On Poetry When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Really great poetry is difficult to read. I don’t just mean it’s challenging, though it usually is. I mean it’s hard to make progress, because the density of meaning in the language stops you; it makes you read in loops.
Alice Fulton has called poetry “recursive”: “It sends you back up the page as much as it sends you forward. ” Because of this effect, it once took me all afternoon to finish reading John Ashbery’s long poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” — I kept wanting to stop and start over again. Alice Notley’s best work feels this way: intensely recursive, almost too good to read. In its semantic density, great poetry gives you the sense you’ve skipped over and missed some available shade of meaning.
You certainly have. Notley, a second-generation New York School poet who has written over 40 collections since 1971, is known for conceptual and hybrid projects. Her latest, FOR THE RIDE (Penguin Poets, 144 pp. , paper, $20), is a book-length epic that follows a character (of sorts) called One — always both a name and a generic pronoun — who has been dropped into a “glyph” and has to figure out, along with us, the terms of this strange new world: “One doesn’t know what’s happening here!
” What are the constraints, the natural laws? “Conditions aren’t clear. ” The scene is postapocalyptic, almost post-time. The glyph communicates to One, not in speech but in thought, pre-language ideas.
“You’ll have to decipher what’s going on, as it happens,” Notley writes in the preface, which offers direction, but only so much. The book’s a kind of game, a text-based adventure: “It should be read for pleasure. ” One’s mission, we learn, is to “make new language here. ” Most of civilization has been destroyed, and language with it, so One must “save the words” or coin better words.
Because language is broken, the verse is intentionally awkward, as though carelessly translated: “glyph doth include the real air? / yes, including vraiment the other air. ” Words from French and Spanish are peppered in, while others are cut off (“lying togeth, floor of hypermarket in afterli”) or smashed together (“playtoyswords”), creating unresolvable ambiguities. Is “chose” the past tense of choose (the “new langue” rejects the past tense, all “hierarchies of pastness”), or an object in French?
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Is “ange” an angel, or part of anger or danger? Notley keeps reminding us we’re supposed to be confused, and lean into the confusion: “Just read it, stupid. ” The book can be read as a defense of poetry’s nonsense, and One as a stand-in for the frustrated reader, of poetry in general and this book in particular. Though the situation’s murky, the syntax estranging, the form itself is familiar, for most of the book: left-justified lines, grouped into stanzas.
But between these are several visual poems, much weirder to the eye. On these pages, letters cascade down in codelike patterns. At first the arrangements seem random, or merely artistic — typography meant to be seen but not read. Keep looking and they start to accrue into strings, as when you stare at a word search.
In one, words form the shape of a body whose head you can read from left to right. Then you reach a chunk that looks like this: If you keep reading from left to right, it’s meaningless. You have to change your strategy and read from top to bottom: this is a hand for form’s sake. In another, letters form the shape of a mask or a human face.
Curving columns of lower-case l’s make the sides of the face. The last l leads into the words “loss of”; the word “identity” forms the chin. The eyes are made of lower-case e’s (e for eye), the nostrils are o’s, the mouth a line of m’s (m for mouth).
“Downward, the features spell “eom” (memo-ese for end of message).”
The satisfaction of “solving” these puzzles, or finding possible solutions, offers relief from the mystery of the rest, which might be unsolvable — much like the real problems (climate disaster, ecological collapse) the book imagines us living, or not living, after. If the book sounds maddening, it often is. It seems frustrated with itself: “oh that’s just more words,” Notley writes; “how tedious, this! ” The tedium might enhance the really enthralling parts — like reading a religious text, I thought, then read the line, “Let’s call this grey stuff light.
” There is joy throughout the book, in Notleyish lines like “Stars look like the word stars, / really do … and sparkle is better as its word. ” I love that — an image that’s purely linguistic. But this book also annoys me deeply. A few stanzas down from the stars line, which I annotated with giant asterisks, Notley writes: “World is coming to an end means, Word is coming to an end.
” This wordplay I find corny, too easy. There’s a certain corniness to the whole sci-fi setup, One’s journey in the glyph. “Only poems can deal in the inexplicable,” Notley claims, but I kept thinking of Hollywood movies: “Arrival,” “The Matrix. ” There’s too much pre-existing scenery and special effects in our minds to imagine this world up from scratch.
“For the Ride” is not exactly an optimistic book, since life as we know it in this futurescape is toast. But there is a strain of wishful thinking in the idea that neologisms, revamped grammars, could effect better living. One’s “new langue” erases difference by design — or there can be no difference, because the language doesn’t allow it. Our avatar is not a he or she; One, paradoxically, is semi-plural, representing every one.
“There’s no class, race, gender” in the postapocalypse; “differences between the ones are gone now. ” Is this utopian, or anti-identity? “Is there some justice? ” the poem later asks.
That’s not an answerable question anymore: “Translate that please. ” Does global destruction offer some kind of radical freedom? “Don’t have to be what / one is pastly in life. ” This makes me think of a cryptic tweet by the climate philosopher Timothy Morton: “You think ecologically tuned life means being all efficient and pure.
Wrong. It means you can have a disco in every room of your house. ” A lot of recent books fall into this microgenre: climate-aware, speculative poetry, mixing the fantastical with what you might call dystopian realism. Brenda Shaughnessy’s “The Octopus Museum” is one example; Chris Nealon’s “The Shore” is another.
These books take place in hell on earth and are nostalgic for the present. There’s a sameness to them. It’s no one’s fault; you don’t know you’re writing the zeitgeist when you’re in it, and then it’s too late — like all those people in the ’70s who named their daughters Jennifer. My best friend is a Jennifer, and I often think of her mother explaining how novel it sounded at the time, and how regal, a variation on “Guinevere.
” When she said that, for a flash I heard the beauty in the name. “One can’t speak but of collapsing sky and land,” Notley writes. This is the trap of the zeitgeist — one can’t not speak of it. That’s part of what we’re mourning when we mourn for the world.
We’re not only losing trees, we’re losing tree poems that aren’t elegies for trees. “To be dead grows on one, sweetly. Not knowing what time it is. ” The world after us is a kind of utopia, because we don’t have to experience it.
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