Review of Benediction by Alice Notley (Clara B. Jones)

Alice Notley

Benediction

2015

256 pages

Letter Machine Editions

Tucson, Arizona

$20.00

Reviewed by Clara B. Jones

This month (2015), Yellow Chair Review features poems on the theme, “Popular Culture,” a fitting category for the poems of Alice Notley, a brilliant associate of the New York School of Poetry. David Lehman's book, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1999, Anchor Books) presents the movement as part of “popular cultural history” whose members (e.g., John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, Notley's first husband, Ted Berrigan) drew creative energy from “the bliss of being alive and young.” According to Lehman, these poets sought authenticity in their lives and speech and were subversives and “non-mainstream.” The New York School extends from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, originally including visual artists, writers, and their admirers whose early members gathered regularly in New York's Cedar Tavern. Lehman proposes that these “playful, irreverent, tradition-shattering” innovators created a “New Aesthetic” that made New York City the “culture capital of the world.”

At age 70, Alice Notley, who has lived in Paris since the 1990s, is considered one of America's foremost poets. She has described her writing this way: “I think I try with my poems to create a beginning space. I always seem to be erasing and starting over, rather than picking up where I left off, even if I wind up taking up the same themes. This is probably one reason that I change form and style so much, out of a desire to find a new beginning, which is always the true beginning.” Notley, who has more than twenty-five books in print, some of which she illustrated, is particularly noted for her “epic poems,” and Benediction, dedicated to her second husband, the late British poet, Douglas Oliver, is a blessing to him in long-form. Divided into two untitled parts, these poems are an homage to common, but, not, arbitrary, speech, intimate “prose essays” that I did not want to stop reading. In the poem, “City of Tingling,” Notley writes, “my hair tangled and hangs down is it is hair real hair, understand? Is hair real hair.” and, in the poem, “Memory,” “it only takes a moment to have been in such a past all along...” Using copious white spaces and repetitions, as well as, diverse forms, Benediction's contents treat feelings as real entities and generate a sense of free-association and improvisation. What makes these poems remarkable, however, is that the language is, nonetheless, controlled and non-random.

Notley and her work deserve to be taken very seriously and will be of particular interest to serious readers interested in experimental poetry by females as well as of particular interest to historians of poetics and aesthetics. Additional information about Notley, including, an informative interview, can be found in Frost EA, Hogue C, Eds, 2006, Innovative Women Poets, University of Iowa Press. Alice Notley has been called “one of America's greatest living poets,” and Benediction will show you why.