Sherry Chandler

Alice Notley and the idea of charm

The world is full of poets I have not read and Alice Notley is one of them. I’m not even sure she’s on my list. Although promise of significant political content is tempting, descriptions like second-generation New York School and LANGUAGE poet hint that I may not be able to find a way in. But I do find this Joel Brouwer review of her latest collection, In the Pines ($18 from Penguin!), filled with evocative statements:

To write vital poems, Notley has said, “it’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against … everything.”

This statement appeals to me, though more as a justification of my inborn contrarian nature than as a philosophical stance.

We prize art driven by nerve, impulse and instinct, but a poem that too fully embraces artlessness can cease to be art. Notley avoids this pitfall through — I don’t know what else to call it — charm. “It is because of the love,” she writes. “If you are in it you know. Then at that time that’s what you know. Then in that time you don’t have to know. That’s why I’m not telling a story.” “Love,” here, suggests a kind of pact between reader and writer: if you’ll trust my voice, the poet says, you won’t need to know my story.

This statement leads me to wonder whether it isn’t always some form of charm that draws us to any particular poet. Whether every poem isn’t as much spell as story. It’s the voice, like that of a siren, that binds one.

Which is not to say that poets deal in razzle-dazzle, though they do.

In, of all things, Terry Pratchett’s latest Disc-World novel, Making Money (HarperCollins, 2007), the central character, Moist von Lipwig (don’t ask, just read the books) is a con man who somehow always knows how to fix things. In the words of one character, a sort of union man at the mint who has decided to support the scheme for making money:

“And we talked to some of the lads from the Post Office last night and they said we could trust Mr. Lipwig’s word ‘cos he’s as straight as a corkscrew.”

“A corkscrew?” said Bent, shocked.

“Yeah, we asked about that, too,” said Shady. “And they said he acts curly but that’s okay ‘cos he damn well gets the corks out!”

Sounds like a poet to me.

We’re all pretty good at getting corks out.

Or, to quote Michelle Boisseau and Robert Wallace in Writing Poems:

Prose, like a straight line, extends to the horizon. Verse, like a spiral, draws us into itself.

So what I mean in all seriousness is that good poets are about getting at news that goes beyond the story, truths that are intuitive, that are of the dream and the shadow, that are sacred, truths that dwell, as James Baker Hall would say, “among the deep feeders.” Lyric poems function like chants, like drum beats. Poets are shamans.

Or they aren’t.

Sometimes poets are just playing around, having fun with language, playing little tarradiddles on their panpips with no further goal than to make you smile or to show you how clever they are.

Still, it’s all about charm.

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