THE DESCENT OF ALETTE - ALICE NOTLEY

I had only heard of Notley but not looked deep into her stuff until I heard that she had passed earlier this year. Since I’ve been in my poetry bag, I decided to pick up her most famous work, The Descent of Alette. Not too often does one hear about modern epics. Book lengths poems that tell discrete, heroic stories, rich in metaphor and wide in scope. Notley did it though, this thing rocks and is a great example of a real avant-garde, something that is actually original and strange but not weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird. The format of this thing is, as far as I know, totally unique. Instead of classic line breaks (which I had always thought of as the most basic unit of poetry) she places the rhythmic feet or unit in quotation marks. As she puts it in a note, “The quotation marks make the reader slow down and silently articulate - not slur over mentally - the phrases at the pace, and stresses, I intended.” And it really worked. Sometimes I read the shorter ones to the cadence of “Who We Be” but it did make me slow down and think about each small phrase. This choice really does give this thing a vibe I’ve never encountered before. Here’s a taste:

“So money” “became invisible” “Invisible money” “began to

Change hands” “Paid” “in invisible” “Things paid for”

“By invisible….” “Everyone knows” “everyone knows”

“If you have it or not” “if you have enough or not” All is

Exactly as” “before” “when there was money” “except”

“It isn’t printed” “isn’t seen” “But it is money”

“Just the same”

 As for the story, it’s likewise bizarre. Alette lives underground in an endless maze of subway tunnels. She comes to realize this world is ruled by the Tyrant, who she sets out to find and kill. Very classic epic poetry style set-up. In that vein she travels to all sorts of strange locations and meets all sorts of strange beings. Mermaids, giant snakes, strange caverns, and powerful owls populate the world.  She is dissolved and eaten, she meets the mother of all mothers and encounters a river of blood, all sorts of bizarre strange images and scenes abound. The pace is slow, dreamlike and very deliberate.  Utterly unique, I can’t wait to come back to this thing for years.