“Language delivers me to me”: A Review of Alice Notley’s ‘For the Ride’
It just so happened that the day of Alice Notley’s reading and informal launch for her newest book, For the Ride — March 14, to be exact — was followed up a few days later by a plea from the city for people to work from home and avoid going out unless absolutely necessary to avoid spreading COVID-19. It was an intimate setting — of the fifty people who registered for the event, it is safe to say that no more than ten people ended up attending. The small bunch of us already spread out to maintain some distance as we sat in the dimly lit room, captivated by Notley’s voice and laughing at her honest and at times self-deprecating humour. Was it a serendipitous coincidence or a kind of ominous foreshadowing that For the Ride served as a kind of bookend that marked the shift from a Pre- to a Post-Pandemic world? The answer depends on one’s mindset (and possibly superstition level), although it is difficult to not see Notley’s reimagining of language, identity, and the very concept of what constitutes an apocalypse as some sort of sign, a prophetic glimpse into a potential future, or at least a suggestion about the evolution of poetry, language, and gender.
For the Ride, a poetic odyssey in eighteen parts, tells the story of One, who is the protagonist and “hero proper” of the collection, but whose characterization is ambiguous and deliberately open-ended. The only insight into who One is occurs towards the end of For the Ride, when Notley describes One as “Once is a she, now’s just One.” Along with the multifaceted One, Notley creates an equally captivating (and expansive) band of characters who accompany One on their journey in a spaceship-like ark to another dimension, with the goal of saving words and (re)inventing language as we know it, all within the guise of a familiar quasi-space travel narrative, as they disembark in faraway cities and encounter other forms of life, even engaging in a battle, at one point.
Notley creates her own internal structure within For the Ride, from sections that are taken from an Anthology of poetry that One and their companions — or the Survivors, as Notley refers to them in the book’s preface — have with them to numerous concrete poems that echo the poetic tradition of Apollinaire. For those readers who like to ground themselves narrative, Notley provides a series of checkpoints in the form of chapter titles that help situate what is happening in that particular section — as well as to help the reader orient themselves within Notley’s extensive experimentation with words and the poetic form — in a more straightforward manner, as it is quite easy to “get lost” in For the Ride’s fluid transitioning across time, voices, and discourses. For readers already familiar with Notley’s work, For the Ride will be less of a surprise and more of a pleasant return to the familiar, following the natural ebb and flow of the book’s philosophical unravelling which, it is worth noting, Notley herself remains unsure of, telling the reader: “ I mean I don’t know exactly what happened; I might even have to tell this story again sometime.”
While it is possible to call One a person, it feels more appropriate to think of them as an incorporeal, even ethereal, entity who has “been robbed of personhood; sorry, that’s what it’s like when one dies,” a representation of a kind of collective consciousness that manifests itself through language. Finding oneself inside the glyph, a space that reads like a cavernous Matrix of language that has been crossed with painterly elements from Impressionism, One’s wrestling with being, with words and identity, becomes a running thread through For the Ride. One’s physical travels always, ultimately, return to the self, to questioning where we, through One, can situate ourselves within existing markers of identity and how these markers, the way we talk and think about ourselves, can and should be expanded, thus One’s goal to “build a new language — / sort of new — bricolage: why waste a thing? Always start with something./ Find out way to mix things for perfection’s fear and its course.”
The remaining cast of For the Ride is an existentially ambiguous group of figures on par with One themselves. In fact, the number of characters in the book is expansive enough that, at times, it proves difficult to keep track of them all, with some of them being more memorable than others due to a greater sense of character or some more distinct personality traits that helps flesh them out a bit more. For instance, Notley positions Qui as a shaman-like figure, while Wideset came across as perhaps the oldest and wisest member of the group. My personal favourite was France, a ghost-like spectre who, like Hamlet’s father, would periodically reappear to haunt the pages of the book. France is at once a parental figure for their kid but also a representation of nationhood that, for Notley, lingers in the background as a part of the past that continues to linger, as One muses in chapter II, declaring, in a moment of self-reflection: “One is the dead one, immigrant. One is the dead one named France./ One’s not even French, One’s like dead! Foreign France, that’s the dead./ One forgot to say One is once an immigrant, pastly, or is One?”
For the Ride is not an easy book and it would be a bold-faced lie to write this review while pretending that I was able to follow all of Notley’s wordplay and poetic musings in tandem. Similarly, Notley provides numerous entry points for her readers, openings through which they can enter into the text to either enjoy the book’s formal and narrative elements, or to engage with the material critically and take For the Ride’s premise as an invitation for discussion and reexamination. In fact, “understanding” is an important term in the context of the collection because saying “I understand” implies a kind of linearity, a transition from A to B that is solidified through a reduction of complex and expansive concepts, like the ever-changing nature of poetics, thereby allowing these concepts to be reproduced through repetition in the form of teaching. Instead, For the Ride is preoccupied with locating and identifying alternative systems of communication and ways of knowing, as well as rethinking how we communicate. Notley undoubtedly has a sense of humour in approaching this daunting task, which is largely concentrated in chapter XII: The New Brain, as she teases the reader: “Look, poem!/ Poured from the foot-brain!”
Rather than asking what a poem means, what a poet is trying to say or to elicit in the reader, the more appropriate questions to ask in For the Ride is what it means to be a poet, a figure who “is/ the original/ birds cry to.” “Can the ones call each other/ poet as/ pronoun?”, asks a voice — Notley? One? one of the other members of the crew? a voice from the past? it is often unclear who is speaking, although the answer is not always important — in chapter VII: Becoming Poems. Not long after, in XIII: Wall of Words, we are told, once again by an omniscient voice, that “One’s tired of sentences. One says, At least of their unwinding length:/ too timelike. Prefer planes. Sense of overlapping realities…” Much like early 20th century art movements — Bauhaus, Constructivism, Surrealism — sought not only to create a new style in visual art but also to conceptualize a new way of being through that art, For the Ride is similarly driven by this desire to rethink the boundaries of the possible within how we think and express ourselves. Rather than thinking of language as a code that gives others easy access into our thoughts, Notley’s poetry pushes for a more radical kind of unplugging and reprogramming, a salvaging and recycling of what we currently have with the goal of creating a system so different that inter-dimensional travel becomes a fitting metaphor for conveying the radicalness of the end product.
Another vital and prominent focus in For the Ride is the role of gender within language, particularly the gendering of language, something that Notley fights against, beginning with One’s identity, which is a source of constant contemplation throughout the book, for One as well as for Notley, who seems to muse through One:
One’s supposed to be inventing new language, definitely
tearing down the old of gender, tensal submission, whatall,
pomposities to enslave one…Tear it down as ones save ones —
Ark of salvation and destruction of the old at the same time.
Wake up! Tear it down! and save one. One is the species, words are.
Despite the admirable goal — of One, of Notley — the idealist utopian vision of language that For the Ride searches for is never quite found because it is not manifested by Notley herself in writing the book. Despite the dream of a genderless language, the presence of the binary is unshakeable in Notley’s imagery, such as the figures With Breasts and Without, “With Breasts […] hysterical, Without[ ] dumbstruck. Scared.” Or the more apparent slippage in chapter IV that suggests a moment of crisis or a dilemma in the early stages of One’s journey — “They use me, I mean One. Inventing female as succor. Addicts” — although this slippage in identity, in terms of gender and the self, is mirrored again in chapter VIII, in One’s words: “Try. Who is one, as you? Will one say I? I was beeyoutiful girl.” Such episodes are few and they are subtle, but they lay in plain sight, embedded within the sturdy walls of poesis that Notley has erected. Much as with many aspects of For the Ride, it is left open to discussion whether Notley is trying to distinguish between gendering words and words that we associate with gender.
Notley’s more serious, and even subtler, offence is in a couple of rare episodes of derogatory and outdated terms, as in the opening stanza of chapter XII: The New Brain:
One’s caught en retard but now sans slow or fast one will last
spread across the wordful univers de la mort.
Once one lived — ah one lives pastly! — in an hôtel, Asiatic
the hostelleries across this voie lactée welcome one, cups of stay
or go — linguistic vortex or no — this retard can say anything.
Notley’s playful intermixing of French and English, something that occurs frequently in For the Ride, here toes the line between clever and potentially offensive. At the same time, this stanza highlights the very fluidity of language that is one of the central themes of the book, as one’s knowledge (or lack) of French will inevitably colour how one perceives the last line of that stanza. Whatever one’s personal stance on this, Notley certainly succeeds in highlighting language’s shapeshifting nature as words slip in and out of meanings, in and out of fashion, usage, time.
In her book Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Australian philosopher and feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz asks: “Is language a human prosthesis?” Notley’s newest collection offers a potential answer to this question, simple in wording but by no means in its implication: “Language delivers me to me…” From the more traditionally poetic in chapters I: The Glyph of Chaos with Willows and XV: I Have Been Let Out of Prison, to the slip into a kind of quasi-stream-of-conscience re-identification and re-alignment of the self in chapters XVI: Stark Star and XVII: The Memory of Nerves, For the Ride is a journey in narrative and in philosophical poetics that invites its readers to let go of their preconceptions — of poetry, of selfhood — and allow Notley to gently carry them away on what will surely become one of the defining literary odysseys of our dystopian age.
