What do you think?
Rate this book
Alma, or The Dead Women
Alice Notley's Alma, or The Dead Women is a cross-genre book, poem/novel, poetry/prose, comedy/tragedy, that submits to no discipline but its own and was conceived by the author in a state of personal, national and planetary grief. In this book, Alma, the true god of our world, is a foul-mouthed middle-aged working-class woman, a junkie who injects heroin into the center of her forehead and dreams and suffers our nightmares with us. With the Dead Women, a community of spirits she attracts before but especially after September 11, 2001, Alma surveys with disbelief and horror the actions of the United States government as it perpetrates one war and prepares for another.
300 pages, Paperback
First published September 15, 2006
10 people are currently reading
388 people want to read
About the author
Alice Notley
85 books224 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 29, 2009
if alice provided infrastructure for a cult , i'd be there . ... ..
October 15, 2011
Just started this, and now that I've started, I've found reviews of Notley's work that say one should read the other books before attempting this one. Well, too late now! It's dense for sure, yeah, almost incomprehensible. Short chapters--prose poems and verse--voices of various women. It's like reading a foreign language and coming across phrases that you actually understand, and they're amazing and profound, urge you onwards. Sometimes one must hurl oneself at the incomprehensible. This thing will never be "read" I think. But I adore work that has motival repetitions--Alma's a junkie and shoots up in her forehead, and someone else is shot in his forehead, and Athena is born through Zeus' forehead. It's so strong and beautiful and the heck if I know what it's about. Or if I ever will...
But lines like this keep me reading:
"he had a broken nose and a gravel voice how can he sing? he doesn't the songs come out of the hole in his dead forehead what made the hole the songs coming out all the songs..."
or
"you don't move me, don't try, or to be wise, or to find me a midwife i'll deliver it myself, from the hole in my forehead, the goddamned boy genius is trying to tell me that pain arises through the actions of machine-like structures, but i send pain i reek of it. i gave it to you in your darling wool cap when you were born on a hillside in a painting made from paint, how rough, to be you, spare me, where do you think i got the pain FROM it wasn't the microwave, i am the universe i AM pain and the origins in me cannot help but.... BUT being god, i can say, there's always more, more god, more of my supposed intoxication, my toxin ingested through the loving self-made hole i seem to prefer to your maniacally conjugal ones, you little dears..."
Alma or the Dead Women is an ocean, and I'm taking a swim. You don't cross an ocean doing the butterfly or the crawl. You just swim for a while. I ain't got no motor boat, but the water's sure interesting.
But lines like this keep me reading:
"he had a broken nose and a gravel voice how can he sing? he doesn't the songs come out of the hole in his dead forehead what made the hole the songs coming out all the songs..."
or
"you don't move me, don't try, or to be wise, or to find me a midwife i'll deliver it myself, from the hole in my forehead, the goddamned boy genius is trying to tell me that pain arises through the actions of machine-like structures, but i send pain i reek of it. i gave it to you in your darling wool cap when you were born on a hillside in a painting made from paint, how rough, to be you, spare me, where do you think i got the pain FROM it wasn't the microwave, i am the universe i AM pain and the origins in me cannot help but.... BUT being god, i can say, there's always more, more god, more of my supposed intoxication, my toxin ingested through the loving self-made hole i seem to prefer to your maniacally conjugal ones, you little dears..."
Alma or the Dead Women is an ocean, and I'm taking a swim. You don't cross an ocean doing the butterfly or the crawl. You just swim for a while. I ain't got no motor boat, but the water's sure interesting.
May 22, 2010
the new species.
April 21, 2008
I'm currently rereading, with more attention (and interest) Alice Notley's Alma, or The Dead Women. I'm not going to write a review, since I'm not finished with the book, but I think it will help if I blog my thoughts as I'm reading and thinking.
This is an angry book. I like it that Alma is angry. She's not a heroin like Allette. Alma's a hag, not a warrior. She's a bit like the Cailleach or Morrígna--she's a god but no one really treats her like one. Alma shoots up into her forehead and dreams/hallucinates the world. It reminds me of how the fire and light from Shiva's third eye can annihilate evil--but also how he often opens up his third eye when he's angry, to burn things (like Brahma's 5th head that liked to badmouth him).
So, Notley continues to work with big archetypal female characters. I can't think of any other epics where the central figure is an angry, often self-righteous hag. It's true, hags are dangerous, erratic (Baba Yaga sometimes helps you, sometimes tries to eat you, and she lives in a house built on dancing chicken legs, so the house moves and looks really creepy), and often annoying. I often find the character Alma to be all of these things--but it's hardly an accident. In "The Invisible Organ Presence," Notley writes:
"That a woman is a composition? a trial lawyer, a severity, a bother to one who would move up, an aging hypnotist an aging theoretician, always the nag, the complainer, the denouncer, the radical feminist. nothing you can say, it doesn't matter what i say, it's always heard in the image of the ear of another, this has been said before, everything you do is meaningless..." (p. 42).
Alma, or The Dead Women imagines the hag as a powerful alternative to being any of these things.
The female/male binary in this book is pretty absolute. Men kill and make war, women don't. This dynamic comes up over and over again in the book, and it irks me. But then there are moments where this dynamic is undermined. So maybe the book doesn't hold firm to that dynamic. Here's a section from "The Stupid Guy Etc" that I think is quite funny, although I don't really associate camp or humor with Notley's work, so maybe it's just me:
"because this guy is stupid, you find out by fucking them don't you, and who is there but the stupid to fuck at this point. the moment is the one just past when the seeds have spread throughout the world that moment when we were still just fucking almost fearlessly" (33).
(Note to self: that section also makes me think of San Diego county, bad decisions about marriage, and fantasies about domestic life that still exist even when they don't work).
or this one from "Of Luz, Cosette and of Vengeance":
"Do we want people to die? no, we want them to know they are guilty, and stupid. we want to abolish sexes themselves. races themselves. we want to abolish everything you stand for" (37).
The you in the first section, I think, implicates women readers, and the you in the second section refers to all the evil, nasty, war-loving men that show up throughout the book. Not all the men in the book love evil. Dick Cheney is here, but so is Sonny--who is mostly a stupid and naive young man who wants to go to war because he knows nothing about it, really. He's stupid and tragic.
This poem is mostly a poem about women in a world of violence, men, and war. But let me quote one more section, this one from the second half of the book, a section called "The Boys and Men":
"the boys and men who came with us just chose to come with. and no make no new social order, make no social order, they just chose to, to come with us. they too had nothing left, in or outside. this is a story of women but i want you to know"(205).
Not all the men are stupid and violent, but this book isn't about them.
Allette is angry, but she sort of rises above her rage. Alma exists because of and through her rage and pain. I'm both attracted to and annoyed by mythic archetypes in poetry--but I see their value: a hag can really, really rant. And rant. The point is that a hag really rants a lot. Of course you want her to shut up.
Other stuff to think about:
* Nagging sense that Alma is just as pious and uptight about her world view as the men in the book. This really would be, I think, the major problem...
* Old Hag Syndrome (sleep, hallucinations...)(
* Hag's connection to battlefields (Morrígan in the Táin Bó Cuailnge)
* And sovereignty--land, etc. Hag is sometimes the barren land. Hero usually has to confront her.
This is an angry book. I like it that Alma is angry. She's not a heroin like Allette. Alma's a hag, not a warrior. She's a bit like the Cailleach or Morrígna--she's a god but no one really treats her like one. Alma shoots up into her forehead and dreams/hallucinates the world. It reminds me of how the fire and light from Shiva's third eye can annihilate evil--but also how he often opens up his third eye when he's angry, to burn things (like Brahma's 5th head that liked to badmouth him).
So, Notley continues to work with big archetypal female characters. I can't think of any other epics where the central figure is an angry, often self-righteous hag. It's true, hags are dangerous, erratic (Baba Yaga sometimes helps you, sometimes tries to eat you, and she lives in a house built on dancing chicken legs, so the house moves and looks really creepy), and often annoying. I often find the character Alma to be all of these things--but it's hardly an accident. In "The Invisible Organ Presence," Notley writes:
"That a woman is a composition? a trial lawyer, a severity, a bother to one who would move up, an aging hypnotist an aging theoretician, always the nag, the complainer, the denouncer, the radical feminist. nothing you can say, it doesn't matter what i say, it's always heard in the image of the ear of another, this has been said before, everything you do is meaningless..." (p. 42).
Alma, or The Dead Women imagines the hag as a powerful alternative to being any of these things.
The female/male binary in this book is pretty absolute. Men kill and make war, women don't. This dynamic comes up over and over again in the book, and it irks me. But then there are moments where this dynamic is undermined. So maybe the book doesn't hold firm to that dynamic. Here's a section from "The Stupid Guy Etc" that I think is quite funny, although I don't really associate camp or humor with Notley's work, so maybe it's just me:
"because this guy is stupid, you find out by fucking them don't you, and who is there but the stupid to fuck at this point. the moment is the one just past when the seeds have spread throughout the world that moment when we were still just fucking almost fearlessly" (33).
(Note to self: that section also makes me think of San Diego county, bad decisions about marriage, and fantasies about domestic life that still exist even when they don't work).
or this one from "Of Luz, Cosette and of Vengeance":
"Do we want people to die? no, we want them to know they are guilty, and stupid. we want to abolish sexes themselves. races themselves. we want to abolish everything you stand for" (37).
The you in the first section, I think, implicates women readers, and the you in the second section refers to all the evil, nasty, war-loving men that show up throughout the book. Not all the men in the book love evil. Dick Cheney is here, but so is Sonny--who is mostly a stupid and naive young man who wants to go to war because he knows nothing about it, really. He's stupid and tragic.
This poem is mostly a poem about women in a world of violence, men, and war. But let me quote one more section, this one from the second half of the book, a section called "The Boys and Men":
"the boys and men who came with us just chose to come with. and no make no new social order, make no social order, they just chose to, to come with us. they too had nothing left, in or outside. this is a story of women but i want you to know"(205).
Not all the men are stupid and violent, but this book isn't about them.
Allette is angry, but she sort of rises above her rage. Alma exists because of and through her rage and pain. I'm both attracted to and annoyed by mythic archetypes in poetry--but I see their value: a hag can really, really rant. And rant. The point is that a hag really rants a lot. Of course you want her to shut up.
Other stuff to think about:
* Nagging sense that Alma is just as pious and uptight about her world view as the men in the book. This really would be, I think, the major problem...
* Old Hag Syndrome (sleep, hallucinations...)(
* Hag's connection to battlefields (Morrígan in the Táin Bó Cuailnge)
* And sovereignty--land, etc. Hag is sometimes the barren land. Hero usually has to confront her.
April 11, 2008
Thisi is poetry/prose. Very hard to follow. I had many questions about this book that were luckily answered when I was able to meet Alice Notley. A New Yorker, she is very blunt and confusing just like this book. The reason I loved it is because of the format of her pages in the book. The line breaks help the reader to understand where she wants to to put emphasis on phrases, words or paragraphs. Alma: is a dead woman, but is alive, it is an owl, Alma is Alice. It's nuts but like nothing I've ever read.
August 20, 2008
so far, i'm mainly confused by this. drug addiction and ghosts or split personalities and largely nonsensical grammar all make it hard to follow, but sometimes a sentence or phrase or even blurted word pops out of the haze and shocks me.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews