The poetry of disobedience by Alice Notley

Over the course of her career, poet Alice Notley has aimed, as New York Times critic Joel Brouwer observed, “to establish or continue no tradition except one that literally can’t exist—the celebration of the singular thought sung at a particular instant in a unique voice.” Though at different junctures she has been associated with the second generation of the New York School, feminist and political poetics, and the Language poets, Notley has consistently reinvented her approach and formal structure with each new collection of poetry.

“The Poetics of Disobedience” was written for the Conference on Contemporary American and English Poetics, which was held on February 28, 1998, at the Center for American Studies at King’s College London, and was also presented at Naropa University on June 15, 1998. It was later published in the anthology Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (2004), edited by Anne Waldman.

In this essay Notley asserts, “It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against . . . everything. One must remain somehow, though how, open to any subject or form in principle, open to the possibility of liking, open to the possibility of using.” Explaining her overarching desire to “blow away the gauze,” she articulates her belief that the essential disobedience of the poet and the reader are necessary for a fuller perception of the self and its connection to the world, concluding that “self means ‘I’ and also means ‘poverty,’ it’s what one strips down to, who you are when you’re stripped down.”