"At Night the States"

Not at all new — it's on Exact Change Yearbook, which Peter Gizzi edited a dozen years ago — but I've returned, by way of PennSound, to Alice Notley's 1987 reading of "At Night the States" (mp3).

And I'd never before heard the recording of her introduction to the poem, excised from the Exact Change version, in which she explains that the poem was her first attempt at anaphoric repetition, and that it is an elegy for Ted Berrigan. In this prefatory commentary Notley describes finding, in a writing process that proceeds from what becomes a stock phrase, a sense of possibility.

This is borne out by the poem: as it rushes past, almost too quickly, the phrase's meaning shifts, expands the potential of its signification, as Notley draws on the varying senses that attach themselves to the words that constitute it, and finds curious correspondences between states of mind and of the "Montana. Illinois. Escondido" that close, as "the states where what words are true are words, not myself."







[NOTE: My brief quotation of part of Notley's poem is based on the recording, and not on the print version. Inaudible, or only partially audible, elements of formatting (punctuation, line breaks, the Notley quotation marks) are not present for this reason.]