HAVE I BEEN HERE BEFORE IS SOMETHING UNFAMILIAR  (from DISOBEDIENCE)

Alice Notley

in Normandy
climb down rungs of steel ladder
as if down to canyon;
walk among rocky tidepools, hurt feet
to see limpets and bigorneaux,
half-eaten cuttlefish, eggcase exposed;
people are collecting bigorneaux in sacks . . .
walk further out onto rocks
in a tableau, a long frame of time,
not a person, until leaving:
as in the caves am non-historical.
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A poet dressed as a saloon girl
red dress, black
ostrich feathers in her hair --
that's so unlike her,
she's really a grouchy intellectual

I was going to help her perform her prose poems,
in a cage, a sort of prison
maybe it was just a disco cage;
the poems were written in bamboo,
bamboo words, hard to decipher . . .

Exactly what it's like, what it's all like.  Poetry world.
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Hear in my mind, ne touches pas
What, I ask silently
I see a grail, a glass grail rimmed
with glass roses.  Who's speaking?
All of tradition.
Let it just stay the way it is.
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A question of a large package, a big cardboard envelope
entitled DISOBEDIENCE.  A member of a girl group
asks me where the comic poet's things are:
DISOBEDIENCE belongs to the comic poet,
she's clear about this.  It isn't the comic poet's
lectures on Thoreau, but the comic poet's
own book, DISOBEDIENCE.
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What a strange and interesting woman, ugly
full of tension, glasses
in a red roses dress hating me
because my feet had been up on the metro seat
before she sat down.
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This guy doesn't seem to have
actually read my essay.  I
never mentioned "the author" --
the author as important --
as he asserts . . . was talking about
the epic, as composed of
cultural materials, including measure.

Now I'm talking about epic
as voice.  and as
disobedience.  For
example I have disobeyed his chart, or is it
charter --  Yours, Yours, Yours.
Your idea of how I'm supposed to write.
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There's conscious and un-
conscious    or there's conscious
semi-conscious (self-
hypnotized)    and the various
levels of unconsciousness:  dreams, and then
below that
is that grailish?
                            To make it all
more conscious I have flooded it with
my voice    without
trying hard to make my voice sound like a poem.
A voice is more uniting than. . . .
it's all we've got to do it with.
The mind by itself is fuzzy enslaved
and divided.  Written words, by themselves,
are E's.
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I try the caves again, out of habit, but
to get them I find I'm
climbing down the rungs of the Normandy ladder

and the caves are different, with a potted geranium,
red, suspended just below a rock arch --
the caves are rooms, are stores
are like the upper world.

The general store is lined with books
a man tends bar in front of them.  I order
Outline of History, fall asleep into the white blaze of its
pages, sitting at a table.

I sense Hardwood's face when I wake up
it's opaque and dark, with black tunnel eyes
I'm hard all over, harder than ever