Notley Response

I will open by saying that I really enjoyed The Descent of Alette more than most poetry I’ve read in the past few years. Since high school literature classes, I’ve seen my fair share of poets, but none stick out in my mind like Notley. I admire especially how Notley managed to create a story through her poetry. No, Descent is not a book of poems loosely linked by common themes (like Merwin), no, this is a story from start to finish. As a Creative Writing major, that really captivated and caught my attention in a way that poetry hasn’t before.
With that devotional piece aside, I’ll dive right in. In this entry I’d like to talk a little more in depth about what I didn’t cover in my presentation, where I stuttered like a mad man and probably didn’t make any sense. Haha. Here goes.
What caught me most about Descent was the semi-hypocritical goal of the text, the idea of trying to create a decidedly female epic. While Notley’s form of poetry is certainly unique (with the quotations marks and a large measure of ambiguity) her story model follows that of the Inferno. Replacing Virgil of sorts is an Owl, who is also supposedly her father, and replacing Dante is Alette, a woman on a search for the evil tyrant, this ambiguous evil similar to Satan himself.
This idea left me a little befuddled by the end of the text, as I wondered if Alette and the other women had failed in their quest to create a female literary or art form. But then I thought more so about how the Owl, though suspecting he was once a man, no longer found his sex/gender to be of any real importance (pg 102).
(As a side note, while I did analyze this, don’t ask me to make sense of eating the mouse, that was weird, I kinda spaced out after that.)
In terms of the animals, to speak more on what I was trying to get across in my presentation, I viewed the symbolic nature of the animals in a way that woman, rather than trying to emulate men with their reason, embraced the so called stereotypes of their existence (being more emotional, more maternal or animalistic) and instead of treating that as something to be ashamed of, instead embracing it and making it empowering.
In conclusion, I enjoyed Notley mostly because of how accessible she was to a person more accustomed to reading novels as opposed to poetry collections. I generally have a difficult time analyzing poetry (looking at poetry requires a totally different lens as opposed to that of a novel) but this text bucked all the norms.