Alice Notley Quotes

In love there is no because.

I want this noise within me to die down.

It's all like me; and any song for this would just be bullshit. This is a thing, where they stopped trying, they deserted it, and desertion itself is the only possible song.

Gift

Nothing will hurt you that much despite how you feel

the stress on your back shapes your insight

this splendid November rain Toussaint. I find

you by your marks, he says

an imprint

But when I summon you, I talk to - I say -

my memory of your face. It's kind of crazy

to others. They're not very interesting he says.

When I first came to this country, and now

I know the language I say, but I had in a dream

spoken it many years previously. That is,

not the language of the dead the language

of France. I took one year of French in 1964

and then nothing but once, in 1977 I spoke French

in a dream all night: I was in the future I

moved here in 1992. Country of the more

logical than I? though the people of my quartier

know and like me, even as I a foreigner remain strange

You do everything alone a woman said to me.

There are ways to care without interfering

but the French speak of anguish frequently

they are conscious of emotional extremity

a terrible gift. It's all a gift, he says . . .

some haven't been opened. I'm not sure

he said that it's nearly my sixty-seventh birthday

today though it's the day of the dead hello

we love you they say.

Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language people just assumed that we were dumb

And if you're referring to your anguish, it's just a thing. The shape of a trailor, a wheel, or a knife. Leave the details of your life and find another one.

Abolish these categories of pain
(or is it love)
Let it all be one pain
Pain swallows itself, dies like a star.

I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own.

I do utterly despise dailiness as it stands. I can't abide what the world has become, the frozen-ness of our product this evil thing that we kiss the ass of every hour. I want a dailiness that is free and beautiful

Who defined me? My culture, a culture of mercy, a living codex. I am a unique culture of one, from everywhere. I am her map and her self. I am everyone in the story; I am the story.

Feeling awful is physiological you say.
God I hate you, I say. Yes you can find the neurons for feeling awful. Do you think you can find the neurons for the fact I hate you?

You're dancing on me
said the cosmic dragon, the galactic surface of all we can see.
So fucking what? she said.

I can't translate myself into language any more.

I didn't care much what happened to me, so chance didn't matter.

What did you do in your songs?
I don't know, I'll never know, you say. Someone else will write them about me, won't they?
I looked into a void of love. And I fell down. There was nothing else there. No where, where I was no one.
But I have to sing this song. I'm still here.

Writing poetry is what I am. I wouldn't know what else to be.

I'm not an expert in the deck at all. My interest lies somewhere near a sense that words are like tarot cards, and that a poem manipulates unpredictable depths with its words ... I like the tarot because it works like poetry and because you don't really have to 'believe in' anything. It's there to be used. The symbols are remarkably durable and beautiful; they float out to encompass all kinds of meanings.

And maybe you can't know me now.
Maybe I'm just blood. Whatever that's for.

... our production of the world, our interpretation of it, what we've been told to experience and what we've been told we have to do, both worry and distress me. I don't want to live in someone else's dream.

oh each poet's a beautiful human girl who must die.

Stalker


The light so thick nothing's visible, cognoscenti

I knew them, stupid apes. Real apes know more

Before we said apes. I know how to be you bet-

ter  -  a stupid voice. You must find a mind

to respect  -  why? There was someone with ear

buds, speaking gibberish who wouldn't

stop walking beside me; freckle-spattered. I

had to ask the métro attendant for help;

she extricated him from me ... I respect his chaotic

speech, mild adhesive force because it makes no sense.

I am back on the alley, discovering adults are un-

trustworthy: someone's lying ... about a

fight between a teenage girl and boy  -  he pushed

her hard  -  first she badly scratched him, she's worse, his

mother says. I'm back at pre-beginning, I don't

want to go through that again. There is no

sexuality in chaos, there's no style, nor

hope. I want style  -  apes have style, people

have machines. Show me something to respect

This bleuet growing out of a wall on rue d'Hauteville.

I picked it and pressed it in a diary. Every once

in a while I respect a moment. I am back at

pre-beginning: I don't want to care beyond

this ... sudden hue in the sand, yellow or spotted with an

hallucinated iridescence. The one who is

stalking me

We name us and then we are lost, tamed
I choose words, more words, to cure the tameness, not the wildness

you see all night in your dreams. And the blue of my voice can't help but see you.