01:19:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
is somewhat porous, right? So that, you know, is she talking to herself or is she talking to him? you know, maybe in each case we'd want to say, well, it seems like this or it seems like that, but maybe the larger point is that it's one can't say.
01:19:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
And and I think we've already talked about the sense in which the word states, whatever that refers to is a kind of itself a slippery thing.
01:19:55
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm.
01:20:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
So if you're having a pronoun referred to a noun that is itself seems doesn't have a kind of stable reference and and or has reference that include internal states of mind and kind of um things like florida or maine and and everything in between that um Yeah, i see I see how you is is sort of doing interesting work in that sense.
01:20:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
um ah i I want to move this along just slightly, but and but but in turning it back to you and sort of building on something you said, because for me, one of the um most interesting
01:20:30
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm.
01:20:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
um ah uses of the first person pronoun um comes in the following stanza, at night the state's whistle, Anyone can live, i can.
01:20:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
I'm not doing anything doing this. I discover I love as I figure. Wednesday, I wanted to say something in particular. i have been where, i have seen it, the God can, the people do some more.
01:21:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
So there are a lot of I's in that stanza, first of all. But also just the the it maybe to begin with, um anyone can live, can.
01:21:09
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm.
01:21:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
i can It's like such a, I don't know, a charged thing to say when someone you love has just not been able to continue living or you know.
01:21:25
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm. who
01:21:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And then what does it mean ever or in a poem to say, i am not doing anything doing this? It sounds, again, like a paradox or a kind of logical internal contradiction.
01:21:39
Nick Sturm
the
01:21:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And it's not to say it isn't, but I but i guess how i would I would want for you to say something about that.
01:21:45
Nick Sturm
who Well, and this poem is full of so many um so many contradictions or paradoxes where there are these, because of the um these relatively short lines interspersed with even shorter lines that are indented between them, there's all sorts of like very, very quick and abrupt um reversals of logics.
01:22:07
Nick Sturm
And so as soon as it seems as if um she's making a direct statement about but the state of a particular feeling or um situation, then she often will undercut it by saying the exact opposite of it.
01:22:24
Nick Sturm
And um like even the lines that you're reading, like i i can, anyone can live, i can, I'm not doing anything doing this.
01:22:36
Nick Sturm
um another word that is central to this poem that is easy to feel its presence, but I didn't really dig into it until we were pushing this conversation, is that word not, um which I also counted it.
01:22:56
Nick Sturm
And she uses the word not both as a word or as a contraction 38 times in the poem. and i And again, i think that really easily attaches itself to um you know what is not present, what is not happening, what's no longer or never, never is very dense at the end of the poem.
01:23:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:23:18
Nick Sturm
The sense of finality um in negation, yes.
01:23:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Negation. Yeah.
01:23:23
Nick Sturm
um And I think too, that this poem is so instructive about death. um There are just no platitudes. And even when one singular thing is expressed, it's immediately kind of taken back and complicated by um undoing it or um contradiction, contradicting it.
01:23:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:23:40
Nick Sturm
And that is the case, isn't it? You know, like nothing sort of holds together. It's completely impossible to imagine that one could say, you know, this is what's going on right now.
01:23:54
Nick Sturm
um You know, especially losing a spouse, you your coping mechanisms are entirely overwhelmed. The grief, um, saturates you. i mean, it consumes you.
01:24:07
Nick Sturm
And so the fragmentation and like the, the breaking up of logic that we see across the poem, it, she's so adept at recording the kind of psychological fragmentation of the experience rather than expressing it.
01:24:25
Nick Sturm
Um, And, um,
01:24:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
when she says i i am not doing anything doing this is that i mean at least in part is that one of these kind of familiar sort of poetic tropes of of kind of modesty or something of of saying you know like um
01:24:34
Nick Sturm
who
01:24:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
you know, poetry makes nothing happen. Like, i' is the doing this, writing the poem or saying these words? Like, I'm, is this, is the is this a way to, is right.
01:24:56
Nick Sturm
I mean, there's a literal way to read it, right?
01:24:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
So I guess I'm just asking, like, is that part, is that, is that one of the layers here?
01:25:00
Nick Sturm
Yeah, yeah.
01:25:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Is the poet saying like, this isn't magic. I'm not, I'm not bringing you back to life or I'm not, you know, I'm just talking, you know?
01:25:07
Nick Sturm
Yeah. Oh, totally, yeah. but You know, right. The poem never presumes to do anything like that, does it?
01:25:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:25:13
Nick Sturm
And that's what's one thing that's so important about it. it I mean, this could be writing the poem, but this could also be living. I'm not doing anything living.
01:25:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. huh. That makes sense.
01:25:24
Nick Sturm
um And it's also like a very anti-heroic statement. you know the This elegy that I'm writing, um you know it's not a monument.
01:25:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:25:35
Nick Sturm
um I'm not claiming anything on behalf of the person who is a subject of this elegy. It is, you know if we think of the district the distribution of the pronouns as pointing to what this poem is about, you know it's more about the eye than it is about anything else.
01:25:53
Nick Sturm
So she's more constructing herself in the midst or in the aftermath, she's integrating the loss. Like when she says things later um in the poem, what stanza is it?
01:26:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:26:08
Nick Sturm
um It's the 15th stanza, so the second to last.
01:26:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:26:17
Nick Sturm
and
01:26:19
Nick Sturm
ah just Just to start from the beginning of that stanza, this one is very dense with uses
01:26:26
Nick Sturm
At night the state's making life, not explaining anything.
01:26:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:26:30
Nick Sturm
But all the popular songs say, call my name, oh call my name. And if I call it out myself to you, call mine out instead, as our poets do. Will you still walk on by?
01:26:41
Nick Sturm
i have loved you for so long. You died. And on the wind they sang your name to me. But you said nothing. just that moment where she says very clearly, you died.
01:26:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:26:54
Nick Sturm
Those are the kinds of things that we go through when we're, we're developing that long-term relationship to the reality of the loss, which is all to say, again, the poem is about constructing this music for herself to live in
01:27:12
Nick Sturm
That doesn't settle the loss, but um makes it into a poem, which, you know, is the most important thing.
01:27:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Josh.
01:27:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
i'm I'm writing down music for herself to live in. That's really beautiful. Mm-hmm.
01:27:29
Nick Sturm
Oh, and speaking of music though, I mean, this stanza, um, it actually starts in stanza 14, the one that precedes it. Um, the last line of that stanza is call my name.
01:27:41
Nick Sturm
And then you get this thing about all the popular songs, call my name, I'll call my name. And, um, that's, there's an actual song she's referring to. It's, um, by the, this new wave band, simple minds.
01:27:55
Nick Sturm
Um, don't, don't you forget about me.
01:27:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh my God.
01:27:58
Nick Sturm
um which is and most famously yeah most famously known as this song from the 1985 movie Breakfast Club.
01:28:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, I know that song.
01:28:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right?
01:28:08
Nick Sturm
um And the song was written and recorded specifically for that movie. But in 1985, that song would have been on the radio. was of the most popular songs um of 1985.
01:28:23
Nick Sturm
And so Notley here is integrating these lyrics from this Simple Minds song um and it's a song you can kind of have in your head without having listened to it for a long time.
01:28:34
Nick Sturm
But mean, yeah, like like, you know, it's like, it's, and it's kind of like an eerie haunting song because of the echo effect that's added to the, um the main singer's voice.
01:28:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, it's it's there for me right now. Go on.
01:28:47
Nick Sturm
And then these very kind of haunting um electronic keyboards, but yeah.
01:28:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
But it's also got that lyric, when you walk on by, right? is That's in the song? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:28:55
Nick Sturm
Yeah. So there's one um lyric that's like, um will you recognize me, call my name or walk on by, rain keeps falling, rain keeps falling down, you know?
01:29:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right.
01:29:06
Nick Sturm
And then there's like the keyboard, du andda don't you, and then the pause, forget about me.
01:29:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right. Right. right
01:29:13
Nick Sturm
And like that negative imperative, I think is something that's really interesting, like because that, that not and never so embedded in this poem.
01:29:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:29:22
Nick Sturm
And then the the gap between don't you and forget about me, it seems like the forget about me is actually its own um instruction.
01:29:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
should make it like an imperative, like, forget about me.
01:29:35
Nick Sturm
who Forget about me. and ah and And this poem has that sense of too, like there's, um this is at the end of stanza 11. um Your being beautiful belongs to nothing. i don't believe they should praise you, but I seem to believe they should somehow let you go.
01:29:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh-huh.
01:29:57
Nick Sturm
And that necessary forgetting is a part of this process. um The song itself, I mean, you could read it as being about like, don't forget me after our relationship is over.
01:30:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, I was going to say there's this, i I'm right, and it sounds like a like a kind of a love song that's sort of um haunting in the kind of metaphorical but not literal sense, right?
01:30:08
Nick Sturm
But there's also this, it's a love song.
01:30:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Though I haven't, ah you know, maybe that'll be next week on Close Readings, we'll do Simple Minds, but. um But yeah, i see i so i see um I see just what you mean. and i'm And I'm thinking also now of the, I mean, one thing that's kind of resonating at another level for me now is is the thing we we mentioned briefly at the outset with that that that comment she made before she read the poem that this was the final elegy she thought she she you know she wrote for her husband.
01:30:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
um this um kind of internalized and maybe lived sense or experience as you had it for us ah back then of um you know grief as something that is both kind of forever present as long as the the grieving person lives, um but also something that is, um i mean, not to be too cute about it or put too fine a point on it, like moved through or worked through so that there is a kind of time at which the mourning is put away um or or recedes into the into a deeper kind of background, you know?
01:31:36
Nick Sturm
who
01:31:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
01:31:43
Nick Sturm
yeah there there is a there's a a dh lawrence poem um oh build your ship of death for you will need it and that line is really important to both alice and to ted and i think what you're saying about the temporality of death i mean this to build the ship of death you know um dying isn't just one thing that you do um for yourself or for anyone who continues to live.
01:32:13
Nick Sturm
And, you know, I think this poem is part of the ship of death um for Ted, but also for her. um And there's like, there's a reference to the, at night, the states, the 14 pieces, this really enigmatic kind of specificity And and that the 14 pieces refers to something that Alice said to Ted the day before he died.
01:32:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:32:39
Nick Sturm
um ah kind of She described it as like a last rite that she was performing in the ambiguity of not being sure if he would live or not. And she said, may the 14 pieces of Osiris now be joined together, which is a reference to this this Egyptian mythology of Osiris.
01:33:01
Nick Sturm
The god Osiris in human form is dismembered into 14 pieces to be distributed across um Egypt. And so there's this mystical kind of occult feeling there.
01:33:16
Nick Sturm
But then 14, of course, is also the number of lines in a sonnet and the resonance of um that.
01:33:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
a hugely important forum for both of them, right?
01:33:26
Nick Sturm
Exactly.
01:33:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
But for him, yeah, right.
01:33:26
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:33:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, that's so interesting.
01:33:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
i'm i'm I'm thinking, i think, in in relation to to some of what you were just saying, though, to be honest, the line has sort of stuck with me. um The stanza that begins at night, the States, it it's a somewhat earlier, at night, the States, and when you go down to Washington, that um that stanza ends, what's done is perfection.
01:33:49
Nick Sturm
Yeah. Hmm.
01:33:57
Nick Sturm
yeah
01:33:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
um reminds me of that um perhaps final poem of um of sylvia plath's edge that the woman is perfected um as a you know people want to read that poem as a as a kind of suicide note or something right but the drawing out some of the etymological um
01:34:17
Nick Sturm
who
01:34:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah origins of perfect as sort of completed, right? um Rather than flawless, but but simply sort of done.
01:34:27
Nick Sturm
who yeah
01:34:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. yeah
01:34:33
Nick Sturm
yeah i think in that phrase too and it's one of the most poignant and beautiful and moving um statements of the poem what's done is perfection and when i think of alice's entire work i i think of the united states this book in united states has really a hinge between ah kind of um there's all this work from the seventies and the early eighties. That's really, um, it's, it's spacious and full of voices. It's symphonic and, um, poly vocal and funny. And then there's this moment where everything changes, you know, and what, so there's a, something's done and then it having to, and completing this book, um,
01:35:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:35:21
Nick Sturm
initiates her into the moment where she begins to be focused on the epic poems, um these visionary epic poems. I mean, and not just Descent of Alette, but um Close to Me and Closer, The Language of Heaven and Desimer, which are two poems published simultaneously in one book where, like, she's channeling the voice of Robert Desnos in the desert, you know, like,
01:35:46
Nick Sturm
And within 10 years, not even 10 years, there's that complete transformation and right in the middle of it is is this poem.
01:35:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:35:58
Nick Sturm
I think in this, i I've been listening to that Simple Minds song a lot and thinking it's really terrific, but like the um the whole thing about Call My Name, I mean, she's circling around that lyric really heavily toward the end of the poem.
01:36:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, I'm still thinking about it. Go on. Yeah.
01:36:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:36:16
Nick Sturm
um And it's such a kind of plea, like, will you call my name? Like, well will I, this I that so saturates the poem, continue?
01:36:28
Nick Sturm
Or how do I continue? I must continue in some other form, right? This I. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:36:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, being alone, I call out my name. And once you did too, right? Yeah.
01:36:40
Nick Sturm
the
01:36:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. um The, the, I mean, to think of the poem as elegy maybe. And I think you said, um you know, one of the things this poem was doing was um sort of revising or, or, or,
01:36:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
or
01:36:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
metabolizing in some way the um the tradition of elegy. um Elegy can address the lost, you know, the beloved who's absent, you know, um and can try, you know, i don't know, I'm thinking of like...
01:37:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
licitus or something, you know, um, to, to act as though, um, uh, the, the dead is kind of reanimated or still present, um, or, or the, you know, there's a kind of drama in the poem wanting to stage that, um, attempt, but, um, but here there's a, there's a, seems to be a kind of, um,
01:37:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
longing for or awareness of the thing that can't quite be accomplished is to hear her name and his voice. Right. to
01:37:56
Nick Sturm
yeah yeah, absolutely.
01:37:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
um and and and And then the question is like, well, what does poetry do and in in the face of that kind of um impossibility?
01:38:11
Nick Sturm
Yeah. I mean, she's kind of transmuting, um
01:38:18
Nick Sturm
this being this presence into words. I mean, you know, she's acknowledging that that's what one does. You you like transmute or transform you. Um, they crystallize in a different form and the, and the form is words.
01:38:34
Nick Sturm
Um,
01:38:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
but but she doesn't seem to be happy with that right
01:38:38
Nick Sturm
Well, no, yeah, there's like, I mean, there is a hard edge to the poem in a lot of ways, you know, like when she says, um I mean, one of the most, i
01:38:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
should we talk about the final stanza is that where you were going to go or no yeah mm-hmm
01:38:48
Nick Sturm
well, was going to say there's there's a moment like in the middle of the poem where she asks at the end of a stanza, who are you to dare sing to me?
01:38:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
01:38:56
Nick Sturm
You know, that kind of like, there's a standoffishness and like a sense of refusal um that is um like my experience of grief will not be,
01:39:08
Nick Sturm
translatable, you know, like, and even to herself, she even, I think, turning that onto herself, like, this isn't simple, straightforward, easy or clear. It's, um um you know, it's it's impossible to do.
01:39:27
Nick Sturm
um but that sense of refusal is just completely embedded up throughout her entire work and her entire being.
01:39:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:39:34
Nick Sturm
um But you're right, I mean, at the end, of the poem when she's thinking about words and what words do.
01:39:45
Nick Sturm
Yeah.
01:39:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
do would Would you be willing to to read the um the final stanza out loud?
01:39:48
Nick Sturm
Yeah.
01:39:51
Nick Sturm
yeah
01:39:54
Nick Sturm
At night, this states, you who are alive, you who are dead, when I love you alone all night, and that is what I do until I could never write from your being enough.
01:40:04
Nick Sturm
I don't want that trick of making it be coaxed from the words. Not tonight, I want it coaxed from myself, but being not that. But I'd feel more comfortable about it being words, if it were, if that's what it were.
01:40:20
Nick Sturm
For these are the states where what words are true, are words, not myself. Montana, Illinois, Escondido.
01:40:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
So we're going to have to get to those... ah really kind of haunting and strange final three words of the poem, which are place names um and and what's going on with those. But I want to, yeah, back up into this ah into this kind of frustration she has or this complaint or something she has about not one. I don't want that trick of making it be coaxed from the words, not tonight.
01:41:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Yeah, or what what do you think about That moment, Nick.
01:41:10
Nick Sturm
um Well, in Notley's Poetics up until this point, so throughout the 70s and into the early 80s, it's more complex than this, but to reduce it to kind of two impulses that she has like a heavy um focus on, it's a If I called it collage, she would be mad at me. But um like I'm thinking of her book, Alice ordered me to be made. There's a heavy collage aesthetic and a lot of what she's doing and she says it really clearly at times, like I would make lists of all these different words and um I just wanted to include as many beautiful words as possible to create as much harmony or disharmony.
01:41:52
Nick Sturm
And um there's one way that she was making these poems that was about accumulations of words. And so then like you generate a particular kind of direction or feeling or thinking out of that process.
01:42:05
Nick Sturm
And then the other kind of technique, um which is very heavy in Waltzing Matilda and How Spring Comes, which are both books that came out in 1981, where they're just filled with voices, just the voices of the people that were around her, her children, her friends, overheard speech, all of that um makes it into the surface of these very dense, long, um discordant poems.
01:42:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:42:28
Nick Sturm
And that doesn't seem to be available to her anymore those processes. And she's dealing with the unavailability of a technique and like her previous comfort with the technique.
01:42:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Sorry, neither neither of those seem available to her?
01:42:42
Nick Sturm
Like, ah
01:42:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
or or Yeah, right.
01:42:44
Nick Sturm
no, not, not in the way that, not in the way that her poems were produced before, you know, this is very different.
01:42:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:42:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:42:50
Nick Sturm
i mean, this poem is actually really singular. um
01:42:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:42:54
Nick Sturm
I mean, maybe there's one other poem called I, the People that is written in 1986. It's kind of similar to this and sounds similar, but to a different effect. So when she's saying, I don't want the trick of making it be coaxed from the
The Nature of Poems as Words
01:43:08
Nick Sturm
words, not tonight. I want it coaxed from myself, but even myself is not available, you know, but being not that I'm not myself, but I'd feel more comfortable about it being words if it were.
01:43:20
Nick Sturm
and that kind of um slip,
01:43:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
If that's what it were, yeah.
01:43:23
Nick Sturm
that's that slip into like, well, okay, poems are made of words, but they're actually, she's saying, aren't they made of something that's much ah less material than that? Like, um that's not, that you can't account for.
01:43:37
Nick Sturm
If that's what it were, for these are the states. So it's almost like this definitional moment. These are the states where what words are true are words, the the very kind of Steinian wraparound, um,
01:43:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:43:52
Nick Sturm
you know, I don't think meant to be untangled exactly, our words, not myself.
01:43:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Where not myself.
01:43:57
Nick Sturm
You know, I'm not, i I don't make this in this kind of simple sense. um There's a kind of um like ghostly, almost like Jack Spicer-esque quality of um transmission.
01:44:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Right. ah Perhaps to be contrasted with the the kind of tradition that I always thought that, you know, um Wallace Stevens put it very pithily.
01:44:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
He said, a poem's words are of things that do not exist without the words, right?
01:44:36
Nick Sturm
pivot
01:44:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Which is this kind of like modernist, but um you know, kind of sense that, you know, you know, it's related to the Williams, you know, that the, that the, the words in a poem aren't referential.
01:44:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
They're like things right there, or they, they make things.
01:44:53
Nick Sturm
Yes, yes.
01:44:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
They're more like a, and, um, uh, Stevens wouldn't have put it this way. Williams certainly not, but they're more like magic or something, right. They, they sort of bring a thing into being that rather than describe something in the world.
01:45:02
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm.
01:45:06
Nick Sturm
Yes.
01:45:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, but, but,
01:45:07
Nick Sturm
Yeah.
01:45:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
But here there's a, I don't know, that not myself seems to want to kind of um describe a somewhat different um ah theory of poetics.
01:45:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Spicer is an interesting ah poet to have in mind here, right, where there is something kind of... Yeah, like transmission or ghostly or kind of uncanny in the wish that's articulated there about about what the poem might be doing or what a poem might be doing.
01:45:36
Nick Sturm
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
01:45:41
Nick Sturm
Well, and what you said, what you're saying um echoes with an earlier line when she says at night, the state's making life, not explaining anything, right?
01:45:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, i love that line. Yeah.
01:45:51
Nick Sturm
That is a kind of encapsulation of what this poem does.
01:45:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Making life not explaining anything.
01:45:56
Nick Sturm
But then, yeah, it's one of the kind of talismanic things you walk away with this poem from, right?
01:46:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:46:03
Nick Sturm
um
01:46:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
I thought that, yeah, go ahead.
01:46:04
Nick Sturm
But then there's less...
Significance of Place Names
01:46:06
Nick Sturm
ah what what I was going to say, well, the last three words of the poem, um Montana, Illinois, Escondido, the the map I was describing earlier that in the original book, the drawing by George Schneeman that precedes the poem, the three words that identify different locations on this imagined fictional map are Montana, Illinois, Escondido.
01:46:30
Nick Sturm
um and I think, you know, she's having fun here with the place names Montana and Illinois. there's There's no, like, um biographical thing to read into those.
01:46:44
Nick Sturm
You know, like, her and Ted Berrigan did live in Chicago, Illinois for two years. But, like, that's, yeah, it doesn't matter.
01:46:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah So what?
01:46:50
Nick Sturm
Yeah, it's it's the joy of, you know, these American words, Montana, Illinois. And then Escondido sort of two states,
01:47:02
Nick Sturm
Escondido is a town outside of San Diego, but um that also seems to be largely irrelevant.
01:47:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
San Diego, yeah.
01:47:13
Nick Sturm
What's more important is, yes, it's a place name, but um Escondido is also the Spanish word for hidden. And
01:47:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:47:24
Nick Sturm
thinking of um how this poem is trying to sort through all of the mysteries the um just unbearable ongoing pain of particular losses and what you as the person in the closest proximity to that loss get to um keep for yourself, like what stays a secret that only you will ever have access to because she's
01:47:58
Nick Sturm
she's hyper aware that Ted Berrigan is this poet who has a lot of people gathered around him. And there was a lot of kind of, it was difficult because people tried to kind of claim Ted Berrigan in different ways in the aftermath of his death. And, um and Alice didn't do that for herself, you know, like that, that
01:48:22
Nick Sturm
there was a kind of threat, you know, that other people are kind of just, taking things for themselves, but she's kind of um reiterating this like crystalline center of pain that she gets to keep, I think.
01:48:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
keep as hidden in ah in a way that in a way that there there couldn't be a I mean, i guess there might be, im i'm i was I was imagining like the poem in and some anthology in some future edition in which there were annotations.
01:48:40
Nick Sturm
And, right.
01:48:54
Nick Sturm
Hmm.
01:48:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Presumably there would be one that that noted that Escondido etymologically, as you gave us the gloss, comes from the word for hidden. but it But it wouldn't be as though like, ah right, there would be biographical kind of pinning down of these places a significant, that that in a way the word is there as a kind of um as as a kind of um barrier rather than as a like a permeable membrane.
01:49:25
Nick Sturm
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:49:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's like the opposite of an Easter egg or something, you know?
01:49:31
Nick Sturm
It's also like a way of ending this poem which is so heavily charged and trance-like and ritualistic with almost like a kind of folksy flavor to it.
01:49:42
Nick Sturm
um Like Montana, Illinois, Escondido, there's like a kind of country Western feeling that I get that is it's actually really lighthearted.
01:49:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:49:51
Nick Sturm
um And in in the sense of folk music also being a form of music that's passed down outside of eyes, you know, they're not original tunes.
Influence of Folk Music and Symbolism
01:50:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah,
01:50:02
Nick Sturm
um And you know the not myself preceding that, there's folk music has a ah deep is deeply embedded in Ali's poetics. And there's something really celebratory, I think, in the final list.
01:50:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah there's something interesting about the the fact that I mean, the place names are like real place names. ah that means Presumably she could have, you know, with with capitalization or whatever and some ingenuity come up with things that sounded like place names but weren't locatable on any map.
01:50:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
She didn't do that, nor did she simply list like the places where they'd lived together that were most obviously significant for the two of them.
01:50:40
Nick Sturm
Yes. Yes.
01:50:49
Nick Sturm
Yes.
01:50:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's sort of neither of those things, which makes it seem like it exists in some kind of
01:50:53
Nick Sturm
yeah
01:51:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
mythological map or something, but maybe that's not the right word. I guess that's what the fanciful place names would have done in the same way that the map that you should, you know, you held up, which maybe we can figure out a way to make that image available of that drawing.
01:51:04
Nick Sturm
yes
01:51:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
01:51:13
Nick Sturm
Yeah.
01:51:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah You said it's like not a real map, but when you hold it up, like I looked at it and I'm like, well, kind of looks like America, but not really, you know, like, yeah.
01:51:26
Nick Sturm
Yeah. Almost like if you squished it together, I mean, it kind of looks like, um, kind of looks like Ohio if you like mirrored it or it also like, you could say it kind of vaguely looks like, um, a heart almost anatomically, but then that would be like imbuing it with a lot of, you know, symbolism.
01:51:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Or like a part of America. Right.
01:51:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:51:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:51:44
Nick Sturm
I mean, it is like a kind of, the image itself I think is very powerful.
01:51:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:51:48
Nick Sturm
I mean, I have it um tattooed on my forearm, this map.
01:51:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
You've got a tattoo of it. Yeah.
01:51:52
Nick Sturm
And, um you know, it's, well, I was thinking actually when um we were listening to the recording this time that there's this one line I had never kind of been able to figure out what i what to do with in the seventh stanza. She says, um everybody in any room is a smuggler.
01:52:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:52:12
Nick Sturm
And I realized, i mean, smuggling, you know, it's when you're taking things across states, right?
01:52:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:52:17
Nick Sturm
Or or between states.
01:52:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:52:19
Nick Sturm
And um yes, exactly, exactly.
01:52:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
That are hidden.
Poem's Mystique and Podcast Conclusion
01:52:23
Nick Sturm
And so, um I mean, if this poem is an allergy, I think it's showing us um this kind of the potential of allergy really, which is that it doesn't give you the person who it's who is the subject, right?
01:52:41
Nick Sturm
It actually, It produces this kind of, it produces a work that does not contain that person in any way. it is It is words, it's music, and it's the person who's producing it.
01:52:55
Nick Sturm
And it just is drenched with mystery. And that's like the capacity of allergy.
01:52:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
01:53:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, that's, I think that's a ah beautiful place for us to end, Nick. I know we've been talking for a really long time. There is this sort of tradition on the podcast to listening to the poem again. Her reading is so extraordinary that I'm inclined to say, like, I'm just going to play it again right now so that people can hear her voice um one more time.
01:53:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
um, and um and if if you if you listener who've made it nearly two hours into this conversation think well i heard it once i don't need to hear it again then um i'm going to say farewell to you um here but um but ah you know i i think especially in light of our passing i i'd appreciate hearing not least voice again so we're going to listen to that recording and um and then that's the end of the episode so um Thank you very much, everyone, for um for joining um us for this conversation. And I'll have more for you soon.
01:54:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Here's Alice Notley.
01:55:27
Nick Sturm
you
01:57:57
Nick Sturm
you.
02:01:04
Nick Sturm
Thank
02:01:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
Thank you.