About
D. Beveridge
What she knew, she deployed as armaments, and “Ballad” read at University of Chicago in 2003 smashes an uncanny knowledge of the logic of my war into the intimacy of a woman’s legs and a lover owl. Alice, including “aircraft carriers”—an object otherwise disproportionately absent (at least weight-wise) from the corpus of American letters—may have well said “submarines” and, had I known then, had there been any worthy amount of instruction in poetry at the secondary level, I could’ve taken comfort underway knowing that somewhere at some time a truly honest person was singing something—even critical—about me and my shipmates. (What this leaves undone for the servicemen and women of our current war remains indeterminate. But no doubt, such neglect, if that is how it plays out, will come home in increasingly suicidal expressions.) Knowing the suffering wasn’t entirely invisible.
And this is not a quick instrumentalization of the life and work of our subject. I have to believe as much as Alice might have enjoyed seeing her work remembered, I think here she would’ve seen an opportunity for another, more political end. (See “1992” in Mysteries of Small Houses to verify the claim.) What Alice did for her brother, Albert Notley Jr., whose PTSD from Vietnam led to an untimely death in 1988—what she spoke for him, and through him, was perhaps the most American thing a poet of her caliber could ever do.
I receive a VA Newsletter today in which the mucky muck bureaucrat says, “I’m sick of the narrative of veterans as victims.” The title says something about “restoring the warrior spirit” and I’m dumbfounded imagining the volumes [insert theory-bro] could write about its subtext. Elsewhere, an able philosopher has described the cynic’s project (the rigorous kind, not in the popular sense) as the unmasking of appearances, and the image of Alice on the cover of her Telling the Truth book screams from its place on my shelf.
Excerpted from “Cherokee” from the same U Chicago reading also (later to appear in Grave of Light, and then Alma, or the Dead Women):
I didn’t see you on the second the next ghost dance day.
If they cover the earth with American materials
will the ghost dance work?
You fountain of disappearances
you maker of power to no one but you
he comes in the second ghost dance, who?
An image of the rattler of keys
to take me home to my senses of old
but that was a dreamed wish
even in the dream it was seen so
no one there, no one is here
but men like presidential
figures
and their ambitious dogs.
I want to exaggerate and make a universal claim about the singularity of Alice’s nearly divine retribution against the State (also keeping in mind her expatriation), but I will settle for speaking of my own experience: I cannot name another poet who cuts through the bullshit with more precision. Especially in Culture of One, the absurd conclusion of the American Dream (psy-op of the highest degree?) exposes itself in the lives of the desert rats around an imaginary copy of her hometown of Needles, CA. It’s almost clear enough from the title alone: our myopic individualities, our hubris towards art, the language of autists. Far from wagging her finger, and even further from bourgeois irony, Alice uses the line and a semi-violent multiplicity of the line to deliver judgement on power.
Perhaps more than any other application today, Notley should be remembered for her practice of Liberty and how that civic blessing must be dispensed with extreme discrimination between true patriots and fraudulent jingos.
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