by Alice Notley
Penguin Books 2007
Reviewed by Ben Mirov
Whole Night Through
Alice Notley’s In the Pines takes its title from a Leadbelly song of same name. The lyrics of the blues classic go like this:
My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My girl, my girl, where will you go
I’m going where the cold wind blows
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
My husband, was a hard working man
‘Til a mile and a half from here
His head was found in a driving wheel
But his body never was found
My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
(repeat)
The song is interesting because of the similarities in structure and tone it shares with Notley’s book (if you haven’t heard the tune before, it’s worth checking out on YouTube. Nirvana’s tremendous cover should also be mentioned). Composed of repeating questions and their answers, the structure relies on an interchange between two personas. The opening line, “My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me,” tells us the first persona claims some type of ownership and authority over the second, the “girl.” In the ensuing lines we learn that the girl has lost her husband and that her sadness and dispossession have driven her into exile.
The comparison between the girl and Notley is obvious. Notley survived the untimely death of her husband Ted Berrigan in 1983 and went on to expatriate to Paris in the early nineties. Although Berrigan’s death and Notley’s expatriation may only be indirectly related, unlike the girl in the Leadbellly’s song, the similarities lend insight into the overall tone of In the Pines. This is a book full of haunting lamentation. It is also a reply to the discourses of power that seek to control and paraphrase those emotions.
The structure of the Leadbelly song is also an impetus into the complexities of In the Pines. Two personas compose the dialog that gives the song its structure. The back and forth between these personas moves the song forward. This occurs in Notley’s book as well, where poems contain multiple voices. This section from the opening long poem, also titled “In the Pines,” functions in much the same way as the Leadbelly song:
If you detest everything about your society, you say,
why are you writing?
It is time to change writing completely.
You are not doing that.
Wait and see.
The back and forth between two personas propels this poem. Just as in the Leadbelly song, one persona questions while the other replies. The main difference is that Notley is explicit about her aim in using the technique. Unlike Leadbelly, she doesn’t intend to tell a story. Instead, she is concerned with “changing writing completely.”
Just as Leadbelly’s song gives form to the story of a young woman who has fallen on hard times, so does In the Pines seek to embody the voices of those who cannot speak for themselves. Like Whitman in “Song of Myself,” Notley contains “multitudes.” The difference is that her multitudes are specifically the disposed, forgotten, forsaken and often the dead, as in this section from “The Black Trailor (a noir fiction)”:
You say that you’re dead and it’s dead: can’t be pushed
back through a hole in timelessness?
You say that I can’t really get at you.
You’re not where you expected to be dead, I say.
Is this a system? you say.
In a sense, Notley is more medium than poet. The rendering of multiple personas in In the Pines reminds me of the San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer’s analogy of “poet as radio.” Notley is not writing so much as she is ciphering information from various sources outside herself and placing it into a “system.” In a way she is more like a “machine” than a “writer.” In a reading at the Kelly Writers House on November 6, 2006 (available at PENN sound), Notley professed to being “high on interferon,” a drug used to treat hepatitis C, while composing In the Pines. At the same reading, Notley also told the audience she composed Mysteries of Small Houses, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in a “process of self-hypnosis.” Whether or not the drug affected her writing, or whether she actually writes in a trance, it is clear that being in an altered state is a key component of Notley’s writing process and one of the most arresting aspects of her as a contemporary writer.
Beginning with her formative years as a poet on the lower-east side of New York and continuing with her expatriation to Paris, Notley has always identified herself as an outsider. It’s a title she has earned throughout her career and why she is perhaps one of the only poets writing today who could have written a visionary book like In the Pines. Although it is laced with vitriol, desperation, tribulation, sadness and regret, In the Pines, is hopeful. As its dedication “For my sons and their friends” suggests, In the Pines is for younger generations of readers and writers. It is instructive in the sense that it attempts to show new writers how a poet can change poetry for the better of everyone, poets and non-poets alike.
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