Scholars of Notley’s work describe 1996’s The Descent of Alette, a narrative poem which follows its eponymous heroine in an underworld journey through the subways in pursuit of a figure called the Tyrant, as a major breakthrough. These fusions of everyday diction with uncanny vision heralded the poet’s developing “sound of plain angel.” But in part because of her lifelong concern with questions of voice, visionary transcriptions emerge as early as 1976’s Alice Ordered Me To Be Made, whose title poem was written “ my father dying in hospital / April 1975.” 1981’s “Jack Would Speak Through The Imperfect Medium of Alice” marks another turning point, as the poet utters a first-person monologue in the persona of Jack Kerouac (by then dead for over a decade). Notley’s earliest work is marked by a concern with the quotidian and allegiance to the American plain-speech tradition championed by William Carlos Williams (the subject of her 1980 critical talk, Dr. More importantly, her words pointed to the root of her concern with origins, the stories we tell about them, and the possibility of healing through speaking another narrative or myth. These statements weren’t just Notley being provocative, speaking her mind, or refusing to repeat “what everybody knows”-though the author of Disobedience certainly has no problem with any of those things. This explosion, this Big Bang-it’s stupid. This is a projection we are putting on the whole thing.

If we say the universe began in violence, then we are going to be violent. This is our myth, the scientific myth that the universe began in violence. I think that’s wrong, and we have to change. I want us to change the way we view-you know, like the idea that the universe began with an enormous painful explosion. At the Town Hall which concluded 2014’s Alette in Oakland, a weekend-long celebration of the life and work of Alice Notley, the poet shocked many members of the gathering when she asserted that she didn’t believe in the Big Bang.

The third angel book review