Mysteries of Small Houses

by Alice Notley

Overview

Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant new collection of poems that charts her growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist. In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative renderings of the American landscape, circa 1950. Likewise, her coming of age as a poet in the turbulent sixties is evoked through the era's angry, creative energy. As she looks backward with the perspective that time and age allows, Notley ably captures the immediacy of youth's passion while offering her own dry-eyed interpretations of the events of a life lived close to the bone. Like the colorful collages she assembles from paper and other found materials, Notley erects structures of image and feeling to house the memories that swirl around her in the present.In their feverish, intelligent renderings of moments both precise and ephemeral, Notley's poems manage to mirror and transcend the times they evoke. Her profound tributes to the stages of her life and to the identities she has assumed—child, youth, lover, poet, wife, mother, friend, and widow—are remarkable for their insight and wisdom, and for the courage of their unblinking gaze.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140588965
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/28/1998
Series:	Poets, Penguin Series
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alice Notley is a poet whose twenty previous titles include The Descent of Alette, Beginning with a Stain, Homer's Art, and Selected Poems. She wrote the introduction for her late first husband Ted Berrigan's Selected Poems. She lives in Paris.

Table of Contents

mysteries of small housesWould Want to Be In My Wildlife
House of Self
I'm Just Rigid Enough
Kiss of Fire
One of the Longest Times
The Future May Contain Me More
Synchronous Chronology
The Obnoxious Truth
Requiem for the First Half of Split
Experience
1965
Prophet's Job
As Good as Anything
"Go In and Out the Window"
April Not an Inventory but a Blizzard
1970
Choosing Styles—1972
Not Child
A Baby Is Born Out of a White Owl's Forehead—1972
They Cut Out Her Eye and So She Dosen't Know If It's Real
Diversey Street
I Must Have Called and So He Comes
Colors—1973
Waveland (Back in Chicago)
Collage
"Bring Me a Pea Jacket and Sandwiches"
The Howling Saint T-Shirt
Place Myself in New York (Need One More There)
The Trouble with You Girls
Self ' 78 Speak
1979 A Dream
The Year of the Premonitory Dream That Ted and Steve Left Me
Hematite Heirloom Lives On (Maybe December 1980)
C. '81
Gladly Though I Lost It and Knew I Would
How We Spent the Last Year of His Life
The Common Ground Ask Anyone You Know
Point of Fidelity
I—Towards a Definition
II—The Person That You Were Will Be Replaced
Flowers
A Metaphysics of Emotion
Becoming Egyptian
Mid-80's
You Can Give It Away
But In This World Together and Not Passing Away
The New York Human
I Am a Hardened Heart
The Brain Is a Toy but Loyalty's Metaphysical
Sept 17 / Aug 29, '88
Owls
Vertical Axis
The Tyrant
Alette
101
If I Didn't Shiver I Wouldn't Be Cold
In Needless and to Poet What Are Real Things
1992
New Dreams
47th Birthday
Bobby (First Visit Back to the States)
In the Basement of Claypool's Department Store
Going Back Mornings
Place Blanche
More Below a Dream Of
Remember What I Came Here to Do to This World Very Little Actually
Office
Mysteries of Small Houses
Lady Poverty

Editorial Reviews

In her latest collection, Notley takes a step back from the body of work she has amassed over the last three decades (The Descent of Alette; Selected Poems; etc.) to compose a kind of quasi-autobiography in verse. Casual, forthright and perceptive, it is a culminating effort. Notley, as is her style, rarely shies away from unabashed, almost Whitmanesque generalizations, and here her bravery pays off. Again and again, she asks herself what poetry in America is and was, turning moments later to provide her own answers: "...`So little/ tenderness in American poetry' as/ Robert Duncan once told mewho was he?/ Who was anyone? unstarred brightest equality." Contemporary poetry's recent past shadows Notley more closely and intimately than most: her late husband, the poet Ted Berrigan, commands a small but devoted following, and many of these poems try to make sense of his work and his early death ("Grief's not a social invention./ Grief is visible, substantial, I've literally seen it") while retaining a sense of her own trajectory ("The Subject/ of this poem is not how a woman's imagination/ may be dominated by a man's"). We follow her in a loose chronology from a West Coast childhood to New York City, first as a pre-feminism college student, then as a 1970s East Village poet in a scene full of humid friendships, wordsmithery and pill-taking, and through to Paris, where she lives today. Occasionally, Notley slips into the automatic writing-like phrases and personal myth-making that was the Achilles' Heel of the late New York School. But even these moments, with their rock 'n' roll bio shading, make for compelling reading. (June) (PW best book of 1998)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

With some 20 books of poetry to her credit, Notley (The Descent of Alette, 1996, etc.) continues to combine Beat blather and New York School patter in her sprawling, self-mythologizing verse; her long, un-punctuated lines rehearses the key events in her life: growing up in Needles, California; coming east to college; meeting her husband, the poet Ted Berrigan, at Univ. of Iowa; and following him to his Lower East Side haunts, where they not only become speed freaks, but also have two children before Berrigan dies young of liver disease. The mostly realist but occasionally off-the-wall narratives, with their wild surreal flourishes, follow the poet chronologically as she uses þwords to cure the tamenessþ she bemoans among the squares. Proving her bohemianism, she uses lots of dirty words, and writes of sex, but her radical feminist self makes sure thereþs nothing sexy in all the vulgarity. Notleyþs tough postures include herself as true poet who hates Iowa City (þtoo boringþ and full of þassholesþ), where þeveryoneþs an academic poetry/groupie,þ and the women offer themselves to the visiting stars. Notley interrupts her manic musings to rant against the middle class, þthe stupid fucking workersþ who vote Republican, and all those feminists who identify her solely with her late husband. In poem after poemþand they all read like one congealed massþNotley claims to disdain the opinions of others, yet she continually worries about þsocial graces,þ the þsocial ego,þ þsocialization,þ and þthe hustle for statusþ(to which she does not seem immune). Perhapsþliving is a poem,þ as Notley confidently avers, but her life on the page isnþt necessarily poetry youþd care to read.

Kirkus Reviews