Alice Notley in Conversation with Robert Dewhurst at BOMB
If you're looking for a deep Friday afternoon read, make your way to BOMB for this expansive interview with Alice Notley, conducted by Robert Dewhurst. The conversation opens with Dewhurst asking Notley to explain why people rarely ask her questions about her poetry, which leads into a discussion about prosody.
Robert Dewhurst When we were e-mailing before this conversation, you remarked that people rarely ask you questions, really, about your poetry. What did you mean?
AN I was thinking that they never ask me about what they personally care about in regard to it. They usually have an idea about what questions should be asked and what topics should be covered, but they never say to me, like, “How do you get such-and-such an effect?” Or “How did you stay alive all those years?” Those are two different kinds of questions, and no one ever asks me either kind. So you are permitted to if you would like to.
RD Well, in the essays in Coming After [University of Michigan Press, 2005], you’ve written so clearly about things like prosody and voice—about “poetics,” a term I know you consider suspect—and I’ve also noticed that you’re sometimes asked to repeat yourself. So I’ll try not to do that. As for real poetry questions, I find something like prosody almost embarrassing to address, because it’s so hard to talk about.
AN It’s impossible, unless you use set forms. I tend to set my own forms. And they usually don’t have to do with how the line is measured, but have more to do with sectioning poems, and things like that. Sometimes they’ll have to do with a general length of line. The last few years I’ve actually been working with classical meters, but I’m trying not to signal it. I don’t want anyone to know.
Prosody is really about your own voice, your own physiology, your own vibrations. Prosody’s about how objects and voices vibrate, and how they’re packaged, made compact, but not compact, at the same time—how they spread and become small and then dense. My second husband, Douglas Oliver, did these experiments where he put electrodes on people’s throats and got them to read poems, and then he compared graphs he got of what it was like for them to read a certain poem—say, by Alexander Pope. The graphs showed the shape of the poem, because they would always be similar. I was never very interested in the comparisons, but in the idea of the raw shape of the voice. That was his idea, that prosody is what you see on these voice graphs. The rise and fall of the voice. A great poet is somehow in control of that and makes it orderly, and when it’s disordered is actually in control of the disorder as well. And that’s impossible to talk about.
The conversation threads through Notely's life as a poet, from the 1970s to the present day, touching on her relationship to music to light to fellow poets to drugs to technology and methods of composition. Get into all of it over at BOMB. And if you're still searching for more smart talk right from the source, check out this interview with Notley and Adam Plunkett, or listen to Notely discuss a recent poem here.