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The Books
Close to me & Closer… (The Language of Heaven) was written in 1991 by Alice Notley. The epic poem is a conversation between a dead father, speaking from heaven, and his daughter who is still alive and on earth. The father struggles to describe what it is like to be in heaven, unable to find words or metaphors that fit.
Well, anyway, I thought I'd try to tell you - since you're a poet - about here. A little bit about how we think here. It's not with...we don't think in words - or pictures - necessarily. Not the way you're, translating me on your page.
The daughter wonders about why humans live the way we do and strives to live as though she is in heaven on earth. She is tired of the arbitrary and artificial life she leads on earth.
But we are aliens
fretting to belong here
Inventing words & frets
Inventing folksongs In-
venting rich & poor And
the song of that
They discuss how humans have invented our culture and made ourselves alien to the rest of the world, and that poetry is the only thing that truly makes humans different. As the title suggests, it is the language of heaven. The father decides to help his daughter change and live like him. The remainder of the book chronicles her experience breaking out of the “bag” that constricts her into living as she has been. By the end of the book, the voices of the father and daughter have begun to blur as they become closer and closer to each other.
Désamère was written one year later, just after Notley moved to Paris. Notley writes in the preface: "It's a book cast against a background of environmental disaster and as such almost hopelessness. But there's no hopelessness in the writing itself, the words of it: at least to me they seem full of life and health." The book begins when the main character, Amère, is introduced to her guide, the dead poet Robert Desnos. Desnos teaches Amère about the environmental crisis, referencing the Cold War, Vietnam, Reagan, Nixon, cars and technology, and the rise of consumerism in the 1960s.
What's a salary, without a future?
Our heroisms, agonies, gains in social justice,
Nothing without a planet
Reagan spends it
Squanders it sitting at a desk
Like everyone else
Humans have become completely separate from animals and the natural world. Amère is desperate to escape this toxic, human culture and become free. So, she canonizes herself St. Désamère and travels into the desert in search of our “communality” with all things – animals, rocks, plants. There, St. Désamère is tempted by a psychologist who takes away her identity and memory in order to prove to her the value of humanness.
Voice says, 'State you're seeking is really wordless. You, a poet. But I won't talk to you anymore. If that's what you want. We'll see how you like it without my talk. Without names. Without a memory. Show you life without human is empty...'
However, St. Désamère finds value in her new life, in her connection with the animals and nature that surround her. It is there she is finally able to look out from herself and see everything.
Ecopoetics
Alice Notley in Paris, 1996
Ecopoetics can be defined as a genre of poetry that confronts environmental disasters as well as human relationships with animals and the environment around us. That being said, ecopoems are supposed to be ecocentric rather than anthropocentric. These ecopoems deal with the Great Acceleration, a period of ecological history beginning in 1945 discussed in Margaret Ronda’s book Remainders. In Remainders, Ronda gives examples of ecopoems that offer “insight into the feelings, forms, and situations arising in response to rapid environmental transformation without presenting easy solutions.” This description applies to Désamère in that her solution to becoming free was to enter a mythological desert, something that is not necessarily accessible to everyone. However, that is also how Désamère strays from traditional ecopoetics. Notley mixes real environmental issues, like overreliance on cars or consumerism, with mythological elements like speaking to the dead or traveling to alternate realms. The mythological and metaphysical elements do not, however, detract from the environmentalist meaning of the work. Rather, they give the work more meaning and more possibility to come to huge understandings about life and humanity that aren’t constrained by just what we can see here on earth.
Alice Notley and Doug Oliver, 1990
