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The Penguin Poets
Certain Magical Acts
An important new work of poetry from Alice Notley, winner of the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest work sets out to explore the world and its difficulties, from the recent economic crisis and climate change to the sorrow of violence and the disappointment of democracy or any other political system. Notley channels these themes in a mix of several longer poems - one is a kind of spy novella in which the author is discovered to be a secret agent of the dead, another an extended message found in a manuscript in a future defunct world - with some unique shorter pieces. Varying formally between long expansive lines, a mysteriously cohering sequence in meters reminiscent of ancient Latin, a narration with a postmodern broken surface, and the occasional sonnet, these are grand poems, inviting the reader to be grand enough to survive, spiritually, a planet's ruin.
Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest work sets out to explore the world and its difficulties, from the recent economic crisis and climate change to the sorrow of violence and the disappointment of democracy or any other political system. Notley channels these themes in a mix of several longer poems - one is a kind of spy novella in which the author is discovered to be a secret agent of the dead, another an extended message found in a manuscript in a future defunct world - with some unique shorter pieces. Varying formally between long expansive lines, a mysteriously cohering sequence in meters reminiscent of ancient Latin, a narration with a postmodern broken surface, and the occasional sonnet, these are grand poems, inviting the reader to be grand enough to survive, spiritually, a planet's ruin.
- GenresPoetryFemale Authors
160 pages, Paperback
First published June 7, 2016
29 people are currently reading
689 people want to read
About the author
Alice Notley
85 books223 followersAlice Notley was an American poet. Notley came to prominence as a member of the second generation of the New York School of poetry—although she always denied being involved with the New York School or any specific movement in general. Notley's early work laid both formal and theoretical groundwork for several generations of poets; she was considered a pioneering voice on topics like motherhood and domestic life.
Notley's experimentation with poetic form, seen in her books 165 Meeting House Lane, When I Was Alive, The Descent of Alette, and Culture of One, ranges from a blurred line between genres, to a quotation-mark-driven interpretation of the variable foot, to a full reinvention of the purpose and potential of strict rhythm and meter. She also experimented with channeling spirits of deceased loved ones, primarily men gone from her life like her father and her husband, poet Ted Berrigan, and used these conversations as topics and form in her poetry. Her poems have also been compared to those of Gertrude Stein as well as her contemporary Bernadette Mayer. Mayer and Notley both used their experience as mothers and wives in their work.
In addition to poetry, Notley wrote a book of criticism (Coming After, University of Michigan, 2005), a play ("Anne's White Glove"—performed at the Eye & Ear Theater in 1985), a biography (Tell Me Again, Am Here, 1982), and she edited three publications, Chicago, Scarlet, and Gare du Nord, the latter two co-edited with Douglas Oliver. Notley's collage art appeared in Rudy Burckhardt's film "Wayward Glimpses" and her illustrations have appeared on the cover of numerous books, including a few of her own. As is often written in her biographical notes, "She has never tried to be anything other than a poet," and with over forty books and chapbooks and several major awards, she was one of the most prolific and lauded American poets. She was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Notley's experimentation with poetic form, seen in her books 165 Meeting House Lane, When I Was Alive, The Descent of Alette, and Culture of One, ranges from a blurred line between genres, to a quotation-mark-driven interpretation of the variable foot, to a full reinvention of the purpose and potential of strict rhythm and meter. She also experimented with channeling spirits of deceased loved ones, primarily men gone from her life like her father and her husband, poet Ted Berrigan, and used these conversations as topics and form in her poetry. Her poems have also been compared to those of Gertrude Stein as well as her contemporary Bernadette Mayer. Mayer and Notley both used their experience as mothers and wives in their work.
In addition to poetry, Notley wrote a book of criticism (Coming After, University of Michigan, 2005), a play ("Anne's White Glove"—performed at the Eye & Ear Theater in 1985), a biography (Tell Me Again, Am Here, 1982), and she edited three publications, Chicago, Scarlet, and Gare du Nord, the latter two co-edited with Douglas Oliver. Notley's collage art appeared in Rudy Burckhardt's film "Wayward Glimpses" and her illustrations have appeared on the cover of numerous books, including a few of her own. As is often written in her biographical notes, "She has never tried to be anything other than a poet," and with over forty books and chapbooks and several major awards, she was one of the most prolific and lauded American poets. She was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
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November 17, 2017
considered tattooing this whole book on2 my body so i can have it with me forever i loved it.
Wrote this review last year when I hoped the world would be less dark, revisiting Notley again in the darkness. Too lazy for revisions. Too lazy for a blog.
“I see blood sliding like thread, a red strand flowing, there amid the spring snow. I think we’re toppling him by crying out justly, but we topple all government in this space, banishing their alters, their archaisms” (56).
I’m thinking about the above quote from Alice Notley’s Certain Magical Acts. I’m not sure what to say, to be honest with you, it left me magically affected, perhaps, wounded, sad and not quite hopeful. Hopeful, angry, then sad again, really sad actually. I was sitting outside on a beautiful Friday on campus and all I could do was cry and read this book. Like serious tears. I didn’t know what to do about any of the brokenness she confides, and that’s how I felt, that she was telling me a secret. That there was something I was supposed to do with this secret, to make the world less fucked-up. When I read the last line of the book— “And are us my children cry out with me turn on the lights”—I felt motivated to do something, say something (147). I immediately wanted my Emma Goldman. Surely there was some way to actively take up this dialogue. In the poem-dream-magical-moment that is her newest collection, Notley takes up her poetic oeuvre to speak against the tyrant—against the silencing of the female voice, the voice of the other, the voice that has been othered—I found it impossible not to think of all the political moments happening now. The nomination of president-elect Trump. His choice for VP, Mike Pence. Cabinet appointments who might as well have walked out of A Clockwork Orange or Animal Farm or The Hunger Games (or just insert dystopia here). Certain Magical Acts is an important book which questions not only how language shapes our memory of events, but also the ways in which commodity and wealth normalize those events. It's everything everyone hates about capitalism, that push to consume. I see this visual of Pac-Man here, much as I love the game. Perhaps this is the most frightening part though. That scarcity and survival have become competing narratives until “No one may be left to dig up our femurs our significant rings our weapons our manuscripts for in more ways than war we are killing ourselves” (76).
Always with Notley, I find myself continually asking how to translate what remains and what about/ the refrain of/ rupture/ mediated experience of terror/ the domestication of/ what myth. I find it impossible to not think about how this book is in conversation with her previous work. Dante awakes from a dream, Notley’s speaker “can’t sleep in her dream,” already her imagination makes the world strange, we begin a search for words which is actually a search for a personal sound, that’s a declaration against government, poetics, misogyny, war, violence, power: it’s a declaration for noncompliance—do not comply with the “trickster,” those patriarchal, ritualized patterns of hatred and disgust. We remember "disobedience to everything." She casts aside the search for enlightenment. No religious directions. No societal or cultural directions. No government or authority sponsored quests. She declares “I want everything to be bizarre; I want not to recognize anyone. I want to sing in a voice you don’t own, that you’ve never heard and judged. I don’t want to know where it comes from even though it comes from me” (17).
By beginning her poem in dream, and letting the reader know that there is no waking from it, that dream is reality, imagination and experience take precedence. She rejects origin—she rejects origin—which is patriarchal in its obsession of whose father is whose, that classist lineage, its obsession with where we come from, by whom we came. By rejecting origin, her speaker makes herself. She sets the terms of her own real. Notley is asking, what do we mean now, what is at stake in this meaning— “I’m not interested in style or syntax or vocabulary. But I am. They crowd around me in the dark; it’s hard to hear” (12). I’m not interested in vocabulary but I need them to communicate. I struggle with this mediation. Notley expresses an intense criticism of words in all her work— “I have never been words, but words have never been words. In language I combine my flesh with yours, and you with mine; my flesh is tender, my skin aches from knowing you, my hand can’t really touch you, but if you say “I” I’ll say “I.” I want to say “we” but I can’t” (19). The poem here becomes erotic and the magic in the poem allows not only access to death, allows access to healing: to think outside frames, to imagine ways to unframe. Like the modernists I see influencing her (Woolf and Stein, for example), she mistrusts the materials that make up language, emphasis on make-up. Smarter scholars than me have discussed this—Susan McCabe, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Keelan, etc. She distrusts words precisely because they are often used to moderate experience and assumed objective. I myself feel a little paranoid here, what is their to trust. Words are events in language and they call into existence themselves: Notley tries to get as close to the experience of the event as possible. She says “I say the same things all the time because there’s repetition built into time to make it timeless. I helped build it in, I help do everything” (16). Unlike Eliot, Notley never becomes paralyzed by the anxiety of the moment. It’s not anxiety that drives her to search for something new in these poems, it’s the desire to be alive. She says “The human condition is not what anyone has said. There are forces in charge of us that have never been named. And will I name them?” (95). Naming things makes things real, she continues, and by making things real for us, “Effable and known to you,” she’s asking us, now what, now how are you going to precede. How do you want to be in conversation with these various institutional hierarchies, these intersecting oppressions. In one of the moments I keep revisiting, she asserts “I can’t be this woman who’s treated like an animal naked in a picture for you, genitals and a face of intelligence, but you can’t see that. You’ve been brought up to think it’s normal for women to be naked everywhere, and you tell them to do this work for you” (16). The domestication of violence, often enacted on female bodies, is vicious. To navigate abusive, sexist, predatory language in the workplace, in the classroom, on a daily basis is terrifying. I just listened to Michele Obama’s speech on Donald Trump’s blatant use of predatory language, and sexual abuse, and I can’t help but find this book politically relevant. Sometimes when I’m watching TV, when I watched the 2016 debates I couldn’t help but shout we are not objects not animals & I felt a little crazy for needing to say this out loud, the make the space around me less oppressive but fuck I think we need this kind of outrage right now. I also shouted WTF & WTF really quite a lot as well.
Alette descends into the dark of the subway, into the world beneath. I’m thinking about what it means to write from the dark. There’s a lot of light and dark in Notley, a lot of underneath, beneath, inside of. In mythology, the dark often promises rebirth or destruction, often rebirth by way of destruction. It seems the dark is required to imagine anything anew. This calls to mind Notley’s words: “The final dissolution and rebirth is taking place in darkness: and what will be born probably hasn’t been seen yet, because no one has walked straight into the dark and stayed awhile.” Then comes her challenge: “To break and recombine language is nothing. To break and recombine reality, as Dream always does, might be something.” I’m struck by how true her sentence rings: she’s writing out of the dark, out of a literary tradition which has historically recognized white, male, heteronormative writers. Which has, as part of its project, silenced women, people of color, lgbtq writers. I’m also thinking about how important dreams are to Notley’s oeuvre, once again speaking against these phantom empires of absolute authority, against the unprofitable inheritance of the historically colonized female body, against a history, a record of events that has coopted our voices, left us voiceless. She searches for a sound, finding words inadequate at translating her experience as an outsider. She searches for that sound, untouched by time— “Who are you, in us, disrupting our measure?” She answers this question herself as well, as she, perhaps, cuts the strings of the playwright in order to locate a voice not mediated by time— “Playwright, agitator. Any voice acts in its shaping of sound: my role of the slave is primary. Anybody can be one, a slave—is a voice so?” (56).
While I do think she’s frustrated with this, she also implies that the only way to write a female epic is to imagine this beginning, to begin in the dark, as Notley’s epics before Certain Magical Acts have done. The epic is a strange form because it is a public form. That’s where the pain rests for Notley because she comes to the epic, as all poets of the epic do, as a way to grieve. To deal with loss and war and grief. An epic isn’t a single person’s grief. It’s the recorded grief of a people. I’m recalling Alma, or The Dead Woman here, which if it is about anything, is also about this—how does Alette/Alice deal with the loss of her brother, how does the world survive in the wake of Vietnam. She was searching for a model for how to deal with grief that was not cut from a male cloth. For as much as I love capable Antigone, rescued Helen. Penelope. Persephone. Andromeda. Dido. Clytemnestra. Cassandra. Medea (who was probably my first literary crush). Those Greek Goddesses—Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hera. Even lovely, war-ending Lysistrata. All these women’s stories have been shaped by men— “But Helen couldn’t be a person, not a real person now, no. No woman is like Helen, no matter what the male poets say, or like Andromache (or Penelope). Only men are like them, in the sense that they invented them” (188). She implores us to invent again. In Certain Magical Acts, the speaker isn’t invented by anyone, has no origin, is restless in a dream that has within it a broken moon (another fuck-off to origin), and all these stories, all these voices are no longer privileging enlightenment or truth because they know the body has to go. I recall Gertrude Stein’s words when she says something like the human head knows this, the eventuality of death, that we all die & so the world goes on, but the human heart does not. It’s funny to me to think about what a romantic Gertrude Stein was. Poetry’s providence, here, is the constant putting-away of the body—it’s the questioning of the nature of what it is to be in a body that dies, what is it to be here.
I’m thinking now about the violence we have to navigate on a daily basis—how absurd that is even a consideration: what violence do I have to navigate today, what violence do I need to know so that my body can continue, unwounded. And implicitly, how has my body learned violence. The entirety of the body, to invoke Olson, is involved in Notley’s poem—I can’t sleep in Notley’s dream either. It’s not safe. Telling stories, participating in storytelling, is the spell she’s casting. That’s Notley’s power. The world is talking, the many catastrophes of this world, of past worlds, are speaking, and time speaks, words speak, the manuscript speaks. It’s an incredibly layered poem-play. I’m remembering that moment in The Descent when Alette murders the tyrant figure, and emerges from the subway victorious—yet she’s still in the body of the tyrant. He’s dead and there’s the looming work of freeing us from the cage of his dead body. That’s horrific, right? To write towards that wound, of translating the self out of systematic violence, racism, through language inherently appropriated, is the task. Poems, to bring my thoughts back to Certain Magical Acts and Alice Notley, give us the permission to talk about how words stick to the real, how they shape and influence what realness. Notley says, perhaps better than Whitman ever could— “I am always the spirit of more than myself” (31). This book did cast a spell, as much as it is filled with weariness, it’s also a healing invocation. It asks us, if we must define and label ourselves, our identities, our ways of being, that we do so in a way which does not exclude other identities, selves, ways of being, sexualities, genders, races. It is very romantic when I think about it that way, isn’t it—to hope that there would be room for multiple ways of being. To hope that I could understand myself in a way that didn’t threaten you. To hope that your sense of self didn’t depend on dehumanizing mine. And here I recall Audre Lorde’s words: “Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal.” She continues to say “And the world won’t end,” and cautions us that more frightening than speaking what you know to be true in times when the whole world is burning itself down is not speaking your truth. I don’t really like making broad claims about what poetry or art or literature or whatever should do. I have to admit, right now, as the world is fucking itself over, that I do feel a certain obligation to shout NO, very loudly & in public, I feel like this might be the only way to save some sanity in the present moment. Notley’s Certain Magical Acts is a spell of healing and anger, it is ready to invent the world as many times as the world needs inventing, it has not given up on us, though perhaps it thinks we may have given up on ourselves, it’s willing to let a multiplicity of voices into its invention, and it asks us, reader, to do the same.
Wrote this review last year when I hoped the world would be less dark, revisiting Notley again in the darkness. Too lazy for revisions. Too lazy for a blog.
“I see blood sliding like thread, a red strand flowing, there amid the spring snow. I think we’re toppling him by crying out justly, but we topple all government in this space, banishing their alters, their archaisms” (56).
I’m thinking about the above quote from Alice Notley’s Certain Magical Acts. I’m not sure what to say, to be honest with you, it left me magically affected, perhaps, wounded, sad and not quite hopeful. Hopeful, angry, then sad again, really sad actually. I was sitting outside on a beautiful Friday on campus and all I could do was cry and read this book. Like serious tears. I didn’t know what to do about any of the brokenness she confides, and that’s how I felt, that she was telling me a secret. That there was something I was supposed to do with this secret, to make the world less fucked-up. When I read the last line of the book— “And are us my children cry out with me turn on the lights”—I felt motivated to do something, say something (147). I immediately wanted my Emma Goldman. Surely there was some way to actively take up this dialogue. In the poem-dream-magical-moment that is her newest collection, Notley takes up her poetic oeuvre to speak against the tyrant—against the silencing of the female voice, the voice of the other, the voice that has been othered—I found it impossible not to think of all the political moments happening now. The nomination of president-elect Trump. His choice for VP, Mike Pence. Cabinet appointments who might as well have walked out of A Clockwork Orange or Animal Farm or The Hunger Games (or just insert dystopia here). Certain Magical Acts is an important book which questions not only how language shapes our memory of events, but also the ways in which commodity and wealth normalize those events. It's everything everyone hates about capitalism, that push to consume. I see this visual of Pac-Man here, much as I love the game. Perhaps this is the most frightening part though. That scarcity and survival have become competing narratives until “No one may be left to dig up our femurs our significant rings our weapons our manuscripts for in more ways than war we are killing ourselves” (76).
Always with Notley, I find myself continually asking how to translate what remains and what about/ the refrain of/ rupture/ mediated experience of terror/ the domestication of/ what myth. I find it impossible to not think about how this book is in conversation with her previous work. Dante awakes from a dream, Notley’s speaker “can’t sleep in her dream,” already her imagination makes the world strange, we begin a search for words which is actually a search for a personal sound, that’s a declaration against government, poetics, misogyny, war, violence, power: it’s a declaration for noncompliance—do not comply with the “trickster,” those patriarchal, ritualized patterns of hatred and disgust. We remember "disobedience to everything." She casts aside the search for enlightenment. No religious directions. No societal or cultural directions. No government or authority sponsored quests. She declares “I want everything to be bizarre; I want not to recognize anyone. I want to sing in a voice you don’t own, that you’ve never heard and judged. I don’t want to know where it comes from even though it comes from me” (17).
By beginning her poem in dream, and letting the reader know that there is no waking from it, that dream is reality, imagination and experience take precedence. She rejects origin—she rejects origin—which is patriarchal in its obsession of whose father is whose, that classist lineage, its obsession with where we come from, by whom we came. By rejecting origin, her speaker makes herself. She sets the terms of her own real. Notley is asking, what do we mean now, what is at stake in this meaning— “I’m not interested in style or syntax or vocabulary. But I am. They crowd around me in the dark; it’s hard to hear” (12). I’m not interested in vocabulary but I need them to communicate. I struggle with this mediation. Notley expresses an intense criticism of words in all her work— “I have never been words, but words have never been words. In language I combine my flesh with yours, and you with mine; my flesh is tender, my skin aches from knowing you, my hand can’t really touch you, but if you say “I” I’ll say “I.” I want to say “we” but I can’t” (19). The poem here becomes erotic and the magic in the poem allows not only access to death, allows access to healing: to think outside frames, to imagine ways to unframe. Like the modernists I see influencing her (Woolf and Stein, for example), she mistrusts the materials that make up language, emphasis on make-up. Smarter scholars than me have discussed this—Susan McCabe, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Keelan, etc. She distrusts words precisely because they are often used to moderate experience and assumed objective. I myself feel a little paranoid here, what is their to trust. Words are events in language and they call into existence themselves: Notley tries to get as close to the experience of the event as possible. She says “I say the same things all the time because there’s repetition built into time to make it timeless. I helped build it in, I help do everything” (16). Unlike Eliot, Notley never becomes paralyzed by the anxiety of the moment. It’s not anxiety that drives her to search for something new in these poems, it’s the desire to be alive. She says “The human condition is not what anyone has said. There are forces in charge of us that have never been named. And will I name them?” (95). Naming things makes things real, she continues, and by making things real for us, “Effable and known to you,” she’s asking us, now what, now how are you going to precede. How do you want to be in conversation with these various institutional hierarchies, these intersecting oppressions. In one of the moments I keep revisiting, she asserts “I can’t be this woman who’s treated like an animal naked in a picture for you, genitals and a face of intelligence, but you can’t see that. You’ve been brought up to think it’s normal for women to be naked everywhere, and you tell them to do this work for you” (16). The domestication of violence, often enacted on female bodies, is vicious. To navigate abusive, sexist, predatory language in the workplace, in the classroom, on a daily basis is terrifying. I just listened to Michele Obama’s speech on Donald Trump’s blatant use of predatory language, and sexual abuse, and I can’t help but find this book politically relevant. Sometimes when I’m watching TV, when I watched the 2016 debates I couldn’t help but shout we are not objects not animals & I felt a little crazy for needing to say this out loud, the make the space around me less oppressive but fuck I think we need this kind of outrage right now. I also shouted WTF & WTF really quite a lot as well.
Alette descends into the dark of the subway, into the world beneath. I’m thinking about what it means to write from the dark. There’s a lot of light and dark in Notley, a lot of underneath, beneath, inside of. In mythology, the dark often promises rebirth or destruction, often rebirth by way of destruction. It seems the dark is required to imagine anything anew. This calls to mind Notley’s words: “The final dissolution and rebirth is taking place in darkness: and what will be born probably hasn’t been seen yet, because no one has walked straight into the dark and stayed awhile.” Then comes her challenge: “To break and recombine language is nothing. To break and recombine reality, as Dream always does, might be something.” I’m struck by how true her sentence rings: she’s writing out of the dark, out of a literary tradition which has historically recognized white, male, heteronormative writers. Which has, as part of its project, silenced women, people of color, lgbtq writers. I’m also thinking about how important dreams are to Notley’s oeuvre, once again speaking against these phantom empires of absolute authority, against the unprofitable inheritance of the historically colonized female body, against a history, a record of events that has coopted our voices, left us voiceless. She searches for a sound, finding words inadequate at translating her experience as an outsider. She searches for that sound, untouched by time— “Who are you, in us, disrupting our measure?” She answers this question herself as well, as she, perhaps, cuts the strings of the playwright in order to locate a voice not mediated by time— “Playwright, agitator. Any voice acts in its shaping of sound: my role of the slave is primary. Anybody can be one, a slave—is a voice so?” (56).
While I do think she’s frustrated with this, she also implies that the only way to write a female epic is to imagine this beginning, to begin in the dark, as Notley’s epics before Certain Magical Acts have done. The epic is a strange form because it is a public form. That’s where the pain rests for Notley because she comes to the epic, as all poets of the epic do, as a way to grieve. To deal with loss and war and grief. An epic isn’t a single person’s grief. It’s the recorded grief of a people. I’m recalling Alma, or The Dead Woman here, which if it is about anything, is also about this—how does Alette/Alice deal with the loss of her brother, how does the world survive in the wake of Vietnam. She was searching for a model for how to deal with grief that was not cut from a male cloth. For as much as I love capable Antigone, rescued Helen. Penelope. Persephone. Andromeda. Dido. Clytemnestra. Cassandra. Medea (who was probably my first literary crush). Those Greek Goddesses—Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hera. Even lovely, war-ending Lysistrata. All these women’s stories have been shaped by men— “But Helen couldn’t be a person, not a real person now, no. No woman is like Helen, no matter what the male poets say, or like Andromache (or Penelope). Only men are like them, in the sense that they invented them” (188). She implores us to invent again. In Certain Magical Acts, the speaker isn’t invented by anyone, has no origin, is restless in a dream that has within it a broken moon (another fuck-off to origin), and all these stories, all these voices are no longer privileging enlightenment or truth because they know the body has to go. I recall Gertrude Stein’s words when she says something like the human head knows this, the eventuality of death, that we all die & so the world goes on, but the human heart does not. It’s funny to me to think about what a romantic Gertrude Stein was. Poetry’s providence, here, is the constant putting-away of the body—it’s the questioning of the nature of what it is to be in a body that dies, what is it to be here.
I’m thinking now about the violence we have to navigate on a daily basis—how absurd that is even a consideration: what violence do I have to navigate today, what violence do I need to know so that my body can continue, unwounded. And implicitly, how has my body learned violence. The entirety of the body, to invoke Olson, is involved in Notley’s poem—I can’t sleep in Notley’s dream either. It’s not safe. Telling stories, participating in storytelling, is the spell she’s casting. That’s Notley’s power. The world is talking, the many catastrophes of this world, of past worlds, are speaking, and time speaks, words speak, the manuscript speaks. It’s an incredibly layered poem-play. I’m remembering that moment in The Descent when Alette murders the tyrant figure, and emerges from the subway victorious—yet she’s still in the body of the tyrant. He’s dead and there’s the looming work of freeing us from the cage of his dead body. That’s horrific, right? To write towards that wound, of translating the self out of systematic violence, racism, through language inherently appropriated, is the task. Poems, to bring my thoughts back to Certain Magical Acts and Alice Notley, give us the permission to talk about how words stick to the real, how they shape and influence what realness. Notley says, perhaps better than Whitman ever could— “I am always the spirit of more than myself” (31). This book did cast a spell, as much as it is filled with weariness, it’s also a healing invocation. It asks us, if we must define and label ourselves, our identities, our ways of being, that we do so in a way which does not exclude other identities, selves, ways of being, sexualities, genders, races. It is very romantic when I think about it that way, isn’t it—to hope that there would be room for multiple ways of being. To hope that I could understand myself in a way that didn’t threaten you. To hope that your sense of self didn’t depend on dehumanizing mine. And here I recall Audre Lorde’s words: “Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal.” She continues to say “And the world won’t end,” and cautions us that more frightening than speaking what you know to be true in times when the whole world is burning itself down is not speaking your truth. I don’t really like making broad claims about what poetry or art or literature or whatever should do. I have to admit, right now, as the world is fucking itself over, that I do feel a certain obligation to shout NO, very loudly & in public, I feel like this might be the only way to save some sanity in the present moment. Notley’s Certain Magical Acts is a spell of healing and anger, it is ready to invent the world as many times as the world needs inventing, it has not given up on us, though perhaps it thinks we may have given up on ourselves, it’s willing to let a multiplicity of voices into its invention, and it asks us, reader, to do the same.
November 12, 2016
You used to
take my breath
away. Now
no one does.
*
you see all night in your dreams. And the blue of my voice can’t help but see you.
*
Your thoughts wouldn’t bear remembering.
*
I’m courting chaos in me.
take my breath
away. Now
no one does.
*
you see all night in your dreams. And the blue of my voice can’t help but see you.
*
Your thoughts wouldn’t bear remembering.
*
I’m courting chaos in me.
June 17, 2017
I was very much ambivalent about Certain Magical Acts. There were moments that I really liked, but also moments that I found to be utterly incomprehensible (and not in the emotionally resonant way that I like in work like Brigit Pegeen Kelly's or Larry Levis's) Some of Notley's poems were brilliant, but much of the book I found difficult without density and oblique without a sense of endpoint. I like climbing steep walls in my verse, but I like to have at least a few visible handholds and I didn't find many in most of this book.
Lyrically, Notley's best pieces are fluid and interesting, like in "Blinding, the White Horse in Front of Me" (which I liked well enough but didn't love) and which begins: "Blinding, the white horse in front of me. If I ride on it . . . / Have you forgotten yourself enough to come with me? / Hurts so--That's just loss. This whole within--" This was one of the more comprehensible poems, although it was not perfectly so, and many of the poems displayed the unusual diffculty of each sentence making good sense and seeming to follow from the previous one, but I often had no idea what I had just read (even in a literal "what did the words say even if I only take them literally and don't really try to make comprehensive sense out of them sort of way). The pieces I liked the least tended towards this more strongly (for me), like this excerpt from "Found Work (lost lace)," a very long poem in the middle of the book: "With / an ancient harmonica / I got to be man wrong / be man wrong // The old man built a slump upon / his back".
My favorite poems were probably "Two of Swords", "Nine and Ten" (both sorts of fantasias on tarot and probably the most comprehensible pieces in the book), "I Went Down There" (a sort of dream sequence of womanness and communication? Maybe?, but resonant in ways most of the book was not for me) and "Private Life: The Names" (another long poem and difficult to follow, but it had some truly beautiful sections). The rest were either fine (like "Blinding, the White Horse in Front of Me") or did nothing for me at all.
Lyrically, Notley's best pieces are fluid and interesting, like in "Blinding, the White Horse in Front of Me" (which I liked well enough but didn't love) and which begins: "Blinding, the white horse in front of me. If I ride on it . . . / Have you forgotten yourself enough to come with me? / Hurts so--That's just loss. This whole within--" This was one of the more comprehensible poems, although it was not perfectly so, and many of the poems displayed the unusual diffculty of each sentence making good sense and seeming to follow from the previous one, but I often had no idea what I had just read (even in a literal "what did the words say even if I only take them literally and don't really try to make comprehensive sense out of them sort of way). The pieces I liked the least tended towards this more strongly (for me), like this excerpt from "Found Work (lost lace)," a very long poem in the middle of the book: "With / an ancient harmonica / I got to be man wrong / be man wrong // The old man built a slump upon / his back".
My favorite poems were probably "Two of Swords", "Nine and Ten" (both sorts of fantasias on tarot and probably the most comprehensible pieces in the book), "I Went Down There" (a sort of dream sequence of womanness and communication? Maybe?, but resonant in ways most of the book was not for me) and "Private Life: The Names" (another long poem and difficult to follow, but it had some truly beautiful sections). The rest were either fine (like "Blinding, the White Horse in Front of Me") or did nothing for me at all.
April 24, 2016
"Time exists to be brutal in."
Notley is writing about the apocalypse, which is here, which is life as we know it. It's a haunting book, but an important one. Reminiscent, at least on the level of content, of Sasha West's great collection FAILURE AND I BURY THE BODY, in that the poems look outward toward devastation (ecological, cultural) and simultaneously feel so distinctly inward: private and personal.
To follow Notley's mind as it moves through language and the world is what I wish all reading felt like.
Notley is writing about the apocalypse, which is here, which is life as we know it. It's a haunting book, but an important one. Reminiscent, at least on the level of content, of Sasha West's great collection FAILURE AND I BURY THE BODY, in that the poems look outward toward devastation (ecological, cultural) and simultaneously feel so distinctly inward: private and personal.
To follow Notley's mind as it moves through language and the world is what I wish all reading felt like.
June 2, 2022
I’m alive and dead now,
at the same time,
speaking in your poems.
at the same time,
speaking in your poems.
April 27, 2022
Alguns poemas são ininteligíveis. Mas os que eu consegui apreender eu gostei bastante.
[Two of swords]
Democracy isn't efficient, and the only politics I recognize lies
between us, undefined, requiring no casting of votes. It asks that we
admit we're both present, all present, in the same multiform space -
within me or you. I would never ask that you follow me; I will never
acknowledge a leader. I am my president. But also, I am
everyone, trying to be with you, because I exist, and always have.
[I went down there]
I wanted him to
love me, but then that wasn't enough. We
gave ourselves to each other, but then
we had done that. Which one of us was more? He
was always more. I am the desire you want
to have, so you can feel yourself continuously
inside the line of derising unwinding against
the horizon leading to infinite nowhere.
[...]
No, I don't have a private life. Or is it
everything I think? I don't seem to want
anything others want. I don't even know if
I want something. To be perfectly quiet, still alive
with no one pressing me. Or keeping me from
eating. I have to have money for food and to
replace my appliances. I hate them. I don't want
community. I do. I don't like other people's fake
sentimentality; I don't like their politics, or
their religion. It smothers me.
[Two of swords]
Democracy isn't efficient, and the only politics I recognize lies
between us, undefined, requiring no casting of votes. It asks that we
admit we're both present, all present, in the same multiform space -
within me or you. I would never ask that you follow me; I will never
acknowledge a leader. I am my president. But also, I am
everyone, trying to be with you, because I exist, and always have.
[I went down there]
I wanted him to
love me, but then that wasn't enough. We
gave ourselves to each other, but then
we had done that. Which one of us was more? He
was always more. I am the desire you want
to have, so you can feel yourself continuously
inside the line of derising unwinding against
the horizon leading to infinite nowhere.
[...]
No, I don't have a private life. Or is it
everything I think? I don't seem to want
anything others want. I don't even know if
I want something. To be perfectly quiet, still alive
with no one pressing me. Or keeping me from
eating. I have to have money for food and to
replace my appliances. I hate them. I don't want
community. I do. I don't like other people's fake
sentimentality; I don't like their politics, or
their religion. It smothers me.
May 31, 2017
My first encounter of Notley's work was "The Descent of Allette" two years ago, which I had a very mixed experience with. It's probably a big indicator of how far I've come since then, and how I've grown, because I had quite a different experience with this collection. There were still sections in "Certain Magical Acts" which I didn't fully understand or connect with because of their literary acrobatics, but one in particular - "Blinding, the White Horse in Front of Me" - was absolutely stellar, and the strongest indicator of what this collection is about, I felt. Notley's work maintains some of that mystical, haunting, and feminist quality that I encountered previously in her work, but it now also has a strong overtone of the apocalyptic, of the now which we are experiencing. It's a call to action in the most pointed yet elegant way possible. There is great truth and weight to the many images and metaphorical situations Notley conjures throughout these poems, as well as an overpowering sense of relevance. "Certain Magical Acts" is a collection that needs to be read and felt, especially now. It also made me want to sit next to Notley and ask for her blessing to be initiated into whatever cult she has consciously or unconsciously created.
December 3, 2021
“I don’t want anything at all. I have no wish. Not to work.
I don’t want to see his perishable face printed on every surface.
I want sunlight, clear air, and silence. I want brains and a thought.”
I don’t want to see his perishable face printed on every surface.
I want sunlight, clear air, and silence. I want brains and a thought.”
February 3, 2025
This was a fun read though it was also mildly headache inducing. Definition of modern poetry, but I love the way Notley messes with the format. I think this collection could be about so many different things. I definitely read into it with a gendered perspective, though I have a feeling that’s not what Notley meant. But if I only understood from this what she meant well then it wouldn’t be poetry. Love the existentialism, very different for me. I hope Gerard Way knows about this collection. I think he would really love it.
October 29, 2017
Contains my favourite poem I have heard read aloud this year (by the poet) - 'Blinding, the White Horse in Front of Me'. By turns distressing, apocalyptic, vulnerable, channelling moments of truth-telling & scattered with irreverence, this book is a dazzling, wrenching achievement, that really wants poetry to be restored to its rightful place in the imagining of a polis, its intimacy with our hearts & souls, & most profoundly, its power as account, both agitating for vengeance & loosing the speaker from the bonds of striving for that which would otherwise kill them. Transformation & terror. You have to read it.
March 4, 2017
actual rating: 3.5 stars
ok i'm conflicted ok bc i started out liking this then it just started getting repetitive and not making any sense (especially the last few page idk what i just read) so! it's good in small parts tho like some phrases or sentences stand out and then it all blurs into one incoherent mess aaa maybe it's because i dont have a physical copy and i read it as an ebook?
ok i'm conflicted ok bc i started out liking this then it just started getting repetitive and not making any sense (especially the last few page idk what i just read) so! it's good in small parts tho like some phrases or sentences stand out and then it all blurs into one incoherent mess aaa maybe it's because i dont have a physical copy and i read it as an ebook?
February 6, 2017
Innovative in terms of formatting and choices of sectioning the book. Highly recommend.
December 14, 2020
Couldn't get into this one, nor was I encaptivated enough to care.
August 24, 2024
"this light touches me.
I won't need anything else."
I won't need anything else."
February 12, 2021
(…) I have no hope; I don’t want
any hope, I simply want to sit here, in this
calm. (…)
I was very excited to read this poetry collection (my first one by Alice Notley), but unfortunately I didn’t enjoy the vast majority of it. There were parts, which I really loved (a sentence here, a phrase there), but most of the book left me feeling completely indifferent. Maybe it was the writing style (I don’t mind stream of consciousness...when used in moderation!!!), maybe I was not in the right mood for these poems (I'll definitely give this book another try) or maybe Notley's poetry it just not the kind of poetry I enjoy (which is more than alright). We will see...
any hope, I simply want to sit here, in this
calm. (…)
I was very excited to read this poetry collection (my first one by Alice Notley), but unfortunately I didn’t enjoy the vast majority of it. There were parts, which I really loved (a sentence here, a phrase there), but most of the book left me feeling completely indifferent. Maybe it was the writing style (I don’t mind stream of consciousness...when used in moderation!!!), maybe I was not in the right mood for these poems (I'll definitely give this book another try) or maybe Notley's poetry it just not the kind of poetry I enjoy (which is more than alright). We will see...
January 16, 2022
Äntligen har jag läst klart den, haha. Känns som jag läst denna hela hösten. Var rätt tung enligt mig, men hittade hela tiden vackra meningar så ville ej ge upp på den. Men har känt mig splittrat kring vad jag känner kring den.
Jag tyckte det var lite långa dikter, något med det som gjorde dem tunga. Hade velat läsa något kortare av henne för jag gillar atmosfären.
Nu på slutet tyckte jag bäst om: ”Om det verkliga är så verkligt varför är det inte det?” Och ”Bländande, den vita hästen framför mig” även om lite onödigt lång. Samt Svarta violer & Berättelsen.
Jag tyckte det var lite långa dikter, något med det som gjorde dem tunga. Hade velat läsa något kortare av henne för jag gillar atmosfären.
Nu på slutet tyckte jag bäst om: ”Om det verkliga är så verkligt varför är det inte det?” Och ”Bländande, den vita hästen framför mig” även om lite onödigt lång. Samt Svarta violer & Berättelsen.
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June 22, 2020I want to love this, and probably would, but every time I try reading one of the poems there is this feeling that there are words missing, or punctuation, and I just get stuck on it. It feels jarring, and I'm sure it's the on the poetry's fault. It *is* poetry, after all, and the author is allowed to creative freedoms, but this is just not for me, at least not right now. Will probably pick it up again down the line.
November 3, 2025
definitely part of the visionary school but not as often part of the dada/surrealist school. many of these are narrative although the narrative faintly hides throughout a long form poem. there were individual phrases i loved—"stairs of shadows beige and blunt"; "scrawls of essence"—but no one poem stuck out. i read an excerpt on social media that lead me to getting the book. dissociative in ways that i like but also in ways that seem to blunt her point.
August 6, 2020
What a wide wild ride. I really did hear voices -- hear them talking to each other and sometimes to me. I couldn't always make out what they wanted, but I wanted to keep listening. I was dreamlistening. I now feel differently about the dead. And how long a phrase and repeat (endlessly). The urgency here makes me hungry for urgency.
March 4, 2018
I got to know her from the podcast "poem of the day" when it read her lines about "Iowa City Iowa". Eloquent candor magical, sometimes dreamlike style. Haven't been reading poems for a long time, so overall a good and refreshing experience.
May 24, 2021
Well, the beginning was just i n c r e d i b l e and indeed magical, but with every other page this magic was kind of disappearing for me? But good read tho, even if only for that awesome start.
Want to read
April 7, 2023to-read
April 18, 2019
Recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2015, an award given to poets “whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition”, Alice Notley showcases her talent in her 2016 book, Certain Magical Acts. One of these magical acts is the act of writing, that of being a poet in action. By the speaker identifying herself as a poet we are instantly comforted with a down-to-earth personability as we traverse our world into “distortion”, (3) a reprieve from the chaos which occurs in everyday reality. Where is here, exactly? “In magic…” (4). What happens here? “Nothing happens; things coalesce then melt/ again as if you yourself create them” (4). This blank verse dreamscape provides the environment for our edgy but sharp, weary but resilient, and ever open-minded speaker as we explore the dualities of peace-war, freedom-control, and space-time while questioning familiar societal systems.
Isolated, our speaker, our poet, is like a shaman, an infinite being, stepping outside of time, outside of society, going to great lengths to this far away realm, into outer space, filled with imagery of roses and diamonds to bring back what she finds to “heal” us, her “patients”, in written word (100). And she goes to this subconscious level via, “Blinding, The White Horse in Front of Me”, the subject and title of a brilliantly constructed poem that unifies everything good this book is about. Must our speaker ride it? Well, must our speaker write? Yes, she must, this horse is blinding white, and telepathic too, and shoots flames, a highly attractive vehicle for receiving inspiration.
When she does speak to her “shades”, (8) or rather muses, she tells them “I’m your mouth” (11) by which she conveys her oracular wisdom to us, the readers. Perhaps, though, with “poets” being “spies”, (34) and still members of society, the narrator is also our “mouth”, as she later reveals: “I’m your perceptions” (104). Our speaker carries the blessing and curse to be anything we need her to be; a lizard, a sunflower, or a reflection of life’s cruelties in the shape of a “commandant/ who severs soldier’s limbs” (103).
In “VOICES” we need her to muse on the topic of war and identity from an apocalyptic waste land, stylized in these verses to echo her descension from society:
“I’m distressed, in exile
by my own choice—
is it a wish or fate?” (48)
In “Two of Swords” we need her personified as a tarot card. In “Private Life: The Names” we need her to be a spy for the dead. In “FOUND WORK: (lost lace)” we need her to be cryptic at times in order to allow for multiple interpretations. If you or I fail to find meaning in one of these lines, we need to let the verse breathe which our speaker so graciously permits at the outset: “…that’s just autobiographical/ who cares? I want to live here where nothing coheres” (3). These artful incoherences along our journey through the mind of a “fiercely” (8) thinking poet can be a much welcomed break from the over-stimulation of the real world. Do we need it? Yes, yes we do.
Isolated, our speaker, our poet, is like a shaman, an infinite being, stepping outside of time, outside of society, going to great lengths to this far away realm, into outer space, filled with imagery of roses and diamonds to bring back what she finds to “heal” us, her “patients”, in written word (100). And she goes to this subconscious level via, “Blinding, The White Horse in Front of Me”, the subject and title of a brilliantly constructed poem that unifies everything good this book is about. Must our speaker ride it? Well, must our speaker write? Yes, she must, this horse is blinding white, and telepathic too, and shoots flames, a highly attractive vehicle for receiving inspiration.
When she does speak to her “shades”, (8) or rather muses, she tells them “I’m your mouth” (11) by which she conveys her oracular wisdom to us, the readers. Perhaps, though, with “poets” being “spies”, (34) and still members of society, the narrator is also our “mouth”, as she later reveals: “I’m your perceptions” (104). Our speaker carries the blessing and curse to be anything we need her to be; a lizard, a sunflower, or a reflection of life’s cruelties in the shape of a “commandant/ who severs soldier’s limbs” (103).
In “VOICES” we need her to muse on the topic of war and identity from an apocalyptic waste land, stylized in these verses to echo her descension from society:
“I’m distressed, in exile
by my own choice—
is it a wish or fate?” (48)
In “Two of Swords” we need her personified as a tarot card. In “Private Life: The Names” we need her to be a spy for the dead. In “FOUND WORK: (lost lace)” we need her to be cryptic at times in order to allow for multiple interpretations. If you or I fail to find meaning in one of these lines, we need to let the verse breathe which our speaker so graciously permits at the outset: “…that’s just autobiographical/ who cares? I want to live here where nothing coheres” (3). These artful incoherences along our journey through the mind of a “fiercely” (8) thinking poet can be a much welcomed break from the over-stimulation of the real world. Do we need it? Yes, yes we do.
June 7, 2021
Recenserades i Populär Poesi nr 48, 2021: https://www.popularpoesi.se/
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June 7, 2017Reading notes rather than a review
-Taking frame of being a hearer of the dead and their voices, mixing voices from past human life to create a surface that dips from the narrator/speaker I into an "I" from the beyond without transition most of the time (First third)
-Larger than the quotidian, summoning the kind of visionary scope that Ginsberg inspired.
-Fractured brief lines in some poems
-Some lines incredibly cogent about large and sweeping ways to think about humanity; other lines feel a bit in the dark on the way to those, much interruption by voice upon itself
-Taking frame of being a hearer of the dead and their voices, mixing voices from past human life to create a surface that dips from the narrator/speaker I into an "I" from the beyond without transition most of the time (First third)
-Larger than the quotidian, summoning the kind of visionary scope that Ginsberg inspired.
-Fractured brief lines in some poems
-Some lines incredibly cogent about large and sweeping ways to think about humanity; other lines feel a bit in the dark on the way to those, much interruption by voice upon itself
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews