Split Feminism, 1988, Homer's Art, Owls

On Alice Notley's journey towards a feminist epic

Last summer, I became obsessed with Alice Notley’s work. I was teaching a workshop with my friend Emily Skillings. I wanted to bring in a poem for us to study that evening, so I grabbed Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993) and flipped open to a random page where there was a prose poem called “Homer’s Art”—a text I had never read before. The poem blew my head off. That was June 2022.

A few months later, I would get the opportunity to fly to Paris for two weeks and interview Notley in person. We were able to record over twenty hours of conversation about her life and work. It was riveting. But by the time I had arrived, having read backwards and forwards, revisiting poems and books I knew, adding on essays and interviews, I had started to form my own reading of the work. I realized there was a massive TURN in her poetics. Everything pointed to the eventful year of 1988.

Prior to 1988, Notley was largely a part of the New York School, a mythical yet real community of poets and painters that converged for a time. Today, there is a scholarly/academic/popular folk understanding of this term or label, where it usually starts with “first generation” figures like John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and moves forward to “second generation” figures like Notley, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, and many, many others, onwards and onwards. Did the New York School really exist? John Ashbery who spent most of the 60s in France and was as close to O’Hara, Koch and Schuyler as anyone, never thought so. His kindest response to the idea of that name—something an invention of the anthologist John Bernard Mayers (1969) that stuck—was a smirk.

In Maggie Nelson’s 2007 Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, she tries to chart the gender and sexuality stories that has been largely left out of this highly active and impactful period. She doesn’t posit a theory, per se; rather, she foregrounds a lot of figures that had been otherwise obscured: Joan Mitchell, Barbara Guest; then long, sumptuous chapters on Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley and Eileen Myles. It’s a great book. The chapter on Notley is called “Dear Dark Continent: Alice Notley’s Disobediences.”

I like how that name, by the way, pays homage to two titles in Notley’s work (“Dear Dark Continent,” Disobediences) and also channels the feminist-anarchist imaginary so crucial to this poet’s spirit. Freud famously called women’s sexuality “a dark continent.” (And for those interested, there’s a great book unpacking the sexist racism of the phrase in a much wider context of psychoanalysis and colonialism—as it turns out, Freud lifted the phrase from a white explorer who had used it to refer to Africa.)

Anyway, here’s a paragraph from the opening of Nelson’s chapter: