Skyler Edwards: I’m really interested in the way environmentalism plays out in the book. Was there something about moving to Paris that brought the environmental crisis into view for you?

 

Alice Notley: I moved to Paris in the fall of 1992. The first books about global warming had just started to appear in the US and England. Something about being wrenched from my usual environment made me sensitive to what was and is going on, and I began to read whatever material I could find -- the books I'm remembering were by McKibben and Lovelace, but there were others, including a book about the use of zoos to protect threatened animal species. I was very lonely here and I began to spend a lot of time at a zoo at le Jardin des Plantes that is the oldest zoo in Europe and that had begun to specialize in saving animals. I also noticed that Paris, like many European cities, has a well-preserved and beautiful old city or inner city, with rings of ugly new buildings surrounding it and uncontrollable traffic. Paris is deadly with cars and their fumes and metal bodies.

 

SE: Amère had Desnos to guide her to an understanding of the world and nature in crisis, as well as humans’ roles in how the environment falls apart in the book. There are all these references to corporations, war, Nixon, Reagan, cars. From what I know, your poems were just starting to deal with mythological scopes, like with Descent of Alette, during this time. What brought all these references together for you?

 

AN: I somehow got the idea of using French references and recent US history together in order to pull together my understanding of what was going on. I'd read a lot of books about the Vietnam War after my brother died, and I had already read the poems of Robert Desnos, though not in French. I decided to use, for the first section of Désamère, the lais of Marie de France as a formal model. She was a late 12th century French poet who wrote in a nice shortish line these totally narrative poems, fables and tales. Somehow I got all the personages in my poem to speak and relate to each other, and everything started to work. I was able to insert all sorts of cultural materials in the poem -- history, politics and so on -- as well as personal history and feelings.

 

SE: I read in an interview that you said most people who read Désamère didn’t realize that it’s about the theme of environmental crisis. I thought that was really weird! Why do you think people miss or can’t see that part of the book?

 

AN: I think it was because the book came out before people really believed in the reality of global warming. I even mentioned in the preface that the setting of Désamère was a global-warming-caused desert, but no one ever said anything about it back to me. The people who liked the poem were largely men, and they were interested in its ties to Surrealism and the Surrealist poets. I gave no thought to Surrealism as a movement when I was writing it! I used Desnos because he famously had the talent for sleeping and dreaming on call, when he was a young poet and member of the Surrealist circle.

 

SE: What do you see as the future of the environmental movement and if it is possible, in some way, to mitigate the environmental crisis? Is there such a thing as a solution?

 

AN: The solution is for each person individually to give up cars, to use less electricity, to moderate appetites. But the biggie would be to give up cars. When I was reading those books in the 90s, the statistics showed that the biggest villain quite simply was the automobile. It is a planetary disaster. People shouldn't wait for governments to tell them to stop using them -- they won't, because people in governmental positions all use them too. Trump is a creep for backing out of the Paris accords, but those accords weren't going to do much except cause a lot of back-patting on the part of politicians.

 

SE: As someone really invested in environmentalism and who is studying public policy related to the environment, how can we actually exist in the ways that Désamère makes happen, in this communality with animals, rocks, plants? How can I be Désamère, in my world, in this world?

 

AN: If you start to like animals, rocks, and plants, you will start to respect them more. The thing to remember is that everything has a soul, and all souls are the same size. I believe this. I'm not interested in what science has to say about souls -- but in my experience scientists really like animals, plants, and rocks. I'm also horrified by the fact that so many people don't know how to do anything anymore -- cook, sew, be with animals, etc. I'm not that good at these things, but I grew up in nature and my mother sewed my clothes, my father ran an auto supply in fact but could hunt rabbits and skin them, fish and clean the fish. He knew who they were and he knew what it meant to kill one. We are omnivorous, and we can't seem to help that, but we could do that with more interest and dignity. One more important thing: we shouldn't want what we're told we want, the material goods and electronic appliances, the cars. Everyone says we want and need them -- we don't.