Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, Alice Notley

Songs and Stories of the Ghouls: Yet another great book of poetry from Alice Notley: this one, Epic Poetry. I can feel the crush of anonymous destroyed ruptured and ripped fleeting and tremendous disappearing and asserted orthodoxies that at one moment in one time seem so absolute so forever eternal and are not are pulverized. And always we are recreating out of mouth building weaving is culture of life of what it takes effervescent survival always fragments of stories telling spewing as some unknown unknowable law of universe we still make up and remove ourselves from or functionalize lever with to get what appears to be ahead to make as sure as possible which ain’t very sure we survive and pass on this moment standing in nowhere and in nothing but that for what we make up and flows out of this mouth our mouth this lion’s roar of blood crushed bone heart.

“See to this crime they said: the object I am drew the child even further into itself, for justice would never help her. As everything seems to be a made thing, when I make this for you, out of the same mouth anything comes from. I’m holding you as close as I can. I cover you.”[1]


“…Towards changes hands of configuration each small mask is a word to cover your lack that is where language stands on no foundation but the wars it has always upheld for if your ways were destroyed and your poems broken and ploughed into the slated earth what would you be? The ghoulishness of this project is affirmed by any style and there is no ‘way forward’ but your empire’s way.”[2]



[1] Alice Notley, Song of the Ghouls, p.12.
[2] Ibid. p. 13.

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