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Joyelle McSweeney on Alice Notley (The Descent of Alette)
2 Plays1 minute ago
The second in a series of conversations about the poet Alice Notley, who passed away on May 19, 2025. The poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney joins the podcast to talk about selections from Notley's epic The Descent of Alette.
(A brief note on audio quality: we listen to three recordings of Notley reading from her book during this episode. The volume on playback of those recordings seems somewhat low to me—sorry!—but hopefully listeners will be able to adjust the volume on their devices so as to hear Notley well enough.)
Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of ten books of poetry, drama and prose, a well-known critic, and a vital publisher of international literature in translation. McSweeney's latest book, Death Styles, appeared from Nightboat Books in Spring 2024; her previous title, Toxicon and Arachne (2020), was called "frightening and brilliant" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker and earned her the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her 2014 essay collection, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, is widely regarded as a visionary work of eco-criticism. Her debut poetry volume, The Red Bird, inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2001. With Johannes Göransson, she co-edits the international press Action Books, which has built readerships for a diverse array of US and international authors from Griffin Prize winners Kim Hyesoon and Don Mee Choi to Daniel Borzutzky and Raúl Zurita. She lives in South Bend, Indiana and teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
You can see Alice Notley read the entirety of The Descent of Alette in a series of recordings made over two nights at The Poetry Center at SFSU.
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Alice Notley Discussion
00:00:00
Joyelle
Thank you.
00:00:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hello everyone and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javadizadeh, and um I'm joined here today with ah by Joelle McSweeney, um who's here to talk ah to me and to you about the poet Alice Notley.
00:00:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
who died ah very recently. ah This, I think, will be the second of, um I think, three conversations that I'll have on this podcast about Notley.
00:00:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Joyelle is someone... ah I was just talking to her before we started recording that I've known of for a while that I've been sort of in contact with over textual forms for a little bit.
00:00:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah But this is our first chance to talk to each other. And I've just really been looking forward to this occasion. I didn't know that um the death of this marvelous poet would be the the the first occasion for it. But I'm i'm i'm i really grateful to Joyelle for joining us on the podcast today.
Joelle McSweeney on 'The Descent of Allette'
00:01:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
I asked her what she might want to talk about if she did want to come on and talk about Notley. And it was a bit of a ah ah change from the usual ah procedure on this podcast because Joyelle's choice, and I think it's been a brilliant one, is to come on to talk about not a single short poem by Notley, but instead...
00:01:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
an epic poem by Alice Notley called The Descent of Aulette. um We will have ah a way of trying to talk about that. So that's a book for for those of you who don't know. um and um And we we have chosen three selections from, after much back and forth, in fact, about which three selections, we have chosen three selections to try to give you as listeners an impression of the book as a whole, but to sort of metonymically represent it in some way um for the sake of this conversation.
00:02:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
um We'll have lots more to say about that, obviously, in a moment. Let me tell you first about Joelle McSweeney.
Joelle's Background and Connection to Alice Notley
00:02:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
um She is the author of 10 books of poetry, drama, and prose, a number I can hardly believe.
00:02:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah Her most recent book is a book of poems called Death Styles, which was published by Night Boat Books in 2024, and her previous book, also a book of poetry called Toxicon and Arachne, also published by Nightboat, that in 2020, is ah it's just ah um a marvelous and heartbreaking and beautiful book.
00:02:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
um The critic Dan Chason, the former Close Readings guest Dan Chason, um in the New Yorker reviewed that book and called it frightening and brilliant. And I heartily agree with Dan um in that categorization of Toxicon and Arachne and indeed of Death Styles, Death Styles II. I think that description rather well captures both of those books.
00:03:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
um That book, Toxicon and Arachne also won the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. ah But that is not the only one of Joyelle's honors. She's also the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, um among many other honors. One that is that I mentioned because it it too has a kind of ah relationship to the podcast is that her debut book, um The Red Bird, which came out in 2001, was selected by Alan Grossman um as the inaugural book, I think, in the Fence Modern Poets series. alan Grossman wrote,
00:03:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
Alas, was never a guest on Close Readings, but he was the subject of an episode of Close Readings. For um for those of you who have been longtime fans of the podcast, go back and look for the Alan Grossman episode.
00:04:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Back to Joyelle. She's also um ah the co-editor with Johannes Gauronson of um the International Press Action Books, and um She's the author of, among other books, an essay collection called Necropastoral Poetry, Media, and Occults that came out in 2014.
00:04:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
and she's a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and lives in South Bend. Joyelle and i were joking before the episode began about how we are both professors of English at Catholic universities, and she was congratulating me on the election of our new pope, who is a Villanova alum.
00:04:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
I should ah should um take that victory lap where I can, I suppose. um Joyelle is a marvelous poet. She is someone who is alive, like hyper alive to the sonic possibilities of poetry, to the way that the poetry sounds, to the kinds of sounds it can make in your head, in your mouth, in the rest of your body.
00:05:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
um She's also though steeped in the long and multilingual history of poetry. um I'm thinking, for instance, in Toxicon and Arachne of the crown of sonnets included in that book on the um the poet, or sort of centered on the poet John Keats, and on his illness and death. um and She's also, though, always seeming to live or to write as though life were poetry, or or rather as though life...
00:05:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
might always erupt into or descend into poetry. um Her writing is full-throated and is soaked through um with life, with its joys, with its ah sorrows, with its extremity, and um and also with its everyday continuance. um And so,
00:06:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
I'm just so honored to have a poet and a writer like Joelle McSweeney join Close Readings. i'm I'm really touched to have her join us to talk about a poet that I think she has a lot um in common with, I have to say, the poet Alice Notley.
00:06:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
And so with that, I want to welcome you, Joelle, to Close Readings and to ask you how you're feeling today.
Influence of 'The Descent of Allette' on Joelle
00:06:50
Joyelle
Oh, thank you so much for having me on. I am so glad we're doing this together. um I've been looking forward to speaking with you about Alice Notley and about Descent of Allet and working through, seeing what we convey about its shapeliness and its shape as well as its particulars. um It's important to me and it's an important book.
00:07:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Good, yeah. um Charles, just, just um I mean, we've had ah um and an episode already where um Nick Sturm, the scholar and critic and editor, has done some useful sort of setting up of who Notley was in terms of literary history and the history of poetry and so on. So we don't need to, you know,
00:07:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
you you know, burn our valuable time here rehearsing that necessarily. But I just, I guess I'm curious from a kind of personal point of view for you, um how and when it was that you became a reader of Alice Notley, ah first of all. um I take it, it's that maybe you met her or that public conversation read with her perhaps a couple of times or something like that.
00:08:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Maybe tell us what that was like, but but maybe just begin at the beginning. like How did you get to become a reader of Alice Notley?
00:08:08
Joyelle
Well, like all good stories, like collasso says ah like Roberto Colasso says, um you should be suspicious of any myth that only has one version. So I can tell this story in a couple versions.
00:08:20
Joyelle
And for the purposes of this podcast, um there's this there's like an occult poetry version of it, which is that when I was in graduate school at Iowa,
00:08:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:08:31
Joyelle
um I had had a very traditional and even classical poetry education. i was lucky enough to study Latin at our public high school. And so when you study Latin, you know, they they give you Catullus and Horus and they don't even edit.
00:08:46
Joyelle
They don't even baudelarize it. They just give it to you. And then, you know, ah and the Aeneid. ah So I had a sense of poetry's bigness and its particularity from the beginning. and And to be honest, I don't think poetry was taught anywhere else in that high school curriculum.
00:09:01
Joyelle
Only i don't remember doing it and certainly not the techniques or the way to discuss poetry. Technically, definitely not.
00:09:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
00:09:08
Joyelle
So I was lucky that my first introduction to poetry was, you know, such a big model. And also, again, it it's salacious, it's pious, it's imperial, it's defeated, it's grief struck, like all the things Latin poetry can be.
00:09:25
Joyelle
And then I went to Harvard and had a pretty canonical ah introduction to American poetry. i think I'd only read one book of contemporary poetry, which was Charles Simic's World Doesn't End. I think that was it.
00:09:39
Joyelle
um So by the time I got to writing school, I had a really good historical foundation, tiny amount of modern poet. I read Irish poetry, so I had some modern poetry. But I certainly hadn't read anything like Notley.
00:09:53
Joyelle
And then I won a little poetry contest where the prize was a gift certificate to that poetry bookstore, to the poetry section. i So I was thinking about the poetry bookstore. um I guess they have other books, Prairie Lights in Iowa City.
00:10:09
Joyelle
And I could just pick books off the shelves and read them. And I should say for the purposes of our conversation that the judge of that contest turned out to have been Josh Clover.
00:10:21
Joyelle
who was another star that we never thought would go out in the sky. and In my sky map of poetry, which is, of course, a nocturnal one, it never occurred to me that that would not be one of the stars.
00:10:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
wow
00:10:32
Joyelle
So I'm thinking of him having this conversation. We didn't know each other, certainly. um And that's how I got my hands on this book, ah by the happenstance of bookshelves, by the sorties, you know, divination of of ah bookstores. I got my hands on this book and I opened it up.
00:10:51
Joyelle
And
00:10:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
So this was the first Notley that you read.
00:10:55
Joyelle
that was my first introduction, was this book, this introduction to Notley.
00:10:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
00:11:00
Joyelle
And I had had all this epic training, and so i that was the way I wanted to read it from beginning to end, to see to see what kind of story and what kind of model was being driven driven through here.
00:11:11
Joyelle
um And then I read Disobedience, which is ah her her next big book after this one, which even wilder. It's set in the city of Paris with a Colombo-like American detective and their own kind of like a cosmic detection streak. And that blew my mind. And actually, i was dazzled by that, by all the light in that book. And that made me go back to Allette.
00:11:32
Joyelle
And instead of reading it like ah you know like a student, who wanted to understand the epic and then understand what a modern epic might be, I went back to it ah and read it in like, this is the dark book, that's the light book, what's happening here? And then I just locked into Alet.
00:11:48
Joyelle
And although I still love Disobedience and I like read it and I flip through it, it's Alet that is a source code for me. Like it is grounding, I refer to it, I think about it, I refer, to i like reread the more iconic, the ones that are like shaped like emblems or icons in my head.
00:12:04
Joyelle
And I think about how this work came out of not out of not. And yes, I did meet her a few times. I'm not one of these people that had the luck to know her very well or have serious conversation or and irascible conversation or a friendly one or just, you know, we just had passing remarks ah events.
00:12:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm. Hmm.
00:12:22
Joyelle
But, um, I just, this the fierceness of that woman and so way that the way this um book serves as kind of ah a hinge or like a keyhole or in her career um from those amazing and remarkable shorter poems to the like the huge vision of the second half of her career. And this is the book where it all happens.
00:12:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. um There's so many doors that I kind of want to step through right now, but I have to do it in some kind of order.
00:12:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
So let me ask you first just... first just ah for For people who are totally uninitiated, and obviously, but well, you know, there are people listening right now, no doubt, you know, who treasure this book and have read it a million times and have, um you know, inhabit it inhabited it in one way or another. And there are other people um who don't know quite what it is we're talking about. So how would you...
00:12:54
Joyelle
Yeah.
00:13:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
you know, describe or or say in just a few words, like, what the book is. um Let's imagine we're talking to a you know, in a classroom of undergraduates or something like that who are getting their first introduction to Notley.
00:13:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
What should they know about it, you know?
00:13:41
Joyelle
Well, the first one I would say is that while we've been calling it an epic poem, don't be afraid of that term. This is not like lifting debt like a dead weight or something. This is a novella length book. It has a strong story and something like a protagonist and something like an antagonist, and it will pull you right along. As soon as you get used to this voice, you're in.
00:14:01
Joyelle
So that's the first thing I would say to somebody who's like, what why why would I even want another epic poem? We have enough.
00:14:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right. Mm-hmm.
00:14:08
Joyelle
um But there is a story here. And what seems to be going on is that our protagonist, who we are told from the title is called Alette, and who is a younger woman, awakes and finds herself on a subway and realized she's been on the subway her whole life, maybe. Maybe we've all been on the subway our whole life.
00:14:32
Joyelle
but as she rides on the subway, she comes to understand certain things about the world. She sees these spectacular, nightmarish, intimate, convivial, surprising things on the subway, as we all do when we step on and off subway platforms.
00:14:46
Joyelle
And they begin to assemble themselves into a vision of the world where she starts to realize that there is a figure in this world that they refer to as the tyrant.
00:14:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
you
00:14:56
Joyelle
He's very he's both elusive and omnipresent. and that she is being pulled into this world because she has something to do with this tyrant. She has to find him. And as she goes along, she has lots of conversations with people. They might be people, they might be figures, they might be ghosts, they might be traps.
00:15:13
Joyelle
We don't know who they are. That seemed to point her further and further. you have to go after him. You have to go after the tyrant. He owns everything. He owns all of us. Only you can do it, et cetera.
00:15:24
Joyelle
And she, almost without... without agency, which is strange for a hero, starts moving along this sort of path of a heroine until the final part where she finally shows up at the tyrant's many mansions.
00:15:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
Amen.
00:15:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Though I guess because it's um she's on a subway car, or she's all on a subway train, maybe I should say it first. Whatever path she's on, i mean, I'm trying to think, and maybe we should talk a little bit about um analogs and other kinds of epics or tropes in epic that this poem picks up or um ah um you know inhabits in one way or another.
00:16:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
she's pulled along on that, at least at first it would seem, on that track without much sort of volition of her own or um decision um on her, right?
00:16:19
Joyelle
Right. Yeah.
00:16:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
You're on a track, you're not. um In the middle of the ah in my life, I found myself in a dark wood, you know, to to to give the first lines of um Dante's epic.
00:16:23
Joyelle
but
00:16:27
Joyelle
yeah
00:16:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
um presumably Dante, though quickly, I guess his path too is constrained and he has to go a certain way and so forth. um Yeah, she's on a kind of path. That's so interesting that she wakes up in that condition already. Yeah.
00:16:49
Joyelle
yeah And I think that she, she, Ouellette, and possibly she, Notley, are ambivalent about this.
Themes in 'The Descent of Allette': Feminine Epic and Personal Loss
00:16:56
Joyelle
And to be honest with you, it's the ambivalence that keeps me coming back.
00:17:00
Joyelle
Like, on the way, and I think it could characterize a lot of, a lot of this poem is the figure of Ouellette, um, is being moved, ah is like sort of the receptacle for these impressions and these stories and these dialogues and these incredible apparitions.
00:17:16
Joyelle
um And she feels ambivalent upon like acting on the information that's given to her because she doesn't want to kill. And they all seem to be pointing towards like only you, you can destroy, you can destroy the the Tyrant, capital T Tyrant.
00:17:31
Joyelle
um And she doesn't, she doesn't want to kill. And so her interactions are both like kind of ah thrilling and somehow ambivalent and there's this like residual ambivalence in them.
00:17:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
And you hear, you sorry, you hear that ambivalence in Notley too, not just in Alette.
00:17:44
Joyelle
And I think
00:17:49
Joyelle
I hear that ambivalence.
00:17:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:17:50
Joyelle
um and Now I want to qualify the way I use the term ambivalence, like in America, like we often use it when we say like neutral or indifferent. But I mean it like ambidextrous, you know, like a double strength, like two things are very strong here.
00:18:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:18:05
Joyelle
And for Notley, for me personally, um the inception of this poem, I think she was already thinking in terms of like, what would a feminine epic be? That's the phrase she has, like what would an epic written with a female protagonist, but also um specifically because her her brother had whose name was Al, um had been in Vietnam and came back um with what quickly revealed itself to be like very acute PTSD and and ah heroin addiction.
00:18:38
Joyelle
um He was in treatment for those things when he died an inverted overdose. And
00:18:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Amen. Amen.
00:18:47
Joyelle
it made, Notley by her own account in the different essays and talks she gave about this book, um I gave urgency to some thinking that she was already doing, ah which is this like, on the one hand, I think of Notley as, you know, of having almost like a goddess, like fierceness, but also a rejection of war.
00:19:04
Joyelle
And so if you're both those things, if you're both like fierce and and you have that kind of yeah ah composure of a goddess and extension of a goddess, but you're also very ambivalent about aggression and violence and specifically war as something that in her writing, she says like, you know, when her brother died, she realized that she and her mother and her sister-in-law were just kind of adjacent to the structure of war that they had no participation in.
00:19:33
Joyelle
um That was the way she was thinking about it at the time. And so I think she sends Alette into this book and on this quest. And I think the idea of being like, kind of, this is just my own take on it. um
00:19:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's what we're here for.
00:19:49
Joyelle
ah the You know, like an instinct for vengeance that a god, or at least implacability that a goddess might have, but also a rejection of killing and and a rejection of a war.
00:19:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:20:00
Joyelle
Like, how can you have both? How can you have an epic that doesn't center a war or that doesn't like
00:20:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:20:06
Joyelle
glorify war,
00:20:09
Joyelle
like, can you? ah and And I think that this ambivalence is actually an important engine of this poem, um that she has led into these situations and like prepared for something that feels like it's going to be a climactic battle.
00:20:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:20:24
Joyelle
And she is ambivalent about it. And there's even a part where um
00:20:30
Joyelle
She says about two thirds through the book, she meets different figures, she meets different animals, they're like preparing her for this. And like, it's it's much more um trippy, I think that I'm making it sound because there's all kinds of like modern artifacts scattered through it as well. It's not as if she's in a mythical, hold on, the heating in this building keeps coming on and off.
00:20:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
okay.
00:20:50
Joyelle
um It's not like she's in just a mythical place.
00:20:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
00:20:52
Joyelle
It's a subway, it's an underground and it's full of like contemporary figures and detritus and garbage and technology and everything as well. um But she makes these strange moves like everyone's preparing her like you have to find some way to destroy this guy. And they find a piece of lapis lazuli, which they take to be a piece of the tyrant's heart.
00:21:11
Joyelle
And she picks it up and they said, What are you going to do with that? and she said, I'm going to give it back to him. I'm going to give it to him. And it's like ah right before the climactic battle. So it's like, well, wait what is happening?
00:21:21
Joyelle
What is being exchanged here? What is what's the transaction?
00:21:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. yeah
00:21:25
Joyelle
um But I think that's what keeps this poem alive. for me as a reader is to like constantly re-encounter her like complete ambivalence about the idea of, of taking on the mantle of violence or like the violent Avenger, even though she is implacable, strong, resourceful, all those things that I also think of it Alice Notley as being.
00:21:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
and
00:21:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, that's that's so that's so wonderful. um and but you In just a moment, I think I want for us to like dive in to the first passage that we've selected for people to, for us to discuss, but but but maybe just as one last kind of preparatory note before we get there.
00:22:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
um I mean, you told this very moving story in which um you discovered Notley just at the beginning of what you didn't call it this, but I will. Like your career as a poet, let's say, like your real sort of education as a poet or something, formal education as a poet.
00:22:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Here we are, you know, I won't say necessarily how many years later, but, if you know, in middle age, a certain number of years later for for for both of us. And... um this is obviously a book that you've lived with for many years and in many different parts and stations of your own life.
00:22:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
And um I suppose this, you've already kind of intimated this in some ways in the answer you were just giving about what that ambivalence, let's say, has meant to you.
00:22:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
But if I could just ask you more broadly to say a word or two about um how this book that you purchased at Prairie Lights, you know, ah a couple of decades ago or whatever has
00:23:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
changed for you over the, or how your relationship to it has changed over the intervening years as, as you've, you know, as your life has, has gone along.
00:23:24
Joyelle
Well, it strikes me and I was just rereading it over the last few days that ah my that's the way my relationship to this book has changed might actually parallel the way not least changed as she was writing it.
Technical to Personal: Evolution of Notley's Projects
00:23:36
Joyelle
It began as somewhat much of an intellectual gambit for her, which it was like, I can write a long poem, what would that mean for someone like me to write a to write a long poem and claim all that space and write an epic poem?
00:23:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Mm-hmm.
00:23:45
Joyelle
What is a feminine eic as I was saying, like she was sort of thinking about it the way any of us might set a little prompt, and what happened or a big prompt and see what happened.
00:23:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:23:54
Joyelle
And then she had these series of losses, you know, um and, you know, first it was, of course, her first husband and then um her stepdaughter and then her brother, ah her father, not too long before. And actually, I want to jump back and say she has also said that her father who had passed came to her in a dream and told her not to harm anyone.
00:24:17
Joyelle
And she felt that he was telling her about the writing of the book that that
00:24:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm. Hmm.
00:24:22
Joyelle
that the instinct to harm, that Alec should resist the instinct towards harm in the book. So I want to say that to trouble the waters a little bit in case we say that, although this is, this is a, she called, she carefully called it a feminine epic, I think to make sure it didn't seem programmatically um easy to pin down or feminist politics would be easy to pin down. And one way that is the case is that the men aren't, even though she's going after the tyrant as instructed, ah never, at things aren't as black and white. And in this case, the,
00:24:52
Joyelle
the message ah that harm should be resisted come comes to Notley in real life in a dream from where her dead father speaks to her and tells her that. And this is a long way of saying that even as she was writing this book or conceiving of it and starting to draft it, it went from being um you know so an aesthetic project that was a technical one and that was intellectually ambitious to one that became laden with ghosts and grief and with like a real engagement Of course she was always engaged with this, but like, ah it's just an incredible engagement with um how do we, how do we go on with our ghosts?
00:25:31
Joyelle
um
00:25:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Haunted? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:25:33
Joyelle
What is survival in a land plagued, plagued is too negative maybe, like land, ahlan um
00:25:45
Joyelle
I'm trying to think, how do we use ghosts, the word ghosts in English language? What would be like, you want to use words like thronged or something, or these are all words that seem negative.
00:25:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
00:25:54
Joyelle
And so it's swarm, rife, rich seems too glib, populace with ghosts, um intimate with ghosts.
00:25:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
who
00:26:01
Joyelle
How do you, how do, how do those intimacies continue? And I think she gave an interview that's in the Paris review where she says that, you know she started to hear the dead.
00:26:13
Joyelle
after these losses. And you can actually see it in the middle of some of the poems that she was writing at this time, like the poem wrote for her stepdaughter finally ends. um I'm sorry for the feedback for your listeners, but finally ends with all these quoted voices, which is also the method of a let, which we'll get into in a minute to have a lot of quotations.
00:26:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:26:32
Joyelle
So this idea that like one thing that the survivor does is this listen to the dead and hear the dead. and And that's how she lived her survivorship of these incredible losses.
00:26:43
Joyelle
um And I think she actually had a like kind of a mission for America. don't know if she would put it that patriotically or if she would have thought the nation was like irredeemable, but that like it's dead were present.
00:26:54
Joyelle
And like they had to be brought into like the point of writing a public poem about a private grief would be to bring it into audition and bring bring the dead into sonic presence.
00:27:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:27:04
Joyelle
So at any rate, that's my take on the Notley side of things. Also, there's more we can say about her career afterwards, but I think it all is happening in this book, and that's why this book is so alive um with ideas and so alive with propulsion and resonance.
00:27:22
Joyelle
But obviously I am no longer 25 years old either. And like ah a young poet who is just looking to try things and maybe a little overeducated on some things. I'm very, very under undereducated on others.
00:27:34
Joyelle
um And again, when I first read it, i think I read it as like a formal take on the epic. Like I liked it a lot. Like it was great. And then I read the next thing on the shelf.
00:27:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:27:45
Joyelle
um But I think ah for me as somebody who has then lived a few more decades of life, um and I was, ah you could say i was definitely one of those lucky Americans good things happen and then my luck kind of ran out.
00:28:02
Joyelle
ah And i was, you know, ah a thing that a lot of people know about me because I've written two books about it is that, you know, we had a little baby who had an and like unexpected birth effect and died after just 13 days.
00:28:15
Joyelle
And I would say the word to describe how I feel about that now, and it was almost eight years ago is implacable. Like I am angry.
00:28:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:28:24
Joyelle
i am still angry. Like today i am angry. um
00:28:29
Joyelle
but in an implacable way, like I cannot be satisfied. No.
00:28:35
Joyelle
And I don't know what is going to satisfy me. I think I'm going to have to like fight this until the, I think I'm going to have to like, till the end of time be turning my time and possibly beyond my death be fighting this.
00:28:49
Joyelle
um And I think that I love the implacability of not late, but it's just behind The more fungible Alette.
00:29:01
Joyelle
Now, Alette does get up on her wings by the end, for sure.
00:29:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm.
00:29:04
Joyelle
But through a lot of the books, she's just receiving the things that are being told to her, reacting. Sometimes she remonstrates. But there's an implacability to this book, which is a fecund implacability.
00:29:15
Joyelle
It is rich. um It is dark. It is rich. It is dynamics like the richest mourning fabric, you know, like it is. There is a lot there. And it's not the brittleness of anger.
00:29:31
Joyelle
It's not the lacrimosity. um It's the implacability of grief. So I think that that's how it reads to me this time.
00:29:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
i'm glad i asked that's a um a fascinating answer and of course i'm i'm so sorry about the the grief that you felt and the reasons you've had for feeling it um that anger you describe is um
00:30:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
is fascinating to consider what, what happens to that feeling or does anything happen with or to that feeling out of, I don't know, when you, when you're feeling that way on a day like today and, and you you read a poem you or you read this poem, you know, like,
00:30:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
It sounds like you're you're identifying with part part of what's happening is that you're finding in Notley a kind of kindred spirit of implacability. but but i But I don't know.
00:30:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Is there a word maybe more to say about that before we move on?
00:30:36
Joyelle
Yeah, and I'd like to put out there that it's, again, it's ah yeah that's not, I know lots of people have extremely close relationships with Notley, and, you know, I was not one of those fortunate people, so this is a matter of the the the um the implacable um speaker of these essays, um and which many of which were talks, so they have a lot of voice to them, and
00:30:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh.
00:30:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
right. Yeah.
00:31:01
Joyelle
the kind of indefatigableness of these books and the idea that halfway through your career, well, ha I guess it was about halfway through her career, but you know in her 40s, she would um invent a new way of being, invent a new principle called disobedience. And that she discovered in the writing of this book, I take this book to be a place where you know, the idea of disobedience and nonconformity conformity to society's structures really presents itself to her in her writing and becomes the name of the next book and like, and you know, the method of the whole rest of her career and way of living outside the United States.
00:31:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:31:41
Joyelle
um Completely no conformity to American poetry expectations whatsoever, but just a relentless pursuit of where these poems were taking her. um
00:31:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
no
00:31:52
Joyelle
just today, that's something I really relate to and that I want to hold up as an aegis.
00:31:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
good
00:31:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Good. Let's listen to the um the first poem we've selected, which um is the first ah bit of poetry. mean, not the very first words. There's an author's note, which is maybe worth returning to at some point.
00:32:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
But the first poem, quote unquote, I mean, sorry, why am I using the quote unquote, which is, I guess, an ironic thing to do in relation to this poem. But um ah There are terms that that you know poets and ah poetry critics and scholars get hung up on that maybe the general kind of poetry admiring public, to be except the extent that there is one out there, doesn't care as much about these terms that we've been kind of tossing around, epic today, lyric.
00:32:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
um ah Maybe we can have more to say about that. I guess I would just say that the structure of this book is that there are ah there are um sections of what seem to be roughly page-length poems um But given that the book is an epic, it's maybe you'll hear me hemming and hawing about whether we should call them poems each themselves or whether they these are you know sections of one poem that is a book length poem. um I don't think we necessarily need to get hung up on that.
00:33:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
um here, but let me play the first poem in the book ah for you now. This is a recording of Notley reading it. We'll listen um and then we'll talk. we will I will have made a link available so that you'll be able but a look at the text of this poem as well, but let's listen to Notley read.
00:34:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
um What an opening, Joelle. What do you make, i mean, so much to say, obviously, what do you make of this as an opening?
00:34:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Like, um if i if I were to ask you just to think about not only sort of what impression this poem creates for you, sort of abstracted from the book, but as the first page of the book, what what strikes you about this as a beginning?
00:35:07
Joyelle
Well, I think you were right on the money when you spoke about, you know, it does have that Dantean feel, you know, you know, I woke in in the middle of my life. um I woke in the dark grove and I had lost my way from the true path. And then, you know,
00:35:21
Joyelle
And then the poem begins ah here. i think she definitely invites herself to that mode. One day i awoke, but I think by the end of the first line, we're totally somewhere else and found myself on on a subway endlessly.
00:35:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Amen.
00:35:35
Joyelle
i think um there's lots of things we could say as poetry professors about climbing down to the station of the Metro and like opening your epic there and just being that audacious to just do it. And so economically, like we've been saying the word epic, which is scary and sounds big.
00:35:51
Joyelle
She does that in a single line. One day I woke and found myself on a subway endlessly. just like claims for herself an urban, contemporary, epic, rattly, dark space that we already know is underground, um that already feels gray, that already feels both like mundane and kind of freighted.
00:36:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Yeah. Right.
Analysis of 'The Descent of Allette'
00:36:11
Joyelle
um So much happens in one sentence there. And um So i I just think there's a mightiness to that. There's a mightiness to that move. And yet it is a mundane mightiness.
00:36:22
Joyelle
Like it's not, it's not alienating. We don't have to like, you know, it looks like the world we're in. And that is one of the sort of, I want to say tricks of the book, because it is a little tricky, tricky tropey, tricky, that this world is very recognizable.
00:36:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
00:36:44
Joyelle
And it is always calling attention to like what is perceived and what is real. And it is so perceptible to a contemporary reader, even now, decades later, like we know these subways. you know
00:36:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right. um I'm just going to draw out you know something you said quickly um for the non-poetry professors out there, um that the the you know beginning the epic and in a station on the metro, as you said, or down on the metro, you know ah the the modernist poet Ezra Pound famously has this two-line poem, which at least according to his own kind of mythology of the poem,
00:37:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
began as a longer you know considerably longer poem that he kept cutting down and down and down, this sort of key text in the modernist, imagist, tradition, early 20th century poem called In a Station of the Metro, which is in Pounds um rendering just a two-line poem, I guess three if you count the title.
00:37:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And that that setting, and here now I want to invite you, Joyelle, to say more to fill in where I'm only going to kind of crack the surface here. That setting, that underground setting, is is itself one with a long tradition. Now maybe here, Notley is giving us a kind of 20th century iteration of this long tradition and and that um transposition into the 20th century has consequences, some of which you've already described, others of which we'll get into, um presumably as the conversation goes on.
00:38:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
But um maybe just say a little bit about what going underground has to do wi with the epic tradition as you, as the you know person studying Latin in your high school and so on, know all too well.
00:38:36
Joyelle
Yeah. Well, this is my material here, but yeah, I mean, as anybody who has encountered an epic, whether in a book or a movie or a cartoon or anything, you know, they're usually the stories of heroes that might usually shore up an Asturian empire wants to tell itself about itself.
00:38:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
And yeah, yeah.
00:38:54
Joyelle
And epics have epics from the classical Western tradition of certain rules. They begin in medias race. They begin in the middle of things. we We still have that term to describe like, any any narrative in a different culture. And it comes from the way we describe epic as beginning in the middle of things. So this one definitely behaves itself.
00:39:11
Joyelle
ah It starts in the middle of things. um Even the speaker doesn't know who she is or how she got there. So that's a nice touch.
00:39:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:39:18
Joyelle
um And lots of things might happen in an epic and usually war is one of them. um But another thing that often happens in and in a Western epic is a descent into the underworld. and that that For that, they switched to Greek and called out a katabasis, which just means a going down, a descent, literally that.
00:39:38
Joyelle
um And when this um male hero goes to the underworld, I think i can't think there's only one exception I can think of, the probably more in the Greco-Roman tradition when, sorry, this this building keeps doing things.
00:39:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
i mean I think it's making more noise on your end than it is on coming through my ears.
00:39:54
Joyelle
Okay, perfect.
00:39:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
So don't don't worry about it.
00:39:55
Joyelle
I'll stop making fun.
00:39:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:39:57
Joyelle
But um so Katabasis is a journey to the underground. And that's, it's a trope of epic. And um like Odysseus goes on one, Aeneas goes on one.
00:40:10
Joyelle
This idea that the hero goes to the underworld to learn some knowledge that he needs. And interestingly, so Odysseus of course imparts knowledge to the dead, Aeneas gets knowledge from the dead.
00:40:21
Joyelle
um and there's The fun thing about the trip to the underworld though, is not only do you get to meet and have discourse with the dead, But there's often some like kind of tricky technology you need to use to get there.
00:40:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:40:31
Joyelle
ah Special things that need to be burned, a golden bough that needs to be pulled from a tree. um I'm really fascinated with that. um That isn't here, which is pretty interesting. Though as Notley moves later from like episode to episode, like there are some important pieces of equipment that are required. And the train itself, like the train itself is a kind of tech ah very present, very rattly technology.
00:40:55
Joyelle
um for for transit in the underworld, so.
00:40:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
But it's not as though she had to secure some mythical subway token in order to get on the subway.
00:41:03
Joyelle
No, not at all. She already has it. She's already there.
00:41:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Yeah.
00:41:07
Joyelle
But one thing that's really popped out to me listening to her is, this is definitely a 20th century poem. I mean, you can feel like nineteen eighty s ah in New York and this ah subway, but at the same time, and like maybe Reagan's America up above,
00:41:25
Joyelle
But at the same time, um this description of A man who would make you pay so much to leave the subway that you don't ever ask how much it is. Like you don't pay to write it, you pay to leave and no one can pay enough to leave.
00:41:39
Joyelle
It doesn't affect all of you and more, most of which you already pay to live below. i mean, to me, it's so descriptive of how trapped we are in um our digital ah second, I mean, we used to call it second live, but like our digital head spaces, our screens, our expectations, like even giving...
00:41:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:41:56
Joyelle
Everything over to AI, um the climates, the water, our jobs, our livelihood, um our ability to even write elegies is all going to be given to these the AI. and And to me, that man, um um man who would make you pay so much to leave the subway that you don't even ask how much it is. It is, in fact, all you are all of you and more, most of which you already pay to live below.
00:42:21
Joyelle
but he will literally take your soul, which is what you are, below the ground.
00:42:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:42:25
Joyelle
I mean, it feels so apt to our moment. I mean, I've never read the poem this way because I always read it about as being like part of my Notley fandom.
00:42:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:42:35
Joyelle
And I think about it being about New York. But here, I'm really struck about just in this conversation right now, how much it seems to talk to describe this trap we're in right now.
00:42:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
and
00:42:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Well, and you're getting at something that that that's kind of implying something to us about your.
00:42:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
theory of poetry, maybe not least too, that poetry can know things before they happen, um or can see things happening before the poet would say that she knew they were happening, but the poetry somehow knows about them ahead of time.
00:42:59
Joyelle
Yeah.
00:43:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, you,
00:43:09
Joyelle
And I think if I could say, I think there's also, um if you want to go back to the word ambivalence, there's like an ambivalence and a determination to what our speaker knows.
00:43:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah.
00:43:18
Joyelle
So prophet has to know, right?
00:43:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
00:43:21
Joyelle
So, or like this figure that goes and looks at things for us. i mean, Dante is instructed and then all the Katabases, except maybe Adizias, they are instructed in the underworld. They have to go there to get some knowledge.
00:43:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right.
00:43:32
Joyelle
And it seems like Notley is for her a let avatar here.
00:43:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:43:37
Joyelle
she both is and is not comfortable with that role. Like, so here it's like, I knew... um she She says she makes and takes away claims about knowing things. And I think it's like, you know, she wants to have the Vatican speaker um But she's uncomfortable or ambivalent about the kinds of power or something.
00:43:56
Joyelle
else So it says, you know, I didn't know how I'd arrived there or who I was exactly, but I knew the train, knew riding it, knew the look of those about me.
00:44:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:44:04
Joyelle
I gradually became aware, though it seemed as that happened, that I'd always known it too, that there was a tyrant, a man in charge of the fact that we were below the ground, endlessly riding, et cetera.
00:44:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Thank you.
00:44:14
Joyelle
um So that's really interesting too. Like just in a handful of lines, we see this kind of ambivalence about claims, claim making and the Vatican. But by the end, she sings this kind of like lovely sonic song.
00:44:29
Joyelle
claim. But he would literally take your soul, which is what you are below the ground, your soul, your soul rides the subway I saw on the subway, a world of souls.
00:44:40
Joyelle
By the end, we're like singing, just as the muse should sing like this epic into being and it's so actually lovely.
00:44:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Well, that line reminds me also, but I mean, that again, so much to say, that line reminds me of the so many, I had not known death had undone so many of this idea of like, you know, a crowd, ah a crowd float of over London Bridge. So many, I'm thinking of, I'm quoting Elliot in the wasteland here, who is himself thinking back um to Dante and this kind of um underground passage to to hell where Dante's ah amazed at the number of souls he sees. um But um you know one thing that i that I find so compelling about the idea of the underground, maybe in the epic tradition, it is that there's this sort of cosmology, or is that the right word for it? Maybe. Let's just go with that. Wherein the dead are,
00:45:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
like you can get to where they are. if you know how to, right? As you said, if you get the right instructions or you perform the correct ritual, it's not as that it's not like a Christian cosmology, right? It's not one in which they're in a truly different kind of ontological realm, like a heaven or a hell or something that's separate. I guess even, and I mean, Dante is obviously Christian, but there is a kind of sense that you can go there.
00:46:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Like you need to find the right cave, right?
00:46:03
Joyelle
I
00:46:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
And it's sort of, ah but um and and i can the upshot of that is that there's always this kind of possibility, it seems to me, where it's like the dead are both of this world and not of this world. like so So that you're in a ah different place, but then it kind of seems in this poem like, oh, she's always been here.
00:46:23
Joyelle
agree.
00:46:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
or her whole life is underground in some sense.
00:46:26
Joyelle
I agree.
00:46:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
00:46:27
Joyelle
great um I just definitely, I definitely agree. and And I will also say, if you fall for this book the way I have fallen for this book and return to it, you will feel like you you are also always, but in the best possible way, like just resuming the ride, um riding on the subway, fighting, like trying to figure out like where harm has come from um and trying to learn from what you see ah and what you perceive.
00:46:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
mean
00:46:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:46:57
Joyelle
Yeah. All of that is just continually renewed by this book.
00:47:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, the word endlessly, which um is the last line of the, I'm sorry, the last word of the first line of the poem. seems to, ah you know, both to address what you were just talking about, that the poem is interested in this kind of interminable experience, which also seems like an...
00:47:21
Joyelle
Yeah. Eventful.
00:47:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Sorry, go ahead.
00:47:24
Joyelle
eventful
00:47:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Eventful.
00:47:26
Joyelle
It is eventful. There are events.
00:47:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:47:28
Joyelle
It is
00:47:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:47:30
Joyelle
it isn't in term it is and endlessness that is full of events. and
00:47:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yes, yes, yes.
00:47:34
Joyelle
but
00:47:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
fair Fair enough. But yeah, well, the I mean, I guess the only other thing that I was going to say is that epic as I know it, you know, in most of the this sort of Western epic tradition that I'm most familiar with, epics are not
00:47:37
Joyelle
Go on, though.
00:47:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
I mean, they're endless in the kind of colloquial sense, and that they're long, I guess, but but they have ends. They're like teleological, you know, right?
00:47:59
Joyelle
Yeah, they have to. We found it wrong.
00:48:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Rome gets founded, or, you know, Odysseus gets home, or Troy burns, or, what you know, whatever it is, that that there is something kind of um
00:48:06
Joyelle
Yeah. Yeah.
00:48:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
you know disobedient let's say um about endlessly as being the kind of condition of of of this epic that it's not just like goes on and on but that it doesn't have an end in the kind of logical sense maybe
00:48:30
Joyelle
And I'd also say that unlike the figures of um Greek and Roman epic that we've been discussing, like she doesn't go there for a specific reason either. um She doesn't have, she doesn't have to like, even like Hercules, like she doesn't have to perform a feat there that she knows ahead of time.
00:48:46
Joyelle
She's not there to extract particular knowledge or to see a lost loved one. She's just there.
00:48:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Right.
00:48:51
Joyelle
um And, and that is, a I think um somewhat speaks to, um, what she's doing with the feminine, as she would say at Epic.
00:49:01
Joyelle
And that's what she, that is her term from the time period that she uses this idea of like, um, ah a system of war and a system of power that has locked women out at like, has not given them control of the like, um, systems of war that they've been brought into, which she sees as being present in classical Epic, as well as in what happened to her brother in the Vietnam war and, and the kind of wreckage that his, his, um, loss, the,
00:49:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:49:29
Joyelle
blows into the lives of women. And let's see, where was I going?
00:49:40
Joyelle
lost my train of thought, but actually that's okay because the next one that we're going read picks up with one of those women, but I will come back to it.
00:49:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Good.
00:49:46
Joyelle
What did want to do it endlessly?
00:49:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Well, train.
00:49:49
Joyelle
Well, I'll get back to on that one.
00:49:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
00:49:51
Joyelle
Why did I it up?
00:49:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay. and Train of thought is also an interesting phrase here.
00:49:54
Joyelle
Oh, the feminine epic.
00:49:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Go on. Yeah.
00:49:57
Joyelle
So, so please me. I was so, I was so forgive me. I was having so much fun thinking about that thought that I forgot why I was saying it. Um, so, uh, we should bring up the other epic that she mentions as a source tech, the Sumerian epic, right?
00:50:12
Joyelle
The descent of Inanna. and And she says that she was reading this at the time. And that also starts with this uninflected visit to the underworld where this like sort of goddess figure um goes down into the underworld and her sister who is
00:50:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:50:27
Joyelle
has power in the underworld. it's like, why are you here? um And there's this kind of pause before that's answered. And then the whole ah whole set of descents happen. um at it is's called It's usually translated, i believe, right?
00:50:39
Joyelle
As Descent of Inanna. And so that is the like, there is a backwards to this.
00:50:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:50:44
Joyelle
This particular incipit is a little bit of a backwards glance to how that um epic unfolds.
00:50:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Good, that that's really useful ah context too. and And maybe one other thing that we should just say, I'm circuit surprised in a way that we've gotten this far without really addressing it, but that's cool, that's the way it goes, is that, you know,
00:51:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
I think this is to some extent audible in the recording of Notley that you heard a moment ago, but ah for sure, anybody who's looking at this poem on the page or on the screen or whatever ah is going to be struck by the that typographic curiosity um ah about this poem, which is that Notley is putting her phrases the phrases that make up the lines of this poem in quotation marks.
00:51:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
And that sometimes there are like these double quotation marks where somebody speaks within the lines or there's dialogue within the lines. Then there's the kind of single quotation marks within the double quotation marks. But, um,
00:51:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
I know this is something that Notley addressed over and over again that readers, you know, have all kinds of feelings about. um Do you want to say a word, Joelle, just like at the beginning about what they're what those quotation
Narrative Techniques in Notley's Poetry
00:52:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
marks are doing?
00:52:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:52:04
Joyelle
Well, first thing I would say is that Notley herself says something at the beginning.
00:52:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Go ahead.
00:52:07
Joyelle
So to to the thing, so The Descent of a Let by Alice Notley is the first page. And then there's an author's note. And so this, she feels this very important to get this ah set up front.
00:52:20
Joyelle
um And what she says is, so it is, it's pretty much every phrase, but sometimes they're very strangely broken, is broken into quote quotation marks.
00:52:33
Joyelle
So you have to read phrase by phrase. um And what that does to the reading is and when you're reading it on the page, you can't predict what is going to happen next at all. Like you can't use your poetry brain to tell you like where you are in the sentence, when the verb is going to come or anything.
00:52:46
Joyelle
So you're kind of suspended. it creates that kind of suspension for me as a reader.
00:52:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right.
00:52:51
Joyelle
And importantly, for what we've been talking about today, you sometimes can't tell who is talking to who. um not without rereading it a couple of times, which for an undergrad, I'm sure like for like a somebody who's reading this casually could be annoying.
00:53:04
Joyelle
But one thing I really like about it is because like people have to kind of pass around like the role, who's being accused of what, who has done what to whom, all of those like harm is in the air, but like where the harm is and where it's going is like not always clear in the line. You have to like read the whole sentence.
00:53:23
Joyelle
um So I think there's like a ah political, um forensic job that is happening here by breaking up our kind of ability to skim the line and find subject verb object, because there's just a visual block from doing that, that makes you feel instead a kind of suspension where harm has infiltrated everybody, everybody and everybody that is in the blast of harm.
00:53:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Good.
00:53:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:53:49
Joyelle
in the blast zone of harm
00:53:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:53:51
Joyelle
um That's something that it really does for me. But listening to her read it now, really thought I heard the train car, you know, did-- did behind the line, which I i never really thought about before.
00:53:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's correct.
00:53:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, that's funny. Yeah.
00:54:03
Joyelle
and that little bit of light that you get between train cars and your underground.
00:54:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, yeah.
00:54:07
Joyelle
like So I think it's also doing something kind of concrete as well.
00:54:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, that they so i so that's beautiful. So the quotation marks are maybe sort of creating that sonic atmosphere that you get on ah on a subway.
00:54:17
Joyelle
little bit of...
00:54:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Or even the visual one, too, in the sense that you get these sort of like as the train is moving rapidly, these little glimpses out the window of like this and then that and then that other thing, you know, and darkness, darkness, darkness, and then something else.
00:54:28
Joyelle
Oh, I think so.
00:54:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:54:31
Joyelle
And so you can't really guess where Alette is going, let alone the poem.
00:54:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:54:35
Joyelle
And she can't guess either. there's all it's just it is just It's very episodic and exciting as it moves along, but it's really hard to predict what's going to happen.
00:54:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:54:43
Joyelle
And it's sometimes very surprising.
00:54:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
So we're gonna move on to the next section and in just a moment before we do, because since you brought up the author's note, I just wanted to pull out a couple of things things from it that we don't even need to comment on, unless of course you want to, Joyelle, but we can just sort of plant them as seeds for the audience to think about.
00:54:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
That one, she says that they're there, the quotation marks, that is, they're there mostly, she says, to measure the poem. The phrases they enclose are poetic feet.
00:55:08
Joyelle
Mm-hmm.
00:55:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
um Then she says, um I'm skipping a bit. She says, they also distance the net the narrative from myself, the author, colon, i am I am, sorry, I'm going to say that again. They also distance the narrative from myself, the author, colon, I am not Alette.
00:55:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
You know, when I read that, I thought, it sounds so familiar to me. This whole sort of structure of this sounds so familiar to me. And you know what I thought? This is a crazy thought that I'm just going to share with you. I don't know what to do with it.
00:55:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
The poem is not like the poem I'm about to mention in any other way, really. But it reminded me of the the author's note to the dream songs.
00:55:46
Joyelle
ah
00:55:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
where Berryman at the beginning of the dream song says like these, so these poems are about this character named Henry, not the author, not me, he says.
00:55:56
Joyelle
No,
00:55:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
And there is something also about like the dream life and the kind of, in in a million other ways, the poems are totally unrelated. I just wanted to mention that then move on from it. The last.
00:56:07
Joyelle
think we should flag it because Notley loves names and um she loves puns and names and she has an amazing kind of Western accent to me.
00:56:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
00:56:18
Joyelle
um
00:56:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:56:20
Joyelle
Like, I mean, like, a desert western Arizona, California flatness to her vowels that like to me um allow the vowels to start moving in place of one another when I hear her read and she writes about it in some of these as essays because um this character is called Alette and then um Yeah, there's a character in another book called Decimer and Alma in another one.
00:56:44
Joyelle
So there's these anagrams of at least the vowels of her name in a lot of these poems.
00:56:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:56:50
Joyelle
I think they've served as more as avatars than as self-portraits.
00:56:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
00:56:53
Joyelle
i So I back her up there, especially in a moment when, you know, confessional poetry maybe was in the air as the only way of reading any poetry written by a woman.
00:56:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:57:03
Joyelle
um But it's interesting too, because there is a claim on like the experience of women in this book, which is rooted in her own life. So I think again, there's ambivalence around it.
00:57:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
and
00:57:13
Joyelle
um And when I, in terms of names, not only is Alette sound like Alice, but um you know, her father's name was Al Senior and her brother Al Junior.
00:57:24
Joyelle
mean, Alice's own, Alice Nathalie's own family.
00:57:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:57:27
Joyelle
And then
00:57:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:57:28
Joyelle
there's and this amazing poem she was writing at the time her brother died that became his elegy, White Phosphorus, where the name Al becomes the word owl. owl becomes owl.
00:57:39
Joyelle
owl. And then both the syllable Al and the owl end up in this book too. So although I don't think that these are like confessions or first self-portraits per se I do think that they are at least avatars.
00:57:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
you
00:57:54
Joyelle
And I think
00:57:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
see She says in this um lecture she gives that's called a let update 2013, which is in this collection of essays and lectures that the Song Cave published just recently.
00:57:56
Joyelle
the way the name changes to Holt and they're so similar to each other and they produce new diaphanous beings, um, seems significant.
00:58:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
She says at some point in it, um So there's ambivalence for you, right? Yeah. that i did descend into the world of the subway in the depths of heaven that i did at least that once kill the tyrant i lived the vision of the poem and then in parentheses she says and i have also in the past asserted that i am not l that she is a fictional character both are true
00:58:37
Joyelle
love it yes yes ma'am write it down yeah i love that and and i also love one last thing i'd say about ambivalence as well is that with one thing that was strange for me as a young reader a younger reader of this text was like
00:58:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
so there's ambivalence for yeah
00:58:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
are yeah
00:58:54
Joyelle
Again, like I wanted to read it classically. So then the owl comes in i'm like, oh, like an owl is associated with goddesses. And but why is this owl coded?
00:59:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Minerva, Athena, right?
00:59:03
Joyelle
And also I was like, this feels like a second wave.
00:59:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:59:07
Joyelle
um My brain wanted to be like, this is a second wave feminist book because it's a feminine book that says women are like this and men are like that. It absolutely isn't. you know
00:59:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:59:14
Joyelle
But these were the tools I had. But she was flagging that this was not the way the book was going to work. And it was still so hard for me as a young writer like who had just like had a little pack of theory under my arm.
00:59:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:59:24
Joyelle
And I was like, but why aren't the genders like lining up with the critique that I'm expecting to find here?
00:59:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:59:30
Joyelle
um So like, why does, why is the father have a story of non-harm, but the tyrant is always associated with harm? And like, why is this owl, you know, instead of being the goddess of wisdom seems associated with like a male pronoun um and the richness of that.
00:59:49
Joyelle
And again, the power that ambivalence, this disobedience into all, all orthodoxies is what is allowing this book to feel so contemporary to me.
00:59:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:59:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Well, let's listen to the next section we have selected, which um whose first line is, a mother and child were both on fire continuously.
01:00:02
Joyelle
Yeah.
01:00:07
Joyelle
There is another adverb for you.
01:00:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, good. um ah this is This is also from pretty early in the book, so not not not all that far after the opening section that we've just heard. Again, we're, well, I'm not going to say more. I'm going to play the recording and then we'll talk about it.
01:02:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Jael, what do you find yourself thinking about as you hear Notley read that section of the poem today?
01:02:09
Joyelle
I think it's such, um, as a, as a fellow poet, I, this time around, I am like really marveling at its turns. Um, first of all, it is such an indelible image. This is one of the ones that I remember when I put the book down and when I come back to the book and in the opening line, a mother and child were both on fire continuously. I mean, quite honestly, I think of newsreels of the Vietnam war or Faruqi's, um,
01:02:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:02:34
Joyelle
it's called Unquenchable Fire, um about about napalm and Dow Chemical and and the um the civilians as well as soldier, as well as all biomes being subjected to that chemical warfare in our chemical century.
01:02:53
Joyelle
um That's the fire that gets going to me from the beginning, um from the first line. Even though we could reach for Dante, my brain doesn't. My brain reaches for Dow Chemical here. um
01:03:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:03:05
Joyelle
that it was continuous, that it consumed the mother and child, um, that they never knew when the burning would stop that for the first half, I'm, um, I feel like my brain's really there. Um, and then when the baby is extracted, but it's form, she made a form in her mind, imaginary form to settle in her arms where the baby had been.
01:03:26
Joyelle
We saw her, her farmer fiery arms, cradle air. One thing I would also say is that this, this is the scene that produces a week, um, And that's very important for this book. um I think that the inclination towards the plural, ah that she is part of the we, that she is part of the Alette and Notley for this moment are part of the so many.
01:03:47
Joyelle
um We saw this, um even though that's kind of contested, but it didn't happen to you. But then she just keeps looking. We saw her fiery arms cradle air, she cradled air.
01:03:58
Joyelle
um Then no the last thing I would just say about this is there's something else that's at stake aesthetically in the whole book, which is form. Like who controls the shapes of reality.
01:04:10
Joyelle
And this mother is making a claim on this form, um that this form is reality.
01:04:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
hmm
01:04:16
Joyelle
ah She insists on cradling the air. She cradled air. She made a form in her mind, an imaginary form to settle her arms where the baby had been. And there is an and Again, like insistence on this for line after line. I mean, this poem is like two thirds of a page long, but line after line, she made it, she made it, she made the form.
01:04:34
Joyelle
In the air like that, she cradled, it seemed to us there, floated. So she cradled air. In the air that she cradled, it seemed to us there, floated a flower like a red flower, its petals curling flames. She cradled, seemed to cradle the burling flower of herself gone, her life.
01:04:49
Joyelle
She saw whatever she saw, but what we saw was that flower. There's ambivalence like three times there.
01:04:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:04:55
Joyelle
um
01:04:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:04:56
Joyelle
At the same time that Notley is giving us like a really amazing prophetic image of this burning flower where the baby had been insisting on it, there's also this other ambivalence about like naming and describing what other people see.
01:05:14
Joyelle
So it's weird, it's working both ways. Like there's both this like Vatican system, I saw, I saw, we saw. And then there's like this little parenthetical room for like, there might be something different going on with that person. And this is what we saw.
01:05:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:05:31
Joyelle
admire that. Like ah I admire our both moves, both like strength to acknowledge that like, oh, but you didn't like this critique.
01:05:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:05:39
Joyelle
You didn't experience it. is there It's allowed, it's made room for, um second but then the VATIC job is big and has to be done. Like this is an endless fire.
01:05:50
Joyelle
This is an unextinguishable fire. and You know?
01:05:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Well, you've said something really profound about poetry. I'm going to say something kind of ordinary. I think that is, ah well, that I think that is kind of like isomorphic with it or something is the kind of, um which is just that like when you're on the subway,
01:06:04
Joyelle
Yeah, I like it.
01:06:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
I mean, on the one hand, that experience is a kind of communal one, right?
01:06:14
Joyelle
You're right.
01:06:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
But on the other, it tends to be pretty individuated, right? And like everybody is sitting around or standing, depending on how crowded or what your riding style is or whatever.
01:06:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
And you're kind of looking around at the people and taking measure of them, but generally speaking, not communicating with them. that you form these sorts of narratives about the sort of their lives or the meanings of their lives or the kinds of people they are, the kind of day they're having or what their expressions and so forth mean. And, and then sometimes things happen on a subway car that, you know, um gather and sort of organize everybody's attention all at once, you know, some kind of active, let's call it again, disobedience or some kind of,
01:07:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
standing out or some kind of accident or whatever. Um, so that on the one hand, there might be this sort of, um, this thought that here's what we all saw, but that at the same time, I love this, this kind of humility about, well, she saw whatever she saw.
01:07:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
In fact, we don't, we don't know what she saw. Um, but then all of that is within this kind of, uh, context of, um, I mean, I'm making it sound like an ordinary subway ride. A mother and child were both on fire continuously.
01:07:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah I think you're absolutely right to to see images, um ah the kinds of indelible images that came through from Vietnam in that. I mean, just to to echo a thing you said earlier about how this seems to be a poem of our moment, sort of avant la lettre, whatever.
01:07:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
i When I read those lines, what I'm seeing right now are these images that keep coming through right now from Gaza, ah you know, of innocent people burning, you know, um and and the sense of a kind of man-made fire that won't stop, you know.
01:08:10
Joyelle
Yeah. And like, you know, like it says in the Bible, you know, everything is going to burn. We'll i'll take turns, you know, and that's I often today I'm reading this also as an environment, like the general environmental pollution, like we're not going to make it off this planet.
01:08:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:08:27
Joyelle
only I mean, I guess Elon is, but the rest of us are going to be on this burning planet. And Um, so I also think about that, like a combustible atmosphere and atmosphere with toxins that cannot be survived. These, uh, forever chemicals, you know?
01:08:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
and And so what, in that to pick up a ah point that you were making earlier about the, like or I just want to tell me if i've if I'm kind of catching your drift here and in the right way, that against that,
01:08:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
not even to say sort of against it so as to defeat it, but just sort of poised against it. There is this mother's kind of stubborn insistence on this form that she's creating and holding and so forth.
01:09:07
Joyelle
yeah
01:09:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
um can is Is that right? And and could can you say more about that sort of form and and what form is like for Notley here in the section of the poem or or more generally?
01:09:22
Joyelle
Yeah, well, I think one of the like real anxieties of the poem from the very beginning and you know it does feel like
01:09:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:09:30
Joyelle
It anxietist when it appears, is is a phrase that people kind of pass around. um On the very first page that we read before, it said that, you know, the tyrant is the man um in charge of that we're, of the fact that we're below the ground, et cetera. and As it goes along, often women will say like, he owns this and he owns that.
01:09:53
Joyelle
He owns your necklace. He owns your, you know, like owns everything.
01:09:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:09:56
Joyelle
So how do we think our way outside of it? um And so any moment when that word form comes up, I sort of read it again to sort of see like, well, what how are, and, and even it becomes a refrain. People say, the tyrant owns form, the tyrant owns form.
01:10:12
Joyelle
And, you know, little later in the book, there's like a little song of like, kind of it seems like kind of a song of liberation that someone starts singing and they sing, oh, when the train was our mother, when the train was a snake, and it seems like a little like feminist song of freedom.
01:10:26
Joyelle
And in the last book, the tyrant starts singing it.
01:10:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:10:29
Joyelle
it's like the tyrant owns like every thought you can have, so what can we do? But I think this moment is marked differently. i think that when Notley, This is my new theory.
01:10:41
Joyelle
so TM copyright. um This is very new to me, but it's something I'm thinking through.
Symbolism and Climax in 'The Descent of Allette'
01:10:47
Joyelle
I think that when Notley thinks away, this is kind of like a Hannah Wiener idea think too, thinks out, like think something out of the tyrant or like in this case, like when this woman in her agony manages to make a shape the tyrant doesn't own, even if the tyrant has taken the baby, I think Notley marks it with a flower.
01:11:07
Joyelle
I think it's like when Hannah Wiener says like, that's it, Hannah, good job.
01:11:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:11:10
Joyelle
At the bottom of when the spirit teacher is like, commend Hannah and like praise her at the bottom of her page.
01:11:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:11:16
Joyelle
I feel like in some ways, Notley marks it. I'm not thinking of a lot here with this vision of some kind of horrible agonized flower. It's like, there is something here um because these very luscious, viscous, black, red flowers um is a subtle motif of the book.
01:11:35
Joyelle
And this is one of them, I think. A flower, a red flower, its petals curling flames.
01:11:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. It's
01:11:40
Joyelle
She cradled, seemed to cradle the burning flower of herself gone her life. She saw whatever we saw, but whatever she saw, but what we saw was that flower. And then the poem this poem ends.
01:11:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:11:52
Joyelle
Just an idea. i don't think it's like th thought out the point where we can like, I think you have to read the book horizontally kind of line up.
01:11:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
it's
01:12:01
Joyelle
So I hope everyone will now. at These like moments of like a little bit of a break with what is already known and owned. owned by the tyrant.
01:12:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. um Yeah, so so interesting to think of the extent to which forms might be sort of self-generated or spontaneously generated versus like inherited kinds of tradition.
01:12:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
I guess i just to to put a little bit of meat on that bone, as a poet, Joyelle, is there something you'd want to say here about like Notley and this book and quatrains?
01:12:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
You know, she's writing, you know,
01:12:39
Joyelle
I think she's pacing herself so she can keep going.
01:12:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:12:41
Joyelle
I mean, I don't know what she would say, but, or what she has said. I mean, she says ah a lot because to her, it's quite rigorous.
01:12:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:12:47
Joyelle
A lot of poets who invent forms that they need to do the writing are like, it's perfectly clear. And it's not always, or usually isn't. And it might not even be worth trying to, in every, of course, it's always worth it with Notley, but it's like with John Manley Hopkins when he's like, I'm doing this thing and it's so idiosyncratic and he's like, no, no, it's perfectly mathematical.
01:13:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:13:05
Joyelle
And like the important thing to realize is that he needed it, that it's like a shape of thought in writing that like is a prosthesis for writing itself.
01:13:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:13:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:13:12
Joyelle
It's doing a lot.
01:13:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:13:15
Joyelle
um It's buckling. There's like, it needed to be the way that is. And this form needs to be the way it is. Yes, we can analyze it and write our doctoral theses about it. But I think the most and important,
01:13:26
Joyelle
important thing to notice is that it's letting her keep going and it's letting her pace this so that these are epi episodes that open and close. um They're actually digestible like for the reader as well. like You can read your way through them even though you don't know what's going happen in them.
01:13:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, that's nice.
01:13:44
Joyelle
I do think they're necessary for the poems writing and reading more than wish to say about the quatrain.
01:13:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
You're right.
01:13:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
you're Yeah, you're reminding me of something she said about a poem in a very different kind of form, but nonetheless, in the poem that Nick Sturm and I discussed at Night the States, which has this refrain at the beginning of each stanza, at Night the States, at Night the States, she said, oh, it was wonderful to discover that I could put the refrain at the beginning of the stanza rather than at the end of the stanza, because by doing that, I could write that line, and then there would always be more to Yeah.
01:14:03
Joyelle
Yeah,
01:14:19
Joyelle
that makes sense to me.
01:14:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
um that that like the for was that that the key thing the form needed to be was like a kind of structure that was generative, that like allowed for so the the the words then to follow.
01:14:33
Joyelle
Yeah. Well, I'll just say that to add to that, that each of these sections also has each section in the book, um each page in the book is pretty much its own episode. And they all have killer endings and very, and the, at the beginnings are usually sort of conventional.
01:14:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:14:49
Joyelle
Like I'm just looking at the spread. I have the book open. The one we just read begins a mother and child. We're both on fire. The next one is a woman came into the car. I wrote the next one. I entered a car. The next one, at the subway stops crowds of people. So the beginnings are like, they open the scene and the endings are often just like killer.
01:15:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Well, let's move. I mean, this is terrible because like one, one wants to linger and there's,
01:15:12
Joyelle
but Reading rope Rainbow Moment, like read the book to find out, Farrakh.
01:15:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right, right. There's so much more to say, of course, but I'm looking at time too, and I want to be sensitive to you know demands on your time and to listeners' um time. ah the the The final selection that we've chosen for discussion comes from much now towards the end of the book.
01:15:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
um and um And so maybe I'm going to ask you just to do a little bit of contextualizing here. And actually, I have a question for you because...
01:15:43
Joyelle
oh
01:15:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, and and i think this I think it's okay.
01:15:45
Joyelle
Oh, yes.
01:15:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
and Don't worry. im not is is that um you know so there So the next section that we're going to do begins, I held the cloth up before the beam of the flashlight.
01:15:54
Joyelle
oh yeah
01:15:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
And um this is the section in which you'll hear Alette says her name, ah names herself.
01:16:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
um But the question for you, joyle is... There's ah I don't know, is it another poem, you know, or another, do you think of it as another section that begins, you are vulnerable somewhere near here on the next page?
01:16:21
Joyelle
I think it's another poem because of that capital Y, but I'm not totally sure.
01:16:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, I thought that's probably right.
01:16:26
Joyelle
It's
01:16:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
And maybe to some extent, it doesn't really matter. i think in the in the recording, you know what we'll make available includes that ah other poem. so we're So maybe we're sneaking a fourth poem in here.
01:16:37
Joyelle
good.
01:16:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
um But it's short. you know It's much shorter than the one that precedes it.
01:16:40
Joyelle
in good
01:16:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
And it seems to sort of very naturally follow from this section.
01:16:44
Joyelle
but So, so if I may, so, yeah, so we read those first two, those are in book one where, where, um, yes, I let wakes up on the subway and has these very episodic visions.
01:16:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
You may.
01:17:00
Joyelle
And then there's two central books where she's sort of prepared for the journey. She goes through a series of caves and then she has a series of interlocutors who keep trying to like convince her that she really needs to go after the tyrant.
01:17:11
Joyelle
um which she is like, as we've been, as we've discussed, I wouldn't say reluctant to do because she continues on the path, but she feels, we feel cued to think that there's like real ambivalence here. And then the part that we're about to play for you is the showdown.
01:17:27
Joyelle
So.
01:17:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, okay, right. So the the um the third person pronoun that you hear, the his, the he, and so forth, that's the tyrant in what we're about to hear, right?
01:17:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay. um Here is Notley. This is from a different reading, more recent reading, so the sound quality is a bit different. um But here is Notley reading, I held the cloth up before the beam of the flashlight.
01:21:44
Joyelle
Yes.
01:21:48
Joyelle
Yes.
01:21:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's, it's, it's extraordinary.
01:21:49
Joyelle
Makes you wanna hoot. Makes you wanna holler. Yeah.
01:21:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
So yeah, I mean, that, that reading, I don't, you know, she's at a different place in the poem. She's at a different place in her life. It's a, it's a different reading, but there's, God, I don't know, such a kind of ah life and energy in that reading.
01:22:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah um And it was making you move and, and make sounds, Jal, talk about it.
01:22:11
Joyelle
Yeah.
01:22:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:22:14
Joyelle
Everything about it. I mean... A lot of the things that are like just said discursively here are things that we've discussed. The book itself is not this discursive. So for it to come to this moment is actually like a huge arrival for the book.
01:22:26
Joyelle
But even when she says, my name is Alette, my brother died in battle. And you see that Alette is also an anagram of battle, right? Or at least the second point of battle that Alette is in the battle.
01:22:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:22:37
Joyelle
Right. And that is like this like anagram that's prepping with you for the ending of this particular section where she like becomes owl becomes Al becomes And like, she's on the hunt now.
01:22:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:22:48
Joyelle
um And, and yeah you know, like that is something she has been a bit ambivalent about, as we've discussed so much. And now it's on.
01:22:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:22:56
Joyelle
She is an owl and she's going to find his soft spot. And off she goes. I mean, I'm so transported by it. It is transporting. She's off the train, too. She's flying through the subway. The the river and the subway tunnels are kind of as in New York, like,
01:23:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:23:11
Joyelle
together, they're thought of together, they map together, one hides another. um
01:23:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah
01:23:16
Joyelle
So she's still in that kind of ah canal space, um but she's not on the train, she's flying and she's an owl. I love it. I'm so moved by it.
01:23:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. um ah i I was struck by, you know, when she, at least in this recording, um when she says the name, Alette,
01:23:37
Joyelle
She stops.
Contrasting Voices: Notley and the Tyrant
01:23:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah and it stops and the voice also the like the the ah register or the kind of tone of it change like it becomes very suddenly like matter of fact um and yeah yeah um
01:23:51
Joyelle
I'm going have to state this fact.
01:23:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
And of course then too, but but sort of contrasted with that in this same environment of this page of the book, like the lines, why was my memory, my memory floating in your heart's blood, I cried. There's like ah the voice rises to a kind of emotional crescendo of some kind where there's like this sort of near story.
01:24:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
sort of screaming or yelling happening. She says later, I was nearly screaming now.
01:24:27
Joyelle
So...
01:24:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
um There is the the contrast of her voice with the tyrant's voice that you hear in Alice Notley's voice and in performance here, where he sounds sort of, I don't know, cynical or, yeah. So to maybe talk a little bit to Joelle just about voice as as you're encountering it um here.
01:24:50
Joyelle
Well, one thing is, so there's her performance, and I feel like you're really aptly are describing that tonality. i mean, again, speaking of current moments, like who is mournable and who owns mourning, um who can perform the work of mourning, those questions that animate our current moment are like all and literally animating this poem. Like he attempts to kind of contain the political power of grief by saying, oh, it's so beautiful and it's so moving, and she just presses back against it every time and almost just takes the mic back um from him.
01:25:25
Joyelle
That is a thing she cannot seem to tolerate. um
01:25:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's what's there in his like men fight stuff, you know?
01:25:32
Joyelle
yeah She says, oh, it's so beautiful.
01:25:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:25:33
Joyelle
Like, you know, you're the the fallen soldier, like all fascists believe that the dead soldier is beautiful, right? Like that's part of it. the sacrifice of the young man as part of what makes the engine of fascism work. And, but here, so he's saying it's so beautiful. And she's saying, it's not beautiful. It is what was, I was nearly screaming. Now he is in the black lake. I have been there too. It is all that there is. That isn't you. That isn't you. Infinity isn't you.
01:25:58
Joyelle
and then he keeps his refrain going, but it's all so beautiful. Um, it's like, she's unlocked something a lot and Alice, I think here in the writing discovers this idea.
01:26:08
Joyelle
um Infinity versus sentiment, infinity versus cliche. That's what unlocks it and unlocks the owl's flight, I think.
01:26:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, it's it's, and as you said, I mean, I'm just connecting it, and what you just said now to what you were saying at the beginning of our conversation um and a line that's And thus I found my anger, my life giving anger. And um I'm trying to pause there to draw out.
Themes of Anger, Memory, and Grief in Notley's Work
01:26:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
So my anger is a phrase in quotation marks that comes at the end of one line.
01:26:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
The next line begins with the phrase, my life hyphen in quotation marks. And then the next quotation marks giving anger.
01:26:53
Joyelle
giving
01:26:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
um That there is that. um it's It's as though it's in response to his. fascistic to use your word, sort of um desire to aestheticize this death or the, um you know, the kind of war machine that produces the death.
01:27:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
um It's in the anger um that that that prompts that like this clari this sort of sudden clarity comes out and this other kind of voice and energy um coalesces.
01:27:31
Joyelle
Yeah, and I think that it's a difficult splitting, but she has to split from the tyrant. There's this strange exchange that opens this episode. Like her pain has suddenly become externalized and is floating in the garbage river.
01:27:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right. Hmm.
01:27:44
Joyelle
um and she picks it up and swallows it. So she like reclaims it. And she says in her narration, why was my memory, my memory floating in your heart's blood? I cried. I must have let go of it. It was too painful. It was for me. And you don't know as a reader who is speaking there.
01:28:01
Joyelle
Like, is this a moment where like it was too painful for the time to hold it? And that's what or what? And then you realize that she is this is a self kind of excoriation. i must have let go of it. It was too painful. I lose it from you and gave it back to you, the tyrant back to your body from where its pain came. And this is something important because it kind of surprised me that I've read about now and I come back into it now where she said when her brother was trying to get help for his PTSD and his heroin addiction,
01:28:30
Joyelle
She has, she said, she characterizes it, say, she was trying he was trying to give his pain back to the public community that gave it to him, like back to the state. um He was trying to like kind of give some of this pain back to the, she says it, something like the national community that gave it to him.
01:28:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:28:47
Joyelle
And I think that's a realization that is happening in this locus of this poem. It's like, where did this harm come from? Where did this pain come from that he has had to bear, um that he cannot bear?
01:28:59
Joyelle
and And this is that moment where she's like rehearsing it as well. I, I must've loosed it. I lose it from me and gave it back to you, back to your body from where it's pain came. And then she says her name.
01:29:10
Joyelle
She's like, understood something about this transaction. And she's like refusing the transaction. Like my name is a let my brother died in battle. I sank to the ground and sat, sat and thought of him.
01:29:21
Joyelle
Um, There's an absolute location for this poem. I mean, I really relate to that on a much smaller scale, but like after the loss of our baby, i couldn't write again.
01:29:32
Joyelle
um Even if I had something normal to do, like a little book review or something, I just like I couldn't do it unless I wrote at the top of the page. I would write at the top of the page, you know, we had a little daughter, Iraq name and she was born sick and lived 13 days and died. And I would just like write at the top of the page and I'd like do my homework.
01:29:51
Joyelle
And then it started moving down the page and into the poems. um And that's how I started writing, um including her and her death in like essays about poetry,
01:30:04
Joyelle
And then writing the death styles and so forth too, is because like, the the thought was so loud in my head that I couldn't write around it. So I had to write it so that I could write. And then it started moving down the page. And I don't know, I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but I think it is powerful when you can let something into the, just let it into the poem that is the source of the poem. And and then from there, it's like the poems, like,
01:30:27
Joyelle
She knows what to do from then on. The poem is in gear, you know, um and Alette is in flight now and ready.
01:30:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
that's ah That's amazing um what you just said. I mean, this idea that the that the that the um that the thought, that the that the voice, that the um that the fact of the matter is so loud in your head that it's it's um it's preventing you from hearing or saying other things so that, right?
01:30:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
it it gets into the thing that you're writing. When you were writing book reviews or or the ordinary, the less interesting than poems things that you that you said you were trying or not being able to write in that time, Joyelle, did you you, so you would put that sentence at the top of the page, you you would manage to write the thing and then you would to take it away, you know?
01:31:19
Joyelle
Well, it started creeping in. So like, um have you
01:31:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:31:24
Joyelle
if you look at some the things that I wrote that are poetry from um that little locus of time, like, so example, I wrote like a, um I was part of a team that was translating the modernist Korean poet, Isang, and we each wrote like little notes to run at the end.
01:31:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:31:37
Joyelle
And my big mine begins with arachne and is about arachne, but it's also about Korean modernism. And then I was writing an article, don't know,
01:31:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
ahha
01:31:46
Joyelle
I mean, some of the, the, the pieces are more, more purposely about grief or what have you, but, um, yeah, I, it became the way I began writing like an essay on the film.
01:31:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:31:57
Joyelle
Don't look now. And also, um, it's kind of hidden in a, in an essay on PLATH that's on the Poetry Foundation UK. Um, it kind of shows up in the middle.
01:32:09
Joyelle
Um, because that's just what those first few years of grief were like.
01:32:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:32:13
Joyelle
Like it was like a constantly on my mind. and i don't I don't know.
01:32:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:32:19
Joyelle
and I think it made them it better writing also because it was the root was so deep, you know?
01:32:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, I know that feeling. I mean, i not every feeling is different, but you know in in my own experiences of grief, it's um I think I began by um sort of secretly writing about it.
01:32:28
Joyelle
Yeah.
01:32:31
Joyelle
Yeah.
01:32:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
I mean, I don't think it was a secret to anyone who knew me, you know but not explicitly writing about it, but writing about it, you know finding other ways to write about it and and eventually sort of um explicitly doing so.
01:32:52
Joyelle
Yeah.
01:32:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, interesting. i mean, what do you, how do you account for the fact or what do you want to say, if anything, about the fact that that name and that moment comes for her so late in this book?
Significance of Self-Naming and Transformation
01:33:07
Joyelle
yeah
01:33:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
I mean, we talked about the beginning as like a begins and she's in medias res, as you said, but like on the on the subway endlessly um and so forth.
01:33:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
um So there is the sense in which there's not a lot of hemming and hawing or kind of preparatory work or setting up or or exposition or what have you. um You're plopped into the show this poem that's already in motion.
01:33:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
um And yet, on the other hand, you have to wait a long time for this moment to happen. So I don't know.
01:33:46
Joyelle
Yeah.
01:33:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Do you have any thoughts about that?
01:33:50
Joyelle
No, I think for all the reasons that we've discussed, like this is the point at which this is the power source.
01:33:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
01:33:55
Joyelle
this is This is being able to name and say this is what allows, but mean, we are like 10 pages from the end of the book here at Showtime, and this is the moment.
01:34:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:34:04
Joyelle
um I mean, self-naming is exciting and and often, I mean, to step away from grief for a moment, even like, ah you know, that the um the hero is often renamed or takes his new, his battle name, you know,
01:34:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:34:20
Joyelle
um it's powerful. It's a powerful moment just for that. But yeah.
01:34:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:34:27
Joyelle
Yeah.
01:34:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
So let's let's let's let's maybe end by, i I just, I want to hear you say something about the, I mean, you've already talked about the um the flying.
01:34:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
I began to fly along the bloody river, corridor river, looking into the darkness for any trace of
01:34:40
Joyelle
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:34:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
I love to the phrase that gets repeated to end that section of the poem, fleshy softness, fleshy softness.
01:34:53
Joyelle
um
01:34:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
And the way she said it, there was almost like, so you could, there was something kind of um
01:35:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
fierce, but also, um i don't know, vindictive is the word that's coming to mind. I don't know if it's the right one, but something kind of biting about that.
01:35:12
Joyelle
Yes, because she's an owl and a big thing.
01:35:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:35:15
Joyelle
so kids, a really fun part in the previous book is she has to get basically owl training, which involves her like, you know, going through various things to get her beak and her talon. But she is also simultaneously like it's we would use the word glitchy.
01:35:28
Joyelle
It's very glitchy. Like she's not obviously just a woman or just an owl.
01:35:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Ooh, yeah.
01:35:32
Joyelle
It's like she glitches from state to state and uses the but talks about holograms.
01:35:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:35:36
Joyelle
And so that seems to be the way she's like instantiating that in her mind. um But also one of the things she has to do is she's a mouse that is kind of eaten by an owl. So she experiences that kind of fleshy distress of mouseness as well.
01:35:53
Joyelle
And um in a previous book. So at this moment when she locks in and she has that kind of predator's beak that is ready to snatch at something. You are prepared for it because you've experienced it the other way as a reader. And so is she as a let. And now she's like owning it. Like she is going to be this predator for just these 10 pages um and go after this guy. Huh?
01:36:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:36:18
Joyelle
It's pretty mighty.
01:36:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah Yeah.
Posthumous Reflection on Notley's Voice
01:36:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. You really hear the kind of, uh, I don't know how she drafted the poem, but the andm what I'm imagining is the kind of sharpness of the pen you know on the as like as a kind of you know um talon or beak or something of its own.
01:36:30
Joyelle
Yeah.
01:36:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
01:36:37
Joyelle
Yes.
01:36:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right, Joel, we're nearly um there. um I guess i I just want to invite you um here at the end of our conversation to say um anything that's on your mind about
01:36:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, you know I asked you what it was like to read this book as a you know a graduate student, what it has been like for you to read the book over the years as um a person who became herself a poet in in um um and a writer and a mother and a person in the world in all kinds of ways. and and And now we're reading this poem that is, at least in some obvious sense, occasioned by grief and loss, and we're reading it on the occasion of the death, not of Notley's brother, but of Notley herself. um
01:37:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
I wonder if if you seem like the right person to ask about this like in some ways to me. like Is there some...
01:37:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
feeling you have that's a that's distinctive about what it's like to encounter the poet's voice as a posthumous voice
01:38:08
Joyelle
It is uncanny because I feel like this book gives us the formula. Like she showed us how to hear the dead and now it's our job to do it.
01:38:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
that's great
01:38:23
Joyelle
And that's that.
01:38:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's that. We don't need to say more than that.
01:38:25
Joyelle
thought about that.
01:38:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, good.
01:38:26
Joyelle
But like, you know, that's not Leiforia. Like irascible, implacable side.
01:38:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:38:31
Joyelle
I mean, I know lots of people knew her intimately.
01:38:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:38:34
Joyelle
um I'm not one of them, but ah just that implacable, irascible, yet practical, resourceful, um visionary,
01:38:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:38:43
Joyelle
ah but also this unbelievably singular, yeah but in a way that is always inviting the plural.
01:38:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:38:56
Joyelle
um And that's true, and and like in every stanza of this poem, it's true in some of these really remarkable um essays that she wrote about the poem.
01:39:07
Joyelle
um One of my favorite articles is when she writes about disobedience um and she starts talking about like, who is who is the ideal reader then?
01:39:20
Joyelle
um And she says, you know she basically like invites the reader into the edifice of her poem. It's possible that the reader or maybe the ideal reader is a very disobedient person, a head church city entity, her himself, full of soaring icons and words of all the living and all the dead, who sees and listens to it all and never lets on that there's this beautiful, almost undifferentiation inside, everything equal and almost undemarcated in the light of fundamental justice.
01:39:46
Joyelle
And Poker Face puts up with the outer forms, as I do a lot of the time, but not so much when I'm writing.
01:39:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:39:54
Joyelle
So she just expects and exacts from the reader that we are doing the work too.
01:40:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, I think we have been. think you have been. um i want to thank you um for making the time and the you know the headspace and the heart space and all that too um to sit here and talk with me for the last couple hours about Alice Notley, about Descent of a Let, and about um this sort of marvelous thing that that this poem and poetry is giving to us.
01:40:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Joelle McSweeney, thank you so much for for coming on the podcast.
01:40:32
Joyelle
Thank you so much. This has been really remarkable. Thank you.
01:40:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
Absolutely. Listeners, thank you for for hanging out with us. There will be more of this ah conversation to come. ah But in the meantime, be well, everyone.