That was his idea, that prosody is what you see on these voice graphs. I was never very interested in the comparisons, but in the idea of the raw shape of the voice. The graphs showed the shape of the poem, because they would always be similar. My second husband, Douglas Oliver, did these experiments where he put electrodes on people’s throats and got them to read poems, and then he compared graphs he got of what it was like for them to read a certain poem-say, by Alexander Pope. Prosody’s about how objects and voices vibrate, and how they’re packaged, made compact, but not compact, at the same time-how they spread and become small and then dense. Prosody is really about your own voice, your own physiology, your own vibrations. The last few years I’ve actually been working with classical meters, but I’m trying not to signal it. Sometimes they’ll have to do with a general length of line. And they usually don’t have to do with how the line is measured, but have more to do with sectioning poems, and things like that. As for real poetry questions, I find something like prosody almost embarrassing to address, because it’s so hard to talk about.ĪN It’s impossible, unless you use set forms. RD Well, in the essays in Coming After , you’ve written so clearly about things like prosody and voice-about “poetics,” a term I know you consider suspect-and I’ve also noticed that you’re sometimes asked to repeat yourself. So you are permitted to if you would like to. They usually have an idea about what questions should be asked and what topics should be covered, but they never say to me, like, “How do you get such-and-such an effect?” Or “How did you stay alive all those years?” Those are two different kinds of questions, and no one ever asks me either kind. What did you mean?ĪN I was thinking that they never ask me about what they personally care about in regard to it. Robert Dewhurst When we were e-mailing before this conversation, you remarked that people rarely ask you questions, really, about your poetry. What follows is barely edited from our phone call, verbatim. While Notley thinks little of pat formulas and theories-“I don’t have a poetics,” she has said, “I think that’s bullshit … poetics is an industry”-she is a great talker and extempore intellect. This award follows a significant symposium on her work, “Alette in Oakland,” convened by poets in the San Francisco Bay Area last October.
I spoke with Notley ten days after she was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime accomplishment. The biographical note in the back of her most recent book, Negativity’s Kiss (Presses Universitaires de Rouen, 2014), states plainly: “At this point I consider myself to be an internationalist and certainly of my own poetry school … As far as I’m concerned my books are the embodiment of everything I am and think, they are my accomplishment and identity. A central figure of the New York School’s precocious “second generation,” Notley has lived since 1992 in Paris, France, where she has cultivated an iconoclastic autonomy from any one poetic school or set of associations. She has published over thirty-five collections of poetry and prose in a career spanning four decades, which together display a bedazzling variety of forms, musics, voices, measures, ideas. To consider her work, in toto, is to court cerebral and sensory overload. Martinez’s And That’s How the Rent Gets PaidĪlice Notley is my favorite living poet. Guillaume Apollinaire’s Zone: Selected Poems, translated by Ron PadgettĪctor, Playwright, Failure, Father, Fag-Conrad Gerhardt Strikes Again. Matt Freedman and Tim Spelios’s Endless Broken Time