read aloud
"In a station" "I saw" "a woman crying" "She stood against"
"the wall" "looking dirty" "& exhausted." "crying quietly"
"I asked her who she was" "& why" "she was crying" "She
said: 'I" "am a painter" "I have been trying" "to find"
"a form the tyrant" "doesn't own–" "something" "he doesn't
know about" "hasn't invented, hasn't" "mastered" "hasn't
made his own" "in his mind" "Not rectangular," "not a
sculpture" "Not a thing at all–" "he owns all things,"
"doesn't he!" "He's invented" "all the shapes" "I'm afraid he's"
"invented mine," "my very own" "body" ("she was hysterical")
"Did he invent me?" "I want" "to do something like
paint air" "Perhaps" "I event want to" "invent air" "I've
painted" "thin transparent" "pieces" "of plastic" "They–"
"the pictures on them–" "always turn" "rectangular," "circular"
"I once painted" "on bat's wings" "I caught a bat" "painted
colours on" "let it loose &" "watched the air change..."
"He owns form," "doesn't he!" "The tyrant" "owns form'"
– from The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley.
Encountered for the first time read aloud. Reminded me of the power of aloud, how much does not make it off the page, and how much does – all the bad stuff does, all the dull words and terrorizing.
I was taken with the discovery that a famous line of poetry about poetry was always misquoted. Came back to the fact of the misquotation all the time even though it belonged to a Dead Old Man and, somehow, both the mistake and the reparation of its original meaning both defer to the wisdom of the Old Man. However, the miquoted line, attributed to the Old Man, had a righteous pessimism to it. People say, "As W.H. Auden wrote, 'Poetry makes nothing happen'". I don't remember when I first heard this. Poetry makes nothing happen. This, we all know (?).
And yet, is there not something intuitively wrong about this line? In late high school I picked a book of Auden's poetry off my parent's bookshelf and moved it to mine. The book, in my memory, belonged to my family friend who had passed away, basically an uncle, a writer himself, Wayson. Look up his books, read them. The poem from which the Auden quote originated, I discovered, was "In Memory of W.B. Yeats". The full stanza actually goes:
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Speaking transforms. It fills, expands, or it guts and hollows. A more accurate, shortened quotation would be, "As W.H. Auden sais, Poetry is a way of happening, a mouth."
Anyway, Notley. I haven't finished the book. But try reading Notley's poem aloud. She forces the rhythm on you.
I'm trying to start writing again, which maybe means more blog posts. I'm hoping the solstice spurs some turning over. My monstera is so tall like a small tree.