ND Graduate Poetry Workshop Blog
Saturday, April 28, 2012
(A Lack of ) Singing in the Reines
I think this book demands to be talked about by separating each part. So I will just add a few brief comments for each section:
1. Leaves: If this book is in some ways a construction-deconstruction of poetry and the poetry book, then Leaves is definitely the section where Reines shows us a typical poetry book before she tears it down. Titles, reasonable poem sizes, standard line and stanza breaks. I think there's something to be said for the fact that Reines knows how to put a poem together. That being said, I think there's a real dearth of interesting imagery and language here, which is too bad. Question for all of you: Is this deliberate? Is she fucking with our notion of what good poetry is supposed to be?
2. Save the World: I can't seem to get through one of these blog posts without telling a story, so here we go. After my little brother and I anxiously awaited the big-screen adaptation of a graphic novel we both loved, Watchmen, we saw the movie on opening day. It's as terrible as everyone says it is. Afterwards, I went home and wrote a short poem about my hatred for the movie and the audience we saw it with. This poem dropped the f-bomb; it got indignant on the behalf of women everywhere. So imagine my surprise to see that Reines has done the exact same thing here. I wanted to like this section, as I love when strong writers address pop culture in complex and artful ways, but because Reines had nothing to add to the general discussion of this movie, I had a hard time getting into it. I realize that's personal taste and not actual criticism. Sorry; this whole part made me kind of mad. Probably because I had done the exact same thing when I was a dorky undergrad who didn't know any better.
3. When I Looked at Your Cock My Imagination Died: More questions for you guys. Is Reines actually trying to shock us here? Why? Is it working? (Note: I don't think it's shocking nor do I think it's subversive, but I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise.) Or does she know it's not shocking to contemporary audiences and is trying to subvert our expectations of shock value as well? Is just throwing around the word "cock" a lot make something shocking, or does it actually take all the power out of that word? Is that the point? Oh man, I'm talking in circles, here...
4. Mercury: Probably the best sense of poetry and image in this series, but I mostly skimmed through it. This book suffers from being too long, I think, and by the time I got here and knew I had to finish this thing so I could blog about it, I no longer cared to pay much attention to it.
5. 0: This is probably my favorite section in the book, and I wish it could have been its own self-contained book. I really admire the way Reines takes a speaker, the speaker's mother, and the speaker's daughter (all of whom are constructions and not actual people, I'd argue, despite the pictures that are clearly of Reines herself) and smashes them together. There seems to be one primary speaking voice, and yet in that voice, all these generations seem to exist at once, speaking to - or more likely, through - each other. I'm not totally sure what to make of this section (I might have to reread it a few more times), but I think there's some cool stuff happening about what it means for unhappy women to bring unhappy daughters into the world and the way you have to both cut yourself off from the future and yet cling to it, too. I think this is directly linked to how Reines feels about poetry and her relationship to it - that her poems are the daughters she doesn't want but which she tries to love. And that maybe she fails to love the right way. Again, I wish this had been it's own thing, as I think it needed some space to breathe outside of this large book.
Anyway, those are my non-academic thoughts on Mercury. I apologize for the scattered way this is written. It's the end of the semester and my brain is absolutely fried.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Juan Gelman and Roberto Bolaño: Against Dictadurar
Saturday, April 14, 2012
"I read myself": On the Awesome Mediumicity of Hannah Weiner
Not too long ago, I woke up with a sentence in my head:
“Where is Art Going and Where has it Been?”
As a very conventionally educated poet and literary type, I had been ‘raised up’ to believe that artistic creation started and ended with the artist. What was in the classical period referred to as ‘the Muse’ was transformed in the Renaissance to ‘Genius’, the special property of an extraspecial individual. The invididual Genius owned his Genius. He was a master; he created masterpieces; he was surely not visited by lady spectres who planted ideas in itself. Genius was a sort of tautological current; it was God-given but thereafter was the personal property of the Genius.
Well, ok. But somewhere in my 20s I realized that this personal-property-genius model was actually a way to set up an artistic 1% and conserve resources there. That is, if we allow that only individuals of Genius possess Genius, and there is naturally a limited amount of Genius in the world, and all the awards, lucky breaks, publictions, etc are awarded by merit, then they should go to those Geniuses, and too bad for the rest of us. Genius and native ‘Merit’ began to seem like codewords to me, or like a forcefield—if you subscribed to them, those notions blocked you from seeing the fact that the literary and art worlds are like any other insitutions, based on certain people holding on to certain powers while hiding behind such supposedly great watchwords as ‘Tradition’, ‘Standards’, ‘Genius’. Words like ‘Genius’, which themselves suggested private ownership of the indelible property of Art, actually were a way to controll who controlled Art’s resources.
That’s why it’s been very important to me to discover artists like Hannah Weiner. I think Hannah Weiner was amazingly great in all respects. I love her voice (both on the page, in video, and in audio). I love her bonkers early work with its corny puns and its loopy generosity. In the early performance pieces she made herself a host for Art—she would host both the Coast Guard and the down town arty types to perform her Code Poems, or she would invite the public to her place of business (designing underwear) or sell hotdogs as an edible pun on her name. She would also host forms and genres and media—codes, flags, horns, lights, invitation cards, underwear, a vaccuum, police tape, etc. At such events, her own person became a site where all these different groups and media made contact and relayed energies and transformed each other—dots and bars became light, words became hotdogs, concept became performance, charisma (her own) became conviviality (of the group). And she never took these events too seriously, even though what she hosted was the most vital Art process of all-- she channeled the eternal force of Art into material and into human temporality, made Art arrive and perform. Art comes to a human address.
After she became ‘clairvoyant’, these processes and vectors intensified and contracted. Unexpectedly, she saw words everywhere—on bodies, lampchains, walls, etc. What’s interesting to me about this is that the first part of her career, as a medium for media and as a host for Art, served as a kind of training to be able to cope with becoming a medium in the spiritual sense. Hannah Weiner is a hero to me because she developed the technology for her new radical occult mediumicity. As she says in 'Mostly about the Sentence",
I bought a new electric typewriter in January 74 and said quite clearly, perhaps aloud, to the words ( I talked to them as if they were separate from me, as indeed the part of my mind they come from is not known to me) I have this new typewriter and can only type lower case, capitals, or underlines (somehow I forgot, ignored, or couldn’t cope with in the speed I was seeing things, a fourth voice, underlined capitals) so you will have to settle yourself into three different prints. Thereafter I typed the large printed words I saw in CAPITALS the words that appeared on the typewriter or the paper I was typing on in underlines (italics) and wrote the part of the journal that was unseen, my own words in regular upper and lower case.
Thus while the amount of time and labor she spent with her Spirit Teachers must have been a lonely and exhausting and exacting endeavor, she remarkably transferred their presence into a variety of other media—the Clairvoyant Journals and other texts, small books and letters and advertisements and pamphlets, as well as tape recordings and live and recorded performances and interview. In other words, while the experience of mediumship may have been radically isolating in its pragmatic demands, it was also an amplification of the process of ‘hosting’ and mediumicity she developed in her early practice. When the spirit teachers (sonically) appeared, Hannah Weiner was gloriously up to the challenge.
One matter of intense interest to me is the specific technology of her mediumicity, the synesthesia (and anasthesia?) of moving from one medium to another, in both her pre-Clairvoyant and post-clairvoyant work. I’d like to ask you, what is it like to ‘meet’ Hannah Weiner in each of these medium? What was the difference between ‘reading’ the Clairvoyant Journal excerpts, listening to the tape, and watching the video? Why do you think Hannah Weiner was continually reiterating the specific technology of her mediumicity at the beginning of her performances and texts (i.e. everything is prefaced with some version of her ‘I see words’ speech )? What was her interest in making this process of mediumicity so apparent to others—even going so far as to refer to the ‘words’ as ‘voices’ and translate them from a lexical to an audial version?
Finally, to return to my early theme of Genius: I suppose we could describe Hannah Weiner as a ‘Genius’ if we wanted to stuff her back into the niches our literary training make available to us but it’s much more exciting for me to do the opposite, to redefine my understanding of Art and Writing using Hannah Weiner as a starting point, to see Art as a series of incomplete or oversaturated transmissions that moves from media to media, that differs and sometimes coincides with itself, that writes its name on my body, world and forehead and rips me out into the streets to see my friends. This insight also allows me to see all my favorite artists (Claude Cahun, Andy Warhol, Joey Arias, Antonin Artaud, Jack Smith, Blatny, Erocelik, Blake, Ito, Kim Hyesoon, you guys) as spectres of radiant and radical conveyance:
Well, what do you think?
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Asylum Granted
I went looking for the madness.
I don’t know if I found it.
Did you?
The backdrop of Ivan Blatny’s life (as discussed in class and in the introduction of The Drug of Art ) prompted the search. It felt like a murder mystery, looking for clues, trying to find its seeds. I wondered what it would have been like to read the poems without knowing he spent time in an asylum, but guess that would be impossible to do. I also wondered if my preference for Bixley Remedial School came down to the timeline. I want to spend this whole post talking about insanity. I’ll try to resist. Quite honestly, I’m not too sure it exists, because so much of what is called sane/insane is just a representation of our acceptance of a power/belief structure.
Institutions:
Blatny was a clearly prolific writer, but there is a 32-year gap between the poems presented in The Art of Drug. There could be many reasons for this gap; an editorial decision; Blatny didn’t write during this time; or anything he wrote has been erased by an institution. It doesn’t much matter if it was the Czech or English institution, both labeled him dead.
It seems that his run-in with the communist structure and subsequent interactions with a mental health structure, affected the survival, creation and reception of his work. His interactions with a political regime literally shaped the tone and character of his poetry, and also shapes the way the reader interacts with the work.
So, for an author whose life and art was so politicized, I was actually surprised to find little overt political content in the poems. In the earlier poems, I get a sense of social upheaval and war, but the war felt like the background noise for the speaker: as the radio broadcast the farm report,/the newspaper carried news of war,/of war to come, and yet everything and everyone was fast asleep (57). What is outside is like a condition of being, it is like sleep, and it is something that needs to be navigated. This passage comes from The Game, which is a long poem that is a mix between pages of prose block and the more traditional poetic page. The prose section of the poem is the Passerby dreaming of trials, rules, a doctor, a Resistance and of poetry.
Boundaries and Other Containment:
The Game is a poem that typifies recurring images/ideas of boundaries and containment that I saw throughout the collection. I felt that the speakers in Blatny’s poems are solidly contained. The containment is sensory, physical, relational and structural. But the speaker perceptions cannot be contained, and the poems represent a blurring of boundaries and distinctions between realties. (By “reality” we mean, the reality of his dream.) (59).
The dream within The Game, shows the Passerby on trial, and the people who represent the structures seem confused about the rules and labels they have aligned themselves to: The inspectors sought to establish who was a member of the Resistance and who was not. Still, he had no idea which signs meant yes, and which meant no (59). The inspector tells the Passerby he and his mother that they were going to chop off a leg from each of them (59), for whatever crime, and they would replace his leg with some type of mechanical apparatus. Towards the end of the poem the speaker tells us: he gritted his teeth and brought his leg down sharply on the lower block./He made up his mind to play it out to the end…/as the Passerby sat down at the table/and heard/the buzzing of several milky ways..(67).
Here we see confusion between the boundaries of wake/sleep, participation/observation and identities. Is the buzzing the sound of the saw in his dream, or is the sound of wasps as he wakes? When the speaker is hearing the buzzing the prose block has ended, giving the reader the impression that the dream is over and this is reality; a reality that the speaker will: play out to the end. As a dreamer, the speaker is both participant and observer; he is the inspector, the doctor and the victim/patient. And although the speaker is going to play out this game, there is no real sense what the game is. Is the game, the game of politics, of conformity, of poetry, etc.: the game is never spoken of: everything must be played out within the games framework, and within this framework the doctor had every right to be insulted…(63).
Wow, I just realized I got lost in The Game, which is ironic, because it was the one poem I did want to talk about. I found the prose section so dense; I couldn’t force myself through, and skipped it on the first read. But it really illustrates how Blatny works away the edges of the real.
While I see The Game mostly playing with structural boundaries and norms, I see other poems playing with the boundaries of the sensory. This Night paints a sensory world, in which the speaker’s senses exist beyond their prescribed powers. Light and time can be heard and what is seen of time can be touched. ...Eight-thirty struck/In the lampshade I heard…/I turned out the light And outside it was gently blowing…/I reached for the handle, what can be seen in an instant/All days All nights Right at this moment/Gurgling from the water mains (13). His word choice, line breaks and repetition in this poem and others are techniques Blatny uses to subvert the distinctions between internal and external existence.
But are these the signs of a mind that has the seeds of mental illness showing, or are they simply an expression of experience, an aesthetic? And what about his experience or aesthetic couldn’t be contained within the “normal” functioning of a society?
Flatness:
And I guess I’m going to use that question as a rough transition to his later works, which are the works directly attributed to his so-called confinement. There are many things that struck me about the poems written in England. The length is much different, tending to be very short, efficient use of the page. He also shifts back and forth between different languages. I could very well be mistaken on this one, but I think he flips between German, English and Czech. I really enjoyed the language shifts. It was like an erasure of parts of the poem, like closing the door to certain members of his audience.
But beyond the switching of languages, the quality that most struck me in his later poems was the evenness of tone. It was like every word, every image all carried the same weight. The poems became flat—not blurred, just flat. An untitled poem on page 120 is one of my favorite examples of this evenness:
Never Light the job
Nottingham is the North of England
potato blight killed there all the bulbs
I have no rules
I’m still undecided about everything
I’m still in
There is a church in America
and when you get married
the priest gets more voices
to get to bed in the evening
it is not my birth-day
to expect the triumph of God in the morning
The potato blight, the church in America, being undecided about everything and not expecting the triumph of God in the morning, are all joined together in the same manner of importance and tone. Nothing seems to be beyond the internal logic of the speaker’s voice. I’m not sure I can describe it any better than this but I’m wondering if any of you experienced this same sensation?
I could go on and on about what I think of this flatness, but it would probably devolve into how Blatny’s poems illustrate a Sociological Theory I love, so I will spare you all that, and leave you with some possible questions to discuss, or go whichever directions interests you. I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Possible Questions:
Ø Am I wrong about the political images and themes in The Drug of Art? Were you struck by political messages within the poems? Is art always potentially political and subversive?
Ø How did the issues of boundaries strike you? What are some ways that you see Blatny establish and take away boundaries?
Ø What did you make of his use of language? How does it relate to the notion of containment?
Saturday, March 31, 2012
history and theatre
Structurally I really liked and hated how the critical texts precede the play in the reading packet we are reading.
The structure inevitably positions the text in the same way as the way blackness and whiteness is portrayed that Susan Lori Park supposedly dislikes; susan writes how blackness, its superfluous fluidity is always positioned in relative position to the white presence, which is a solid grounded position, in theatre that has both white and black. likewise, the critical text with its solidity/certainty inevitably positions the creative text in fluid relative/reactive position, which is also vulnerable to the scrutiny of academicians-- the super pc, the believer of literal oppresser and oppressed binary--gaze.
This shows the operatie system of theatre of academic publishing and a marginalized writers: the overflowing meaning the nonstandard body is put under the easily comprehendable solid theory and names.
But at the same time, susan revels in this theatre: that's why the black character's name that susan lori parks is giving are attached to stereotypical food(black man w watermelon; black woman with fried drumstick). she plays with mask that obviously cannot contain the superfluous body. it is just like when tracie morris screams and sings the textbooklike text that describes slaery; the music is manifestation of superfluidity, the textbook-y language are the names, mask.
Of Mimicry and Man
When I say mask that cannot contain the superfluidity, it is the opposite of the mimicry/camouflage in homi bhabha's text in terms of its original purpose. The maks Susan plays with is purposfully limited to flaunt superfluidity behind it; camouflage is intended to hide the superfluidity to fit into standardized world. yet ironically they function similarly. they both reveals constructed, thus, not-absolute nature of the mainstream/stanadard/whiteness through their own-- exaggeratedly limiting/too defined mask&trying to blend in but unsuccessful mimicry-- constructedness/performativeness
posession
in this zero-sum(in terms of interiority and authenticity) equation "the definition of posession cancels itself out. the relationship between possessor and possessed" is even further eradicated, the economic implication in the word possess. Black and white relations are always in midst of economic transaction; slavery, welfare queen, a boy with a ratty hoodie is suspicious because of this implication, and economy is inevitably in the center of theatre of history.
element of style
This title reminds me of the grammar book written by dr. white.
This section of the Susan's writing does mimick the absolute tones of instruction yet the excess, the black speech tone seeps into the instructions of how elements should be arranged to re-member the scattered, de-constructed, no longer absolutely-binary elements and masks into a new constellation, a new universe, another Ameria
America Play
That is why this is America Play, not American Play. It is creating another America, another history. There are doubling of everything, making everything into the construction and super-fluid darkmatter, the hole. The hole of History. The hole=theatre. There is no solidity. There never was. There is no ground. There is no America with capital A.
(I will add more about the play itself later; but feel free to fill it in? :) )
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Obscenity, Duality, and Style
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Notley's The Descent of Alette
Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette
*Because the poem is so long, I’ve summarized and highlighted passages I think are important—there’s so very much going on in this book that I’ll trust all of you to do more close reading and interpretation than I do here. Hopefully my post will at least start everybody off. I'm so sorry for the length of this!
Book I
Notley’s epic poem—compared on the back cover to Dante’s Inferno, although it is essentially a subversion of so many aspects of the traditional epic—begins on the subway, on which a “world of souls” rides endlessly below ground, never surfacing, forced beneath the earth by a Tyrant who will let you off only if you sell your soul to him. In this nightmare world, Alette encounters wounded and tortured souls, all in some way enslaved by the Tyrant and his mind: shattered, drug-addled soldiers who killed for him, women and children on fire (clear references to the Vietnam War), strippers (suggestive of male ownership of women’s bodies), lunatics, businessmen and women, etc. There are cars of garbage and of blood, of disembodied voices crying for help, of ghostly office-workers. Not too far into the poem, it becomes clear that the Tyrant is a kind of metaphysical being, embodied in various avatars throughout history but never completely reducible to them: he is capitalist, Pope, Caesar, bureaucrat (6), even (at times) revolutionaries with guns who want to change things (implying the exchange of one form of the Tyrant for another) (39); he owns form (25), (spiritual) enlightenment, and light itself (37). He is Reason as well, wresting order out of chaos (20). He’s also a mild-mannered, appealing guy. His maleness could be read either as essentialist or as conditional, I think. The feminine principal of the poem is chthonic, creative, timeless, and the “ground of being” so to speak, and the Tyrant’s maleness is order-driven, authoritarian, hierarchical, rational, power-obsessed, and removed from the creative life-force of the earth itself. These qualities could be said to inhere in every person regardless of sex, and later on in the poem, Alette discovers that everyone has a piece of the Tyrant inside (81). More on this later. Nevertheless, beneath the Tyrant’s rule, true life itself is forced underground and the psyche is stunted, allowed not to unfurl of its own accord but borne against its will, mechanistically, back and forth along a pre-established pattern, without meaning, in the darkness of oppression / repression.
And yet there seems to be hope, if only a tentative kind at first. A woman in one car recalls a dream in which she becomes a snake and strikes at the Tyrant, albeit unsuccessfully. (The snake will return again and again throughout the poem as a symbol of chthonic, feminine / creative resistance to the Tyrant’s rule—a kind of earth mother.) Another woman—a painter—is trying to invent a form that the Tyrant doesn’t own. There is even a car made of living flesh in which Alette has an intimation that there is “someone else” in all of us who escapes the Tyrant’s rule. Alette encounters an owl—symbol of dark wisdom—in one car, who tells her that her duty is to kill the Tyrant, and when she does, she must remember that she is an animal and do it cleanly. (The animal ‘way’ of killing is significant to me: animals kill not out of malice but out of necessity, in harmony with natural impulses.) Interestingly, Alette feels the owl to be the spirit of her dead father, adding an element of male resistance to the Tyrant in an otherwise female-dominated paradigm. Alette later witnesses a death, and a counsel of spirit-beings that urge the dead man’s spirit not to rise but to descend, because to rise would be to enter the Tyrant’s world: “We can only go” “down” “farther down—“ / “Down” “is now the only way” “to rise” (26). Descendence rather than ascendence / transcendence, darkness rather than light, the depths of the earth and of the psyche rather than the heights of heaven / reason, is what Notely’s epic ultimately privileges as a path towards reclaiming all that has been lost to the Tyrant. In this spirit, Alette boards a black train at the end of Part I, headed downwards towards “true night”, “endless darkness”, and the “unknown.”
Book II
Beneath the subway’s subconscious world lies a universe of the unconscious, the “middle psyche” as the poem refers to it (47)—caverns within caverns, dreams within dreams. Before beginning her journey through the caves, Alette hears an old man’s voice singing of the snake / earth mother that once carried people through their lives before the Tyrant’s train took its place. She has numerous mystical experiences in the caves (some of which I find very difficult to interpret), and seems to draw closer and closer to the evasive earth mother / primal life-force. Of all the experiences, one of the most striking is the one in which Alette meets a mermaid with a hairy chest (suggestive of a primordial, hermaphroditic union of male and female) who tells her that she is a “forgotten possibility” and that Alette’s people “have / divided” “themselves in two:” “have made” “domination” “[their] principal”. She tells Alette, “You must begin again,” “create again” / “each moment” (64). For me, the mermaid signifies the primordial, creative union of the sexes in harmony, and the possibility of *creating* a path and a life beyond the Tyrant’s life-defeating dominion that exists, to a greater or lesser extent, in each person. The hermaphrodite motif shows up again and again through Part II (in the god/woman whose genitals are “blank” and who shapes “a hairless,” “sexless figure” out of clay [66], in the “divine neuter” mask [75], etc.) Although other parts of Part II might be read as essentializing masculinity and femininity, the hermaphrodite motif, for me, implies a basic union of masculine and feminine energies in each person that has been forgotten under the Tyrant’s rule, thus saving the poem from a simplistic kind of essentialism. The ending sections of Part II are significant dramatic movements: Alette puts on a cellophane half-mask and declares to a group of men and women that the old structures must be torn down and beds built for all the living. The group draws cards to decide who will kill the Tyrant, and Alette draws the Ace of Roses/Panthers (again, this pairing of symbols could be read as a union of feminine/masculine energies) and tells the group she will do it. She finds and steals a piece of the Tyrant’s heart in one of the last caves, and says: “its presence here” “meant, I knew” “that / something of him may be” “indigenous” “to any one of us” (81). (I will refrain from dwelling on the fact that I think it’s pretty impossible not to think of Blake’s Urizen, Ginsberg’s Moloch, as well as Voldemort’s Horcruxes here…) The primordial creative force inheres in every psyche, but so does the Tyrant’s death-drive. At last, Alette enters a cave and descends a stairwell that emerges—surprisingly—onto the earth again, and wades into a night river.
Book III
Alette swims across the river and enters a forest, eventually meeting with a headless woman—the true first woman / mother. Her headlessness perhaps represents the division of the body and mind that is perpetrated by the Tyrant’s energies: the first woman speaks of the ignorance of the holy men, the wise men, the poets, etc. as having caused her to suffer (90). She speaks of the beginning of the world, of how male and female were once one, but the male somehow lost the primal connection to the world of creation and became a thinker, a war-maker, a ruler, etc. (91). She can only “see” with her voice—a voice that emanates from deep within her being—but Alette helps her to reattach her head so that her voice can actually create reality once again (99). Alette and the first woman bid goodbye to each other and the owl reappears, and so begins Alette’s necessary self-transformation that will allow her to kill the Tyrant. Alette is first made to eat a mouse the owl has killed, and so realizes the unity of all creation, of death and life (104). She is then led to the black lake of death, beyond which is the “great darkness”—the dream-world before creation. Thrown into the lake by the owl, Alette is dismembered of her being so that she can be transformed into becoming, and in the great darkness she meets a light that isn’t a light, but her very self. This might be putting too much of my own spin on things, but I feel that this “true” self is not a fixed entity but the *process* of being—the endlessly self-creative self (to put it that way). A voice reminds her: “’It’s what you’ve / always” “suspected” “It’s nothing but” “what you’ve always known,” / “always been” “For you’ve always” “been being” (111). Alette reenters her body, delighting in her senses, and finds herself in the forest again, where the owl bequeaths a talon to her so that she can kill the Tyrant as an animal (once again, the dichotomy between natural killing and rationalized violence is highlighted). Alette must now find her way upwards to the Tyrant’s house.
Book IV
Alette and the Tyrant finally meet, and the Tyrant finally reveals that he is reality itself (though Alette doubts this), and has no need for the heart she has brought with her. He leads her through his house, past displays of various kinds showing various human societies, the subway, and his “government.” He also shows her masks of “principals,” “essences”—including vegetation, sexuality, religious leaders, and the first woman herself. It becomes clear the Tyrant is abstraction itself—he lays claim to and attempts to possess realities but cannot fully own them, although he thinks he does, in the same way that he owns museums, art galleries, and greenhouses. He thinks he owns Nature as well, but only as a scientist can, “From the outside” (128). Alette and the Tyrant travel to the subway, where the Tyrant reveals that the subway is actually his heart, and that its darkness scares him, but also empowers him (132). This is poignant to me: the Tyrant’s power comes from the very act of repression-- his darkness is transmuted to violence, to mental agility, etc. Later on, the Tyrant reveals that it is from this darkness that all inspiration, poetry, etc. comes from as well. (Do we buy this?) At last the pair emerges at a stop called “River Street”, which is a river of blood that flows off into separate rivulets throughout the subway. Alette reclaims a lost memory in this river—the memory of her brother who died in battle. This is also the only moment in the poem when we hear Alette speak her own name, and thus voice her feminine, individual identity against the Tyrant. Alette becomes an owl and flies over the river of blood, looking for a place where the Tyrant is vulnerable. She comes to a flesh grotto, where a strange bush grows: its three arms are vegetable, animal, and human, and in the human hand is a dead black rose (symbolizing, perhaps, male ownership of the female principal of life). Alette invokes the owl-spirit and pulls the bush out at the roots, and the Tyrant’s is mortally wounded. He pleads with her, says that she is killing herself, her own culture, her own soul. But all of these, Alette knows, are simply unreal constructions, dreams. “’Starting” / “from dreams we” “can change,” “will change” “In / dreams,” “in dreams, now,” “you will die” (144). The Tyrant is ultimately a dream solidified into reality, and with the Tyrant’s death Alette returns the world to the primordial openness of existence: “What we can have now,”…”is infinity” “in our lives”. (147). The Tyrant’s repressive “reality” is revealed as only a constructed reality, reified by the millions of souls unable to dream or create anything else. The sky is clear again, the light is new, and the people emerge from the subway determined to remake the world. All the lost and forgotten beings from the depths of being emerge from the depths of the earth, and with this the poem closes. Notely’s epic has come full-circle: to revitalize existence, Alette does not travel upwards to heaven, but downwards through the darkness of being to reclaim the lost power of creation that can re-imagine and re-create the world.
Some questions to consider (if you want to, of course):
What are we to make of the fact that Alette must use the power of the owl—who was formerly a man—in order to kill the Tyrant? Can this be read as a channeling of male violence against itself, or as reclaiming a sort of power that was / is always inherent in the female psyche?
Going off that, what do you all think of the essentialist aspects of this poem? As I’ve said, I definitely think there are moments of true essentialism, but also many moments that seem to undermine the male/female dichotomy. Which wins out for you, in the end?
Finally, the question of voice. Notely’s uses quotations to make sure that her text is experienced as a spoken voice, not simply a text, and the figure of the voice shows up over and over throughout the poem. Is voice synonymous with creation itself, a bringing into being of something that never was before? What other valences could there be to this?
Finally, the last question: the poem privileges descent into the depths of being over transcendence. Is the inherent, messy chaos of being the solution to tyrannical order imposed by the mind? What are the political implications of this? The psychic implications? The implications for sexual politics?