Notley - Culture of One

Table of Contents

165 Meeting House Lane 1971
Phoebe Light 1973
Incidentals in the Day World 1973
For Frank OHaras Birthday 1976
Alice Ordered Me to Be Made 1976
A Diamond Necklace 1977
Songs for the Unborn Second Baby 1979
Dr. Williams Heiresses 1980
When I Was Alive 1980
How Spring Comes 1981
Waltzing Matilda 1981, REISSUED 2003
Tell Me Again 1982
Sorrento 1984
Margaret & Dusty 1985
Parts of a Wedding 1986
At Night the States 1988
From a Work in Progress 1988
Homers Art 1990
The Scarlet Cabinet (with Douglas Oliver) 1992
To Say You 1993
Selected Poems of Alice Notley 1993
Close to me & Closer... (The Language of Heaven) and Dsamre 1995
The Descent of Alette 1996
etruscan reader vii (with Wendy Mulford and Brian Coffey) 1997
Mysteries of Small Houses 1998
Byzantine Parables 1998
Disobedience 2001
Iphigenia 2002
From the Beginning 2004
Coming After: Essays on Poetry 2005
City Of 2005
Alma, or The Dead Women 2006
Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 19702005 2006
In the Pines 2007
Above the Leaders 2008
Reason and Other Women 2010

Some of these poems have been previously published in The PulchritudinousReview, Fence, Margie, Daedalus, Upstairs at Duroc, and Cock-Now Zine.

Once again at the beginning I am down on Front Street,
by the old drugstore, the pharmacy where all healing starts.
Its possible one begins in healing in mercy in self-kindness. Dont
you know this? I dont know anything. Theres a sudden change
in the weatherthree signals click click click. Because
it was too hot and stark, but now we can have a cloud, the most
necessary thing: some say its for rain but I think not, its
a cloud, its itself, grey and luminous and sun-shielding. Do
you love it? I fear it, but I gradually wonder if I should. A vast and
silken entity, and one sees that it possesses tentacles, extensions,
silky grey arms hanging down. With a joyous look on his face a dark
man touches one of these armsfor the cloud is that close, its in the street;
but Im afraid and enter the pharmacy to watch the cloud from behind
the glass wall: should I go back outside and touch it? Eventually...

I am mercy; I have no understanding of who I am;
though, with my thousand arms, I have written of my own
nature since writing began. I inhabit you and you write about me again.
There is always the sound or color or feeling in which I can arrive.
Lying in bed suffering from loneliness or anger the woman
with eyes closed sees me bending over her, a many-armed figure
wearing a rayed disk hat. Not a clear image, but made of the blue and red
brocade beneath the eyelids. Yes you were right, you contain all
the qualities and possibilities, all the godsIm here inside when
you need me; I can come to you when youve forgotten my
name; a voice of yours, hidden to you, calls for mercy and mercy always comes.

The most outstanding characteristic of the mercy moment, the time when she comes, is how instantly the suffering stops. You have to stop thinking. You dont have time for guilt, or you will neither sleep nor begin again. This was how I started this time; then I asked myself what I would like to read, or rather what items I wanted in my culture, to contain created, newly and justly, my needs. The world isnt a text to be deciphered, it is a new creation though ancientbut what is antiquity to me? Every moment must destroy suffering anew; a cloud enters you, to begin in.