Ariana ReinesI want to talk with you about your books and also your collages and drawings. I’ve also brought a few quotations from your newest book, Being Reflected Upon, that I want to present to you as a game. It feels a little Georges Perec: “Pity and compassion still disgust me though love doesn’t.”
Alice NotleyWell, don’t pity and compassion disgust you?
ARCompletely.
ANPity and compassion imply that the person who is experiencing them is better than the person to whom they’re directed. There’s no equality in pity and compassion, whereas there’s equality in love. Probably. Or, there should be. But that’s the implication. That’s early Christianity.
ARAnother line about love that I adore, which also feels like a remark on bad tendencies in contemporary poetry: “I knew I was supposed to be supportive as if marching / but the best I could do was love everyone.”
ANIn that poem I’m responding to a particular time within the last decade when every little thing that anyone did or said, every gesture, was a point of hatred, something to march about. It was difficult to separate things that were really important from things that weren’t. I have no activism in me. I can’t do things in a group. I can’t do things that imply that I know better than everybody else. But I would ideally like to love. I can’t always love. But I do go through a lot of contortions and turmoil, so it’s probably love.
ARI’m finding myself wanting to ask related questions about communal activity or group activity, because the firmament of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church[, New York], which you were involved with in the 1970s—it’s still so powerful. A lot of us are still living on the energies that were generated by you and your family and your friends in a certain time and space. But I also think that that kind of collectivity gets idealized, and maybe a lot of annoying theories are generated about just how and why it’s been so powerful.
ANYeah? You have some?
ARI have fantasies, but not theories.
ANWhat do you want to know?
ARI suppose I want to know if it’s possible for you personally to love anyone who isn’t a poet.
ANOh, yes. All the members of my family who weren’t and aren’t poets, I love them so much. I love my parents so much. My mother, my father, my siblings—I have this incredible love for them that’s expressed in all my poetry.
ARI had this dumb fantasy that everyone in your family is or was a poet.
ANOh, no. No, no. I had all these aunts and uncles, who are dead now. Many cousins, some of whom are still alive. There were and are a lot of large families in the family constellation that I’m part of. There’s a constellation that has to do with my stepson David, who is not a poet, although he’s written some poems. There’s a constellation around my stepdaughters, who are Doug’s daughters, and they’re not poets.
ARThe debris and cobwebs are being cleared from my consciousness as you speak, which is also how I feel when reading your poems. If I have one stupid theory, it’s that sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as a public. Or if all art is always made for other artists.
ANIt’s not made for other artists. It never is. Sometimes they’re the only people who are your audience in the now, but actually you are talking to everyone who ever existed and will exist and whatever planets and non-planets there are outside of this planet. You’re talking to everything. Poets just have to trust the future.
ARYou write variations—or, perhaps better to say, your writing emanates variations on lines about changing the universe and correcting the perception in the reader that a false world is real. Can you talk to me about changing the universe?
ANI don’t know if I can. I’m very shy to. And I don’t think I have good words that aren’t in the poems. I don’t think about it in words. When you think in poems, you think in the proper way. Not everyone should read my poetry, but if they do, then the changing of the universe will commence or continue. Because if you’re reading my poetry, you’re not doing any of the bad things that are bringing the world to its possible conclusion. You’re just reading poetry. You’re not going out into the world of terrible machines and pollution and violence and aggression.
ARI can personally attest to the changing of the universe that your poems accomplish. One of their qualities, and this has been true of your work from the beginning, is that when I’m reading you, there’s a pervading sense that this is the most important thing in the world.
ANThat’s how I feel about it! [laughter] I don’t see anything that’s more important than what I’m doing in my poetry, or what anyone might be doing in their poetry. But there are a lot of other people in the world who don’t feel the same way. I find them puzzling.
ARThey are very peculiar, those people. What I mean is, your work has a corrective or a medicinal effect. It sets the rest of life into a different proportion.
ANWe’re all being this. What I’m making is a place for all of us to see that we’re all being this, that we’re all being this intense and light-filled existing. That we’re all poetry.
ARIt feels very connected to the work of the Sibyls.
ANThey didn’t write very well.
AROr is it that the priests translating them weren’t writing very well? [laughter]
ANI don’t know much about the prophets. I don’t know how they wrote their prophecies. But I think one supposes that they were poets.
ARThere’s a poem in which you’re talking to Allen Ginsberg, and he says, “I was not reborn . . . your system is / correct.”
We’re all being this. What I’m making is a place for all of us to see that we’re all being this, that we’re all being this intense and light-filled existing. That we’re all poetry.
ANWhich poem is that?
ARIt’s called “To Remake It w/ Microtones.” It’s a poem I love.
ANYeah, he wasn’t reincarnated.
ARWill you tell me more about that?
ANNo, it’s obvious! He told me he wasn’t reincarnated. I knew he wasn’t reincarnated. I can’t believe that anyone believes in the caste system and reincarnation. How can anything be transcendental and arranged into levels based on some social system that existed a long time ago?
ARPeople are obsessed with hierarchy.
ANThey are. And they’re wrong. Simone Weil was, and she was wrong.
ARTell me more about how wrong Simone Weil was.
ANShe was only wrong about that. For a while there I kept trying to read L’Enracinement (1949), but toward the beginning I would get to this page where she listed the number of things that people needed, and one of them was hierarchy. I would look at that and think, “I don’t believe it. I can’t read this book.”
ARThe French are obsessed with management and hierarchy.
ANThey just like things that are clear, very clear, and they like to have philosophical discussions. In order to graduate from high school with a baccalaureate you have to answer a three-hour question on a philosophical topic.
ARThe society is organized on the basis of this test. I’m half a product of the French system, and I’m fascinated that you brought up Weil, because she has this negativity, which is different to the Keatsean negative capacity. It’s founded in her obsession with what she believed to be her brother’s intellectual superiority over her. I’m thinking of your book Negativity’s Kiss (2013) here, but nowhere in your work have I found anything like Weil’s “de-creation,” or (to be reductive) her low self-esteem.
ANOh, no, I don’t have that.
ARYou don’t suffer from that.
ANThe way I was brought up did not allow that. I had a very, very good upbringing. I don’t know how to describe it. It was obviously very hard in some ways on my brother, because there were expectations of us. I don’t have the words to discuss it with anyone who didn’t know us, because I loved him and my parents loved him and I can’t talk about it as if it’s an object.
ARI understand. I have a brother too, and one of the peculiar things about my brother, whom I adore, is that he was in Rockland, that same hospital you reference in “To Remake It w/ Microtones.”
AN“Am I or am I not / with you in Rockland.” Allen’s line.
ARAllen’s line. We can’t really talk about prophecy, I accept that, but there’s a way in which poetry is sort of always prophetic. It’s always holding the future. When you’re reading it, it’s holding you, and you find that your life is being held by this poem that was written for you without knowing you, or having precisely needed you. “Prophecy” isn’t really the word for it, whatever “it” is. Poetry’s the word for “it.”
ANIt’s about the odd points of connection in a life. There are times when you look back, and everything that was back there rushes up here. And poets can be engaged with that process. It’s part of what makes them poets. It’s something that happens inside poetic stress: you get to this point where it’s like this black hole, and then everything just comes in, past and future.
ARI’m going to step away from magic and the paranormal for a moment and read you some lines of yours about Paris: “I’m trying to remember when I started to like it here / maybe after about my fifteenth year in this building.”
ANWhen I came here, I had intense culture shock that lasted for about three years. I was living in Montmartre, and it was very touristy. I didn’t know how to be there. I didn’t know how to be in Paris. I didn’t speak French. When we moved into this building in 1995, I started to feel a little better. It was kind of like living near 14th Street [in New York]. This neighborhood’s very mixed. It’s kind of working class. I liked all of that. But then Doug died, and I felt terrible. Then I got hepatitis C, and I felt really terrible. And then the virus got cured and I started to feel better again. I started to gradually be here, but it took a very long time.
It’s something that happens inside poetic stress: you get to this point where it’s like this black hole, and then everything just comes in, past and future.
AROne of the things that electrified me about New York School poetry as a teenager is that it’s funny. When I think about your books, for instance when I read Disobedience (2001), from earlier in your Paris time, it’s so funny. What you do with the epic and with language is all extremely serious and important, as if the entire universe depends on it. And it’s also hilarious. What you do by smashing the epic mode with French noir—there’s a lot of joy in it.
ANI wrote it right after I moved into this apartment, and it’s based on a project to try to understand Frenchness in some way. I was trying to live here and feel around inside of it. But in the middle of it, there was this enormous public strike, so the middle section is the strike—la grève. I detail all these people and what they are and the kinds of things they’re saying and I’m dreaming about them and none of them exist anymore. None of them are alive. There’s one French person who has written about the book, but most people here don’t know about it.
ARThe French are funny about poetry. For them, poetry existed in the nineteenth century. Or it ended with Arthur Rimbaud. Or the Surrealists.
ANThere’s a new generation now, and they’re different. But it existed here until the war, and then it kind of stopped. Everything stopped and became philosophical. Everybody was so traumatized by what happened—by the Holocaust, by the war. It wasn’t that they shouldn’t write about it, but they couldn’t.
ARRight, it’s not Theodor Adorno forbidding it.
ANNo, it’s not Adorno. He was wrong. It was so painful, so dolorous, so shocking, that, well, anyone can write anything at any time, but you had to approach it in another way. But I have this feeling that it’s coming back. I notice that certain elements have been reintroduced: conversation or description or the sense of people on the street.
ARThinking about shock and trauma in the language of French poetry and how it’s shifting, I also think about the way that Being Reflected Upon is chronicling a time of terrorism. It’s everywhere in the book.
ANIt’s everywhere in my life. There’s a poem about the terror attack in San Bernardino. I couldn’t believe it. I had this San Bernardino County blanket that had Needles on it—the town I grew up in. It was on my bed when I was reading about this terrorist attack that took place at a center for people with disabilities.
I was away during the big attack in Paris in 2015. I was in Milwaukee giving a reading at Woodland Pattern. I had to give this big reading at a gala while people were still being held at the Bataclan theater. Finally, by the end of the evening, it was over. I came back two days later. I walked into Charles de Gaulle airport just as a minute of silence was being called over the speaker system. We all stopped. I was pushing my luggage and we all stopped. It’s making me cry right now. It was horrible.
AROne of the things that I found really marvelous in your book is the way that this terror that keeps showing up just keeps showing up in the poems. It’s like that sobering, traumatized silence in French poetry after the war that you were talking about. There are certain things that, as with love, cannot be said but somehow simply show up. And we respond accordingly.
ANIt’s part of the fabric of life. Most of the things I write about are part of a fabric. That’s something that comes out of being part of the New York School when I was young and learning from Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler and so on. I’m giving a picture of my times, and thereby giving a picture of myself.
ARAnd chronicling the times as a soul, more than anything.
ANI’m trying to speak to people about what one has to go through, how one might approach having to be a person in their time. Perhaps one person’s time is not very special in the end, but it is their time, and it’s what they have to talk about while they’re alive.
ARIt’s special to us because we’re living through it.
ANIt’s what there is. It’s the vocabulary.
ARI want to ask about a workshop you taught. I heard that you had the participants make tarot cards?
ANI did that at a couple different places. One was the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. It wasn’t precisely a workshop. You could do whatever you wanted, however you wanted to. We went every day. It was all women. Everybody became really bonded. The people in the other workshops called us “the coven.” We made a little tarot deck there, and I also did one in New York at Poets House. I did one of those master classes, and there were people I knew in the class: Edwin Torres, Jennifer Firestone, people like that. I said we could either use the Major Arcana as given or make up our own. Rachel Zucker was there, and she insisted that there had to be The Hermit. She was dying to be alone. She wanted a card for being alone. I insisted there should be a card for immigration and nobody knew why. But I knew.
ARMaybe this is a good segue into your drawings and collages. I’m curious if you’ve been doing that lately?
ANI’m back to working on collages, but I’ve had this problem since I’ve been in Paris that I can’t get enough materials. In New York I could always get things out of the garbage, or people would give me things. Jane Dalrymple-Hollo gave me this stack of things.
ARDo you want me to get some poets to collect trash for you?
ANNo, you have to know what I like. I think it has to happen in such a way that it’s a personal transaction.
ARI’m the sort of person that people give trash to. They give me rocks, sticks.
ANI have a lot of rocks.
ARMe too.
ANAnne Waldman has been giving me cheap jewelry, and I’ve been putting it in collages. She doesn’t know that.
AROkay, we won’t print that.
ANShe probably wouldn’t mind if she did know.
ARHere’s a line I love: “To hold it all together, a linguistic energy.” There’s the sense that the impulse of the voice is holding the world, even the universe, together.
ANI think it is. I think that when we die, we talk to one another and thereby hold the cosmos together. The only possible thing that’s holding everything together is communication—as Anselm Hollo and I say in the Anselm Hollo poem. We were both saying that as he was dying. That’s all there is. And obviously you don’t disappear, because there’s nowhere to go. There’s no nothing to go to because there’s no nothing. And it’s obvious there’s no nothing. So we become communication.
AROne last thing. Here’s a line from early in the book: “I used to be a pacifist but now I’m nothing but soul.” We were talking about the weird obsession with hierarchy that pervades people’s minds on Earth. In France, it shows up in mystical literature sometimes. This is a thought-form that obsesses people.
ANPeople think that there is another thing that’s better than you. I don’t think that.
AROn account of your excellent upbringing.
ANOn account of my experience of myself as a soul. I don’t have to think like that. I don’t have to find it by clinging to something outside of myself.
