It was an inspired reading line-up, to say the very least. On Friday, March 21, the Walt Whitman Arts Center in Camden, NJ, presented Alice Notley reading with Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, her sons. I was fortunate to be one of just under 50 people who came to this transformed public library just off the Rutgers-Camden campus and got to hear an exceptionally diverse and enjoyable reading.

 

Anselm, the older of the sons, read first. It was the first time I’d ever heard him, but his reading fit almost seamlessly with what I find on the page: an essentially quiet poetry filled with exacting attention to detail, captured with just as much attention to phrase structure – indeed a poetry of the phrase. It looks & maybe even sounds a little New York School, gen whatever, but without the flash & over-the-top effects. The trade-off is an ability to focus in wherever he wants with an acuity that is marvelous. You have a sense – or I do at least – that this is an artist already completely in control of his craft, who is going to have a profound impact on literary culture over the next 20 years.

 

Edmund, by comparison, writes work that is, in many ways, louder, its humor goofier & more edgy. As he read from a novella in process, I recall thinking that I hope he never gets mad at me, because his sense of satire can be positively slashing. And it would be delivered with a big cheerful smile.

 

It seems impossible to imagine that Alice Notley can write anything better than the works she has produced over the past 15 or so years, as she has been as the top of her game for a very long time, producing poetry that makes everybody completely have to set aside preconceptions about form & genre & just start over with brand new eyes – she does that “make it new” thing as well as any poet of my generation. But her current project, which might be called Alma, is yet another great leap forward. Part fiction, all poetry – even the prose parts – and deeply involved with indigenous cultures, including the culture of junk, and with the structure of a curse, Alma is not really like any text I’ve ever heard before. Notley’s reading was electric, both ecstatic & terrifying at once, completely draining just to listen to. I’m trying to think of somebody who might be this intense as a reader, but frankly I can’t. Alice Notley has found a territory that is hers all alone.

 

Families that write are not that common – Howe, Saroyan, Ginsberg & his father, Creeley & his grandson Trane Devore. Often if relatives are active intellectually or in the arts, it’s at some angle – Louis Zukofsky & his son the violinist, Marjorie Perloff’s daughter Cory directing the American Conservatory Theater or Lydia Davis’ half-brother, Alexander Cockburn, holding down the crackpot Stalinist franchise at The Nation. In every instance, a part of what enables especially the younger artist with a well-known parent (& the Berrigans in their own way must contend with more than most: Notley, their father Ted & their late step-father Douglas Oliver) is an ability, very early on, to articulate distinctly an aesthetic take – an earlier generation would probably have called this “voice,” but in fact it’s much larger – that is not held in common. Anselm & Edmund Berrigan pass that hurdle easily, but it was only hearing the two of them, one after the other, that I really began to appreciate just how entirely different each is from his sibling.

 

Note to reading & event coordinators: the Notley-Berrigan Family Values tour would made for a great series of readings, as much a “natural” as when, say, Bobbie Louise Hawkins did the folk circuit with Rosalie Sorrels and U. Utah Phillips. Bring it to your town, now!

 

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Michael Magee wants people to know that he has an article in Contemporary Literature 42:4 (Winter 2001), entitled “Tribes of New York: Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of the Five Spot,” that addresses many of the issues raised in my blog last Tuesday.