Scan barcode
forgereads17's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.5
raluca_p's review against another edition
5.0
I’m alive and dead now,
at the same time,
speaking in your poems.
at the same time,
speaking in your poems.
rakishheir's review against another edition
5.0
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.
losethegirl's review
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
lilsticker's review
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
2.0
noisyheadspace's review against another edition
4.0
“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.”
tinyphrases's review against another edition
5.0
i bought this at the beginning of 2018 when i was traveling, ducking into this san francisco bookstore that some of you may know and i honestly didn’t know of. but it was beautiful and i had wanted a collection of notley’s work for a while now – and i love it. i love it even though i am not smart enough to understand poetry but man, it makes me feel.
stefanieh's review
5.0
Full of myth and myriad voices. Notley is definitely one of the best living American poets.
garleighc's review
5.0
I haven't read a poetry collection I enjoyed so much in a very long time! These poems sort of pick up with the story of Cassandra the prophetess; I loved all the allusions to mythology but I also loved the idea of the journey down and inward, to come back out of some interior state of hell, or death, and then proceed to go forth and communicate that vision to the world. I don't even know where to begin with analyzing this.
arizer's review
4.0
Innovative in terms of formatting and choices of sectioning the book. Highly recommend.
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