American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form

3. Alice Notley’s Disobedience: The Postmodern Subject,Paranoia, and a New Poetics of Noir

3 / Alice Notley’s Disobedience: The Postmodern Subject, Paranoia, and a New Poetics of Noir “I find I need a plot to show us truth, the graph’s coordinates quotidian life.” —alice notley, disobedience, 2001 Perhaps because of the many formal, generic, and thematic crossings within Alice Notley’s large and ever-growing oeuvre, attempts to place her work within any single community of contemporary experimental writing necessarily fail at the same time that such failure precisely identifies her work as among the most distinctively hybrid poetics of our current moment. At times Notley has been identified through her husband, Ted Berrigan, with the so-called Second Generation New York School, a later twentieth-century movement both bohemian and urbane that generated a dynamic, spontaneous, and speakerly poetics. Notley and her contemporaries in the New York School were extending Frank O’Hara’s adaptation of Baudelaire’s flâneur, these later versions engaged in sensual absorption of both city and historical present through playfully textured languages of material and personal immediacy.1 At other times, perhaps especially in relation to the poems of At Night the States and Close to Me and Closer, Notley has been associated loosely with the Language movement because of her work in the breaking down of normative syntax and her opening of language to reader engagement and construction of meaning. In her 1980 lecture “Dr. Williams’ Heiresses,” Notley traces her lineage back through ancestors Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, among others, claiming to inherit directly from a collective of innovators in disjunctive and distinctly American language.2 One rather broad avenue of approach to Notley’s work, then, might be with close attention to her use of language-as-such, 72 / alice notley’s disobedience its texture, structure, and political force, its power to unsettle the status quo, its deeply American orientation toward speech and the utterance and experience of the common person, but also—importantly—its attention to questions of gender and authority in poetry. And yet despite the attention to the structure, politics, and radical potential of language that constituted the core of much late-century American avant-garde poetry criticism, Notley remains an awkward fit in this context, largely ignored by leading critics of not only the avant-garde but also the mainstream. Notley’s neglect among the mainstream is hardly surprising; her work is not straightforward lyric, and her poems take unusual forms, frequently ranging across the page in a provocatively connective dissonance and/or invoking the tradition of epic only to unsettle the gender identifications imbricated in the genre’s history. These formal features appear to have been enough to make her work impenetrable to mainstream critics writing in the seventies and eighties, most of whom were writing about the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde when they were writing about poetry by women at all. With regard to what many poets have recognized as the opposing camp, the avant-garde community’s neglect of Notley can be attributed to some degree to the abiding gender politics informing the innovative/ experimental poetry scene of her moment, a moment that in aesthetic terms stretches from the seventies into the present. In Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing, Ann Vickery documents this phenomenon, showing the multiple ways in which women’s disjunctive poetics have been treated as marginal to men’s in experimental /Language writing communities and rendered all but invisible amid male-dominant readings, public conversations, and publishing venues.3 More recently, Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young have rearticulated the degree to which the work of women poets has been elided in the criticism and anthologies of the various innovative poetry communities of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century, a practice that Spahr and Young argue continues into our current moment, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.4 In histories and overviews of Language writing, a select few women, namely Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe, have been consistently singled out by critics for their unique contributions to innovative poetry, and the reasons for this special status are clear. Reflecting the primary doctrine informing the Language movement’s collective project of dismantling the lyric, Hejinian and Howe have either avoided or openly problematized the trope of the lyric I and have composed work that encourages alice notley’s disobedience / 73 reader engagement with the word as...