Alice Notley's _Disobedience_
1.
I wrote my friend:
About halfway through Notley's Disobedience, and I still don't understand
a) what she's disobeying
b) where the poetry is? (which would imply she's writing notpoetry and that's the disobedience? but it's still poetry? I mean, even Maggie Nelson calls this out in The Argonauts)
2.
On p. 121 of The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes:
On one of those days, I teach Alice Notley's grouchy epic poem Disobedience. A student complains, Notley says she wants a dailiness that is free and beautiful, but she's fixated on all the things she hates and fears the most, and then smashes her face and ours in them for four hundred pages. Why bother?
3.
I mean, I suppose I was just restating Nelson's student's complaint to my friend (maybe a little differently: Nelson's student just complains that Notley is hypocritical, which is fair; I was missing the poetry).
3.1.
But what, exactly was I missing? Disobedience is written in lines, deals with big abstract issues in abstractly concrete language, and . . . and is sometimes inscrutable (is this really the beginning of my definitions of poetry?!). It is not, however, written beautifully, or at least I didn't think so when I wrote my friend. I was missing the language! the lilt and the melody and the poetry of language! and, instead, I was reading lines like
The phone rang; we're meeting at 1:30.
and
. . . this was a pointless exercise to begin with. Firstly, looking back through a book to find one example of a feeling you had while reading it both diminishes the feeling (in that it was created by several things working together and not individual lines) and shows you that what you thought was missing was actually there all along, and secondly, since most people think of the book as one single poem (albeit broken into titled sections), maybe I should, you know, read the whole thing before declaring it void of poetry.
4.
Wait-- Is hypocrisy a form of disobeying oneself?
5.
I have finished reading the book and should, to save face (?), completely scrap the above. And yet.
At some point in all the years I spent on the receiving end of education, I learned how to read in books instead of reading entire books. This saved time and energy and "precious head space" (as though there were only a finite amount), and it was great for getting through a semester, and it was great for getting a feel for a book, and it was great for a minute, but of course I robbed myself of several experiences by not reading the whole of X, Y, or Z.
It was important to have read the whole of Disobedience, to have seen and experienced its entire arc, to have found the beauty in its language (even in lines like the one quoted above), to have received Notley's argument whole, which I will now attempt to sum up (badly--my reading is mine and not yours, after all) with five very short passages:
my life as the shape of the ways I've been fucked / by prevailing thought & practice
and
Stop don't always try to say. Leave it resistant / and scary, exact.
and
The rifts in the world cannot be healed with language.
and
if you never quite let it be a poem / you might write one / but / there are a lot / of other / ways.
and
I've taken some / care that this poem not be a nice place.
6.
It was important to have written this attempt at a review. It was important to have attempted to write this review. If only because it helped me understand hypocrisy in a new way.