I feel bad--I really do. Why? Well, since you asked, because of some divine act on behalf of the poetry gods (and because of the way the books and blog assignments line up) I'm always writing about a poet I don't wholeheartedly enjoy. Then, when it comes time for the rest of the class to respond to the blog assignments, my blog is always the one that's always whining, neither pleased nor satisfied. With that tawdry excuse of my excessive whining out of the way, let us now continue to Notley...
First things first: those quotation marks. I knew it was going to be a rough ride when I first saw those. And it was...in a way. Just like a rough ride in a car will make you slow down, Notley's metrical quotations accomplished the same thing in a literary fashion. I found myself taking the time to read each foot without "mentally slurring" the words (what Notley warns against in the Author's note. I found myself "slurring" a lot while reading Merwin--not slurring drunk, of course, (really!) but slurring in accordance with his wispy, ethereal manner of writing. Notley's poetry, on the other hand, has a sense of progressive, forward motion (almost a marching quality) because of the way the iambs are enclosed. This causes the reader to slow down in a quick way (let me explain); one in which he or she is reading every word but with a sense of motion because of the way the iambs are placed. So, I guess it's not a bad thing, just an unusual thing.
Something else unusual in "The Descent of Alette" was the very distinct sense of purpose with Notley's poetry. Most poets--I would assume--use poetry as some sort of meditation: a place in which to hone ideas, make points, and discover (for their own sake) revelations. We don't find this in much of Notley's work. From the get-go, she marches (see previous paragraph) us into the story head on with everything planned out and hoping we'll be the ones making the revelations. This is evidenced by Notley's exorbitant use of symbolism--a tell-tale sign of a well thought-out work--everything is planned and everything stands for something else. Of course, Alette makes revelations on her way to kill the Tyrant and the reader learns a couple lessons along the way, but I don't think a whole lot of meditation for Notley in the act of writing the poems in "The Descent of Alette." There is, instead, an end and a means to an end. It could be argued that the poems possess a dreamlike quality that could be likened to a more meditative sense of poetry, but I don't think so. Take, for example, the line on page 136 where the phrase "neck's nape" is repeated. The fact that the phrase is repeated is not to impart a dreamlike quality, but, rather, to underscore the important features of Alette's brother's beauty: to make the point that, before the Tyrant, there was once something beautiful about men, but the Tyrant has robbed that from them as well as women. Yes, the repitition does impart an out-of-body, dreamlike quality, but I don't think that was the specific reason it was used.
I love how this book was compared to “a rough ride in a car that will make you slow down”. Because that’s exactly how I pictured it, I just never put words to it. The quotations were very much like speed bumps, in my opinion. You don’t want to slow down, but you have to, in order to really understand it. And, like speed bumps, you sometimes have to crawl through them, and that’s something I also did. Very, very slowly.
ReplyDeleteI also agree when you said it has a sense of a progressive, forward motion, because this book of poetry reads like an actual book, which is strange in itself. It’s the first of its kind that I’ve ever read. Notley had a story to tell, she had an idea planned from the beginning. Maybe she didn’t have everything “planned” because as a writer, you can never be sure what’s going to happen next, but she definitely had an outline. She definitely didn’t use this story to “discover” anything. It was definitely premeditated. This is obvious from the symbolism, which went deeper than anything. It seems everything was a symbol for something else. That just doesn’t happen spontaneously, unless you’re some kind of crazy super genius. Because of this symbolism and having to read really slow, yes, this book was incredibly tedious to read.
I also like at the end, talking about how men at one time were thought of once as being beautiful. I don't think we went over that in class, and that got me thinking a lot. Because in this collection of poetry (or this book), men are evil and just the worst thing imaginable. To think that her brother was potentially the only "good" male in this book is kind of sad.