Alive: New and Selected Poems

by Elizabeth Willis

Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

American poet Elizabeth Willis has written an electrifying body of work spanning more than twenty years. With a wild and inquisitive lyricism, Willis—“one of the most outstanding poets of her generation” (Susan Howe)—draws us into intricate patterns of thought and feeling. The intimate and civic address of these poems is laced with subterranean affinities among painters, botanists, politicians, witches and agitators. Coursing through this work is the clarity and resistance of a world that asks the poem to rise to this, to speak its fury .

Genres: Poetry

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 2015

About the author

Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book is Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015). Her other books of poetry include Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), recipient of the PEN New England / L. L. Winship Prize for Poetry; Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan University Press, 2006); Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003); The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995); and Second Law (Avenue B, 1993). She also writes about contemporary poetry and has edited a volume of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (University of Iowa Press, 2008). A recent Guggenheim fellow, she has held residencies at Brown University, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Centre International de Poésie, Marseille, and has been a visiting poet at University of Denver, Naropa University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. From 1998-2002 she was Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Mills College. Since 2002 she has taught at Wesleyan University, where she is Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Jerrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw her read from this collection a few weeks ago down in the village, and got to speak with with her after. It's clear she is enamored by sound and its many effects, especially in the ways that it escapes language's attempts to assign it meaning. This is evident in poems throughout the collection which is a composite of many beautiful fragments pushing and pulling at each other; but it is most obvious in the final poem that lends the book its title. In this amazing long lyric which Willis writes in the space between a poem and essay, she teases out the possibilities and limitations of language and the system we've built of it--playfully and with boundless erudition. The book is a delightful wunderkammer

[steffi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit difficult to find a sense of resting place in these poems. Everything is flowing, changing at an almost frantic pace. Like watching a theatre play with a constant kaleidoscope of shifting stage scenery. But such interesting sentences and images. Both contemporary and fable-istic. The “I” of the poem forms and re-forms herself perpetually against a whirlwind of foxes and satellites and museums and gingerbread, jungles of “purple gel,” and “wordy water” and poppies, yes, several instances of poppies. Even the letters of the alphabet are characters in passing. The poems really do speak to something primal and emotional, despite their outward “randomness.”

Pronouns understand their game before we join the histories that betray us. The happening of summer, all verb upon the land.

We live in a flower, so I can’t taste anything […] I think therefore I green the grass I’m pinned upon.

Prepare yourselves […] to be urgently chiffoned.

[Ben Ringel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for class, eh

[Max Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was SO close to giving this 3 stars- a bump from the last Willis book I read, but ultimately not a ton of praise. Most of the book falls into that category: Willis does a good job playing with language, and the frankenstein nature of this collection provides an interesting separation of style, as though you were watching somebody's highlight reel and stopping a while during each season. However, very few of the poems stood out or attached themselves to me; I didn't see much reason to invest more in the work. But I did, I chugged on through, and there were some solid rewards along the way.

What bums this up to 4 stars is the title poem at the end of the book, "Alive". It's a spectacular piece of writing, probably in my top 10 ten poems immediately. Supposedly it was written for a live performance, I'll have to look it up. It's an irregular (but not unheard of) style, connecting little thoughts almost like a disjointed piece of prose. Some of the thoughts seem simple and benign, some are quirky or artsy. But the through-lines between them, the string pulling the poem along, becomes more powerful as you progress. Few poems with that much length have really drawn me in so well and so efficiently. The way that Willis plays with language throughout this book (meaning throughout her career) paid off well in that final poem, which was deserving of titling the book.

All in all, a good book. High peaks and fairly low valleys, but throughout I though it was ok. I would not say this is a book that can be eagerly enjoyed by casual poetry readers, my appreciation of it largely came from my understanding of poetry as a culture and craft.

[H]

"When *if* is *so*/ that's a kind of valentine nowhere" (30)

" 'you' is a man/ 'you' writes my book / What I have is an accident/ I spun my web" (31)

"Desire is a form of fastening/ They were right to steal everything/ We hadn't seen it" (32)

"an inescapable temperature/ a sensitive tabloid/ at the end of an angel" (36)

"Emotions are my daily actions./ Each seed has a gender./ The love of fertile ground can be a kind of phobia./ The mustard thrown to stony soil was saved./ All is fair" (38)

" 'We build this house'/ and then we live in it " (43)

"Against this house I always hammering/ the green of a fountain/ the original honor of the thing" (44)

"I came to laugh/ in a dirty garden/ A thwarted pauselessness/ considering pearls/ I was fluent in salamander/ Everything wrote itself onto skin/ with a tangled blowing/ An opal eye looking down/ on an errant package/ A sky wrung of tint/ What is the meaning/ of this minor error" (47)

"Your dream above your head/ like comic weather" (52)

"So loving love/ we lack science/ and in ourselves/ touch up the little/ teacher's picture" (53)

"Figs of lost thought/ rainy differences and non-glides/ feverish in girlways/ The tenuous escape of a patient/ nodding, obstinate/ jeweled or pinked" (56)

"Grammar is coral/ a gabled light/ against the blue/ a dark museum/ Durable thing" (61)

"What happens once can never come again, even in a dream. So I moved on, or it passed through" (67)

"He's bound to the gypsy by a terrible necklace./ You can't protect everyone from yourself" (68)

"It's a nuclear secret, a box of smack, and she's its beachhead. She's come from the dead to be remembered, and if she has to kill someone along the way, that's poetry" (71)

"a petticoat of sand/ the mind's a hinge/ a roughly chestnut arsenal/ a little box of nothing/ an incidental rose" (74)

"like a tin adventure/ blown forward in a crowd" (77)

"Adore the big green nothing of the past, the rationing of calm late in the century, like the arches of a brick heart, letting go" (82)

"It says we haven't died despite the cold, it sells the green room's sweat and laughter. It's misty in the dream. It says you promised to go on" (85)

"The delicate column, the poppied hill" (89)

"I swim to shore/ every day/ unfashionably mirrored/ with iridescent moss/ Even in terror/ surely we survive/ the scheduled collapse/ of yesterday's cakes" (91)

"I'm drawn to the warmth of what doesn't belong to me, waking up on the bus with money in my pants" (94)

"The body is always softer than its image" (96)

"I'm thinking of/ the heat in the reins/ a gear in love with itself/two parts that fit/ I'm thinking about your face:/ there's nothing to invent/ Driven to distraction/ or just walking there/ The edge of my mind/ against the edge of yours" (122)

"Abiding by its class/and country church, a kitsch picture/ is not "sincerity"/ though I am native to it/ A nation has this sound/ of being born/ the human/ is not its ill-begotten ad/ A hemisphere is not your hair/ in its Parisian rooms/ an astrolabe is not/ a metaphor for love" (122)

"A word is a symptom/ of what can't be described/ a promise, a premise/ held open like a door/ So I didn't find mercy/ or it didn't find me/ It's always personal/ like the failure of a knee" (123)

"The vine is just a vine/ a substitute for nothing:/ little mitten/ bellwether friend" (133)

"Wherefore my masterwork/ of plated opulence/ The constant flowering/ of our downward mobility" (136)

"The machine day assists you/ with its simple fittings/ To drive so as not/ to touch the world/ To oversee and not to hear/ its irregular sobs" (137)

"Concrete is not/ completeness/ A dream will/ shake its mind/ as light may be/ unfinished with/ its day... The peonies are/ finished, so am I/ but not the dream/ its closure welling/ up out of the dark" (143)

"I worry that my youth was wasted/ in obedience, which it was/ I worry there is not enough modern/ pollen for the ancient bees" (146)

"I'd like to graduate/ from the united states of plastic/ I'd like to face the future/ as if it were a person/I'd like to touch it/ and still come home for dinner/ I want to introduce you to my boat/ I think that everything/ can't wait til tomorrow/ I hope you're awake/ when I get there, that you'll be/ with me at the end" (148)

"Someone will say something/ evil is crazy/ Someone will always say/ it was nothing/ Someone will take/ all you are or could be/ as a given, as proof of/ a mistake in the landscape/ Someone tries to drain/ all the color from the room/ In the end, as the ending/ of a given or proof/ what you are or carried/ can't be covered, will be found" (151)

"I've been trying to catch your eye, but you're too busy kicking out the sun" (154)

"She is up all night. She is disappearing./ The C, the O, of the eclipse" (161)

"The gemmed trouble/ of someone else's power/ stopping traffic/ in love with its own nothing" (168)

"Aggrieved belief. He was my east and west./ He bound my breasts, I cut his hair./ I lay my words upon his mouth,/ my mouth upon I cannot say./ All of grace is not device. Love/ loves its past but not its thief./ May all its punishments remain untamed/ upon this green unsentencing" (170)

"I used to think it was obvious that I was different but not obvious what that difference was./ Breathing only becomes obvious when you try to hide it" (175)

"What makes a person lucky is not always obvious because it's so close to disaster./ I wish I were more famous./ I wish I slept better./ I wish I could take a nap in the middle of the day" (178)

"Her eye has turned the water into sky./ The poet is a trespasser/ The poet is the king of Rome, New York, with one foot in a boat and one against the snowy shore of reason./ Wondering if, like a boy, she could go there for a season" (181)

[Ely · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second reading: 3 stars
Having read a lot of beautiful poetry now—this one has kind of lost some of its magic. There are still some beautiful poems, but there are a lot of meh ones too.

First reading: 4 stars
Picked this up on a whim in Waterstones. This is some really gorgeous poetry. I especially loved seeing how her style changed from collection to collection.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 W734a 2015

[Paul Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I DO NOT remember why I bought this. I don’t think I saw any reviews…I don’t think anyone recommended it…I don’t think I saw some reference to her work somewhere…it may have just been that this collection was published by NYRB Books. Whatever it was, it worked out. This is a great collection.

Quite a few of the poems, perhaps as many as half of them, are prose poems and brilliant examples of the genre. (I checked David Lehmann’s anthology of prose poems to see whether I had come across her work there, but no.) They have a way of matter-of-factly dropping a non sequitur in a deadpan, nothing-to-see-here way that reminds me of James Tate.

What struck me most, though, is a quality that I associate with some Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker poems, having to do with the poem not needing to be seen/read/noticed as a poem to be a poem. Most poems, nearly all I think, want you to see them, want to register on readers’ consciousnesses as poems. A lot of Willis’s poems seem more self-sufficient than that, almost as if they do not need to be read and recognized as poems to be poems. We could call this a kind of modesty or self-effacement, but it could be a kind of supreme indifference too, the absence of any need of readerly approval. I find it very attractive, somehow.

The final poem, “About the Author,” seems to be a witty twist on just this point, playing as it does on the idea that if we readers see the poems as poems we will want to know about the source of the poems, the poet, assuming her to be remarkable and interesting and wise. And even though I repeatedly found myself thinking, as I read Alive, that Willis is interesting and remarkable and wise, “About the Author” seemed a well-dropped reminder that whether I came to such conclusions or not, her poems were poems.

[Aliah- The Book Corner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite a few of the poems, perhaps as many as half of them, are prose poems and brilliant examples of the genre. They have a way of matter-of-factly dropping a non sequitur in a deadpan, nothing-to-see-here way that reminds me of James Tate.

What struck me most, though, is a quality that I associate with some Emily Dickinson and Lorine Niedecker poems, having to do with the poem not needing to be seen/read/noticed as a poem to be a poem. Most poems, nearly all I think, want you to see them, want to register on readers’ consciousnesses as poems. A lot of Willis’s poems seem more self-sufficient than that, almost as if they do not need to be read and recognized as poems to be poems. We could call this a kind of modesty or self-effacement, but it could be a kind of supreme indifference too, the absence of any need of readerly approval. I find it very attractive, somehow.

The final poem, “About the Author,” seems to be a witty twist on just this point, playing as it does on the idea that if we readers see the poems as poems we will want to know about the source of the poems, the poet, assuming her to be remarkable and interesting and wise. And even though I repeatedly found myself thinking, as I read Alive, that Willis is interesting and remarkable and wise, “About the Author” seemed a well-dropped reminder that whether I came to such conclusions or not, her poems were poems.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whether it is "translating Blake," imagining classic Hollywood cinema as a baroque, assembling lexical sets into pastoral rhumbas, or a list of Giorgione archival imposters, often in an Elizabeth Willis poem the aesthetic warrants transgress -- like bad cultural repurposings; vid. "Who would not leave the message for the illumination, the culture for the poem?" -- any occasions the language quite elegantly discover in their implication: as she says, in the more unbuttoned "Alive," "metaphor carries something across, but from then on, it's fugitive."

[K. M.]

Intimate and replenishing. A very fresh collection. At the beginning I felt I was chasing an esoteric maiden in the image of Tess. At the middle of the book I became the one I was chasing. At the end, I reentered the world.

I'm meeting Elizabeth this sunday. Yes, she's my upcoming professor.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A stunning collection.

[bren · Rating 2 out of 5]

the only one i liked was the one about witches

[Cori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highlights: the young blake, steady digestion to a fixed point, no really steady digestion to a fixed point

[Winston? Kam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Principal Catastrophe was my favorite

[D.]

abbandonato

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Maiden

When I found your face on a pillow of leaves
you had already erased it. A nest so heavy
can stay in the heavens only by reversal.

By this law the knees are laced with abandon.

I said to the young man.

If watching is the manufacturer, and I lose you
what angel takes the place of a dowry
or distance in this leaf action?


Subject to like passions as we are

my soul herself, myself

a possession I could not

mistake for the man

(his language and Latin)

yet we are “taken to”

a love passage

I had hardly noticed

in the late talk of money

The work of love and the work of art

has no sleeping part

Is a drop of light

in a small silver socket,

a rosy dime

in a daylight tryst

Is a keeper and no spender

As seeing who is invisible:

a kind of flaxen thing

caught in stone

I obeyed and read further

“I am hemmed”

Though my heart were a pear tree

threaded with fire

Lion you leapt through me

like fineness in the boundary gene


What is a maiden,
boatswain,
but a fiery lair
and a teary citadel
By the smallest shipwreck
a daughter is laughter
Yet equalled
as in a fable
this Gibraltar goes headlong
in a just king’s love
See how his hands
are her mercy
and measure
her number and rescue
O Perseus
Pythagoras

Pierre
my Pierre

*

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous