Shawn Huelle

Alice Notley Notes

Alice Notley visited DU for a week. Here are my notes from her reading:

an historic time of world wide massive immigration it will probably be all right jobs of small movements proofs vs. Prousts

lecture:

oblique dialogic impossible speech into the reader's ear and mouth potential endlessness trying to be as fast as thought • a quality of graven-ness simply had to discontinue all of our lieders are mute here we should think about what we're doing speed as memory aid walking across the street is a story and then we're always to break out of those stories memorization of what we write they actored them you kind of [gaze] into the computer does thoughtfulness equate to strong fingers?

workshop:

the poetry pole / rhythm vs. cadence rate you feel as though you have depth and surface @ the same time your interior is always surrounded and sometimes always that surrounding is surrounded in the moment (Buddhism?) • coming from the poet head one has to allow one's friends to break up anything that affects you deeply / and yet we're talking about surface your = one's yr = thine deliberate vs. deliberative making a mistake and deciding to save it is genius diction: there's that word again. does it yet have a meaning? always read aloud / always read aloud prose can use variation of a line length, but you must know you're working with lines. poetry distracts you from meaning Content? Mediterranean Homesick Blues das Wochenende (ich lebe fürs Wochenende) "the whole bent of the 20th century was to make things sound natural" working w/line and sentence in simultaneity Whitmanic impulses everything I know how to do you can't do it without doing it in the music of the paragraph, you have to be aware of where you want the breaks (in the rhythm?) so many people have died around her and she is aware is aware and steeped in it and unforgetful true civilization lies in the symbolic sacrifice music is the art of grief (have I been grieving?)

surface is content it's always good to bang your head against the wall of a form I recommend it as a sound