Disobedience

by Notley, Alice (Author)

• ISBN13: 9780141002293
• ISBN10: 0141002298
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-10-01
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)

Summary

Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging radical female poets at work today. Her last collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Structured as a long series of interconnected poems in which one of the main elements is an ongoing dialogue with a seedy detective, Disobedience sets out to explore the visible as well as the unconscious. These poems, composed during a fifteen-month period, also deal with being a woman in France, with turning fifty, and with being a poet, and thus seemingly despised or at least ignored.

Table of Contents

Change the Forms in Dreams	p. 3
What's Suppressed	p. 5
Sun Is Very Near Hot and Buttockslike	p. 8
I Suppose This Is All a Lefthand Path	p. 11
Where Is the Babylonian Meter with Its Lovely Caesura?	p. 14
Circorpse	p. 17
Help Me Corpus Sagrada	p. 21
The Islanders Remember That There Are No Women and No Men	p. 24
Red Fish	p. 27
Enuma Elish	p. 30
The Forest/Swamp/Gorge/Alp Hotel	p. 33
Lana Turner at Versailles	p. 36
"You"	p. 39
"... I Thought She Was Going to Be a Ghost Story"	p. 43
Just Under Skin of Left Leg	p. 46
"Have Made Earth as the Mirror of Heaven"	p. 49
Left Side Liberation from E	p. 52
Dante's Ass a Nobel Prize	p. 57
Particle Doll	p. 60
There Isn't Much to Do If You Aren't Geology	p. 64
And Still No Story, How Will You Known When It's Over?	p. 68
More of the Assholes of Giants	p. 72
Rita, a Red Rose, Hates Her Clothes	p. 76
An Impeccable Sexism I Mean an Elegant Idea or Procedure Haunts the Stars	p. 80
Breaking the Sound Barrier	p. 84
The Morbid Managers Are Serving Trays of Charnel Flesh	p. 88
The Big Slip on the Dead Woman Is Pink	p. 92
Dancing into the Shadows of the Hideous Future City We Don't Think So During This Strike	p. 95
White Rice Words Are the Means of Exchange	p. 99
Seems to Be Heading for Mexico	p. 102
Being with People a Cliche Eating Dinner	p. 105
In the Motherless, Homogenized and E-Epistolary	p. 108
Breaking an Unsound Barrier ...	p. 113
The Veil Is, Like, Sexism or Is It Like It	p. 116
Being Wiggy	p. 119
Exposing My Breasts So You'll	p. 122
In That Room, In That Time, But Later	p. 125
You Cover All the Windows with Your Manuscript Pages	p. 128
Will Die and Die in So Many Ways, as Professional and Cultural Entity	p. 131
Do I Have to Be Mad Now Later and Always	p. 135
Lost the Plumbing Lost My Story Good	p. 139
Oh Put Some Obscenely Concrete Nouns Back in Your Poems	p. 143
Healthy and Foolish the Mainstream Stars of Kneejerk Joy and Despair May Win the Future	p. 146
It's Dumb to Be a Member of a Dominant Species	p. 150
People Could Live in This Town, They Don't But I'm Going To	p. 154
My Hair Is Terribly Dirty and the Dress Looks Drab	p. 158
Meet Me at La Chapelle for Some More Salami	p. 161
But My Real Dreams Are Objective (Objects Made of Me by the Secret)	p. 164
Don't Give Me Drovel, Give Me a Shovel (Popular Poem)	p. 167
Open-Stomach Woman	p. 170
I Know You'll Make Fun of the Clothes the Magi Are Wearing	p. 177
Crowded into a Breathless Bubble of Bad Thinking Our Poem the World Owned by a Few	p. 180
Coming Down the Spiral Almanac Staircase	p. 183
Could I Ever Share a Tableau with Miss January's Murderers?	p. 187
Echoes the Past Fucks Me Over and Over	p. 191
In Any Movie Whatsoever, in Order to Be Working Actors	p. 195
Do You Want to Be Excellent an A Actress No Not That Either	p. 199
We Should All Live Like Rocks in a Flat Field	p. 203
Everyone's out After Some Emotional Action	p. 207
Seen the Whale-Skate and Seen a Tomb	p. 210
Keep Going Down to the Tomb	p. 213
Not That Person Anymore, Mitch Being Ever Fainter	p. 217
Have I Been Here Before Is Something Unfamiliar	p. 223
There Was Also Valium in the Drink, Placed There by Two Other People	p. 226
I Don't Have Sympathy We're Equals	p. 230
Pouring Rain No Love from the Weather Except in My Dream	p. 233
Roaring Being a Given, My Roaring's a Given	p. 237
The Lines Fall Away Sometimes	p. 241
The Subterranean Senses Are Already There in New Air	p. 244
Remember the Station with No Name	p. 247
Further Figuration of My Regressive Backlash	p. 250
Don't Think That Thought It Will Poison This Moment	p. 254
The Longest Vampiric History Vs. the Soul	p. 258
Please Don't Anyone Save My Life Passim	p. 262
Lion	p. 266
A New Hairdo	p. 270
The Chaplet on the Donkey's Head: Both Keep Dissolving	p. 274
The One Thousand Arms of Poking and Pinching Love	p. 277
The Usual and the Most Tenuous of Goodbyes	p. 281
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