Mysteries of Small Houses (Poets, Penguin) [Paperback]

Alice Notley (Author)

Book Description

Series: Poets, Penguin | Publication Date: June 1, 1998

Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant new collection of poems that charts her growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist. In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative renderings of the American landscape, circa 1950. Likewise, her coming of age as a poet in the turbulent sixties is evoked through the era's angry, creative energy. As she looks backward with the perspective that time and age allows, Notley ably captures the immediacy of youth's passion while offering her own dry-eyed interpretations of the events of a life lived close to the bone. Like the colorful collages she assembles from paper and other found materials, Notley erects structures of image and feeling to house the memories that swirl around her in the present. In their feverish, intelligent renderings of moments both precise and ephemeral, Notley's poems manage to mirror and transcend the times they evoke. Her profound tributes to the stages of her life and to the identities she has assumed—child, youth, lover, poet, wife, mother, friend, and widow—are remarkable for their insight and wisdom, and for the courage of their unblinking gaze.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her latest collection, Notley takes a step back from the body of work she has amassed over the last three decades (The Descent of Alette; Selected Poems; etc.) to compose a kind of quasi-autobiography in verse. Casual, forthright and perceptive, it is a culminating effort. Notley, as is her style, rarely shies away from unabashed, almost Whitmanesque generalizations, and here her bravery pays off. Again and again, she asks herself what poetry in America is and was, turning moments later to provide her own answers: "...'So little/ tenderness in American poetry' as/ Robert Duncan once told meAwho was he?/ Who was anyone? unstarred brightest equality." Contemporary poetry's recent past shadows Notley more closely and intimately than most: her late husband, the poet Ted Berrigan, commands a small but devoted following, and many of these poems try to make sense of his work and his early death ("Grief's not a social invention./ Grief is visible, substantial, I've literally seen it") while retaining a sense of her own trajectory ("The Subject/ of this poem is not how a woman's imagination/ may be dominated by a man's"). We follow her in a loose chronology from a West Coast childhood to New York City, first as a pre-feminism college student, then as a 1970s East Village poet in a scene full of humid friendships, wordsmithery and pill-taking, and through to Paris, where she lives today. Occasionally, Notley slips into the automatic writing-like phrases and personal myth-making that was the Achilles' Heel of the late New York School. But even these moments, with their rock 'n' roll bio shading, make for compelling reading.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

With some 20 books of poetry to her credit, Notley (The Descent of Alette, 1996, etc.) continues to combine Beat blather and New York School patter in her sprawling, self-mythologizing verse; her long, un-punctuated lines rehearses the key events in her life: growing up in Needles, California; coming east to college; meeting her husband, the poet Ted Berrigan, at Univ. of Iowa; and following him to his Lower East Side haunts, where they not only become speed freaks, but also have two children before Berrigan dies young of liver disease. The mostly realist but occasionally off-the-wall narratives, with their wild surreal flourishes, follow the poet chronologically as she uses words to cure the tameness she bemoans among the squares. Proving her bohemianism, she uses lots of dirty words, and writes of sex, but her radical feminist self makes sure theres nothing sexy in all the vulgarity. Notleys tough postures include herself as true poet who hates Iowa City (too boring and full of assholes), where everyones an academic poetry/groupie, and the women offer themselves to the visiting stars. Notley interrupts her manic musings to rant against the middle class, the stupid fucking workers who vote Republican, and all those feminists who identify her solely with her late husband. In poem after poemand they all read like one congealed massNotley claims to disdain the opinions of others, yet she continually worries about social graces, the social ego, socialization, and the hustle for status(to which she does not seem immune). Perhaps living is a poem, as Notley confidently avers, but her life on the page isnt necessarily poetry youd care to read. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Edition edition (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140588965
• ISBN-13: 978-0140588965
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #665,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Accomplished and moving, April 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Mysteries of Small Houses (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

An accomplished and moving book, Mysteries of Small Houses shows Alice Notley writing at the top of her form. Her autobiographical poems are rich and detailed, with an immediacy of attention that derives from her roots in the second-generation New York school, and which is used here to show the reader what it was like to have lived, at no small cost, a life dedicated to poetry. There's a highly individual sensibility at work here, and an admirable one.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the great epics poems of our time, January 31, 2006

By 

Celia M. White "Poet Librarian Goddess" (Buffalo, New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mysteries of Small Houses (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

This is one of the books I most admire in the world. Alice Notley is both brilliant experimental. Reading at least a few pages of this work aloud, allowing the measures the quotation marks frame to be illuminated and articulated, is immensely rewarding. I have re-read it several times over years and it is better each time.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful experiment in Tracking Self, 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: Mysteries of Small Houses (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

Alice Notley continues to explore the state of the "I' in the poem. This book concentrates on the intersection of memory and biography, what the memory brings to light and what the poetic self creates from that experience. In a linear sense, the series of poems explores Notley's early childhood, school at Iowa, marriage to poet Ted Berrigan and raising two small sons while continuing to write and experiment in New York City. It's interesting for the poet's memories alone, but it's also Notley's dialogue with how the "I" historically has been used in the poem. It's exciting to read Notley's work and to see her continually push the boundaries of her poetics.