Disobedience (Poets, Penguin) [Paperback]

Alice Notley (Author)

Book Description

Series: Poets, Penguin | Publication Date: October 1, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After many years as an independently published poet, Notley did two stellar books with Penguin in the '90s: the 1996 long-poem, Descent of Alette, and 1998's Pulitzer runner-up, Mysteries of Small Houses, recounting, among other things, Notley's marriage to the late poet Ted Berrigan. This huge third Penguin volume from Notley outshines its predecessors, a tall order indeed. Like Alette, Disobedience is a long, serial, subterranean journey, taking on the search for spiritual life in a corporatized society and anger at persistent male dominance. Along the way, it crosses the worlds of the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary, the particular and the symbolic, vacating everyday life of its assigned non-meanings and granting them wild, personal resonances: "I don't want to create meaning;/ I want to kill it / You made meaning; I'm/ trying to make life stand still,/ long enough so I can exist./ I, truly, am speaking." Many fictional elements crop up, such as a character who is variably named Hardwood, Hardware, Hardon or Mitch-ham (after the actor Robert Mitchum), moving in and out of focus as the stream of thought determines. Hardwood, who at times appears to be a stand-in for Notley's late second husband, the poet Douglas Oliver, seems at others to be an interior persona, the "hard," even male, aspect of her own psyche that she uses to power her defenses against the world. The naturalness of Notley's idiom, the distinctive and uncompromising perspective of her thought, the almost Rimbaudian zeal to break free of convention, the sense that she is, after all, very vulnerable in her struggle all these contradictory elements fire Notley along a comet's path of spiritual discontent. This book traces its arc beautifully. (Oct.) Forecast: A near-miss last time around, Notley should garner at least one major prize nomination for this accessible, fast-moving epic. Magazine items will focus on Notley's two poetic marriages, but young protesters will find this book a contemplative inspiration, while Notley's peers will recognize the hard-won knowledge of a long spiritual search.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

By age 50, many established poets begin settling into a contemplative conservatism, both in style and substance. But Notley, a 1998 Pulitzer nominee, still has cultural axes to grind. Disobedience, a dense, poetic journal/dream diary written in Paris during the mid-1990s, ripples with outrage, sarcasm, and hard-boiled self-examination. Her explicit targets are often greed, racisim, and sexism ("Men want the cave in place and me in place..."), but her most insidious enemy is acquiescence to societal expectations, to the past, and to compromised conceptions of the self. The poet's anger affords an avenue by which her personal identity may be reclaimed from these oppressive forces: "So start, myself, start, where./ Before anyone invented me." Each poem is a lengthy, subdivided cascade of observations, reactions, and visions "Can you see that something inside/ keeps calling one home/ through dreams" that stops just short of free-association. Though rambling in appearance, this is a focused, acutely aware record of consciousness: ornery and off-putting, yes, but fascinating and inventive, too. It's the product of a mature poet who refuses to take either herself or her world for granted. Highly recommended. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Edition edition (October 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0141002298
• ISBN-13: 978-0141002293
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,328,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Totally Intriguing, April 25, 2004

By 

Megan A. Burns "meganaburns" (new orleans, louisiana United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Disobedience (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

This is the book that really threw me into Notley's poetry. I could not put it down and had to read everything by her after this. It was tricky to get into at first, but once you allow yourself to wade into this world it's hard to put it down. The book length poem is filled with recurring images, fictional characters, aspects of the self, and motifs that all create a collage. The overall effect engages you with its witticisms, lyricalism and coded language that you want to uncover like a detective gathering clues. I loved reading this with "Mysteries of Small Houses" and "Descent of Allette", because they are all experimenting with the poet's role in the world and with poetry's historical use to explore self.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cutting thought, January 6, 2004

By 

Valerie Aaron (Bala Cynwyd, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Disobedience (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

There's a future in this poetry, a future for poetry, if the new poets will read it, speak it, and try to understand it. The Descent of Alette equally marvelous.