On Reading Alice Notley’s Homer’s Art

by John Roche

Reading Alice Notley’s Homer’s Art (Curriculum of the Soul #9), gift of Alan Casline, on examination table in Doc Booth’s office—now an hour later in the hot sun of parking lot to Lori’s Natural Foods, using reverse side of North Shore Grill menu ‘cause I can’t find notebook. Arms look like napalm burns from infected poison ivy (“most impressive case this year,” quips Doctor Laura Jo). “Both of Homer’s public stories—as everybody knows—are generated by a war & are male centered-stories for men about a male world.” Female doctors and Supreme Court Justices and Secretaries of State—so much has changed since Alice wrote of Vietnam and Troy raped by the stupidity and lies of war promoters and poets, but now women, too, calculate the cost-benefit of so many body bags, as Madeleine Albright factored the children dead from Iraq sanctions and Condi Rice authorized the waterboarding and Hillary Clinton pushes the new Afghan strategy. But women, too, die for freedom, as Neda in Tehran the other day, and so many like her females long silenced like Cassandra, enslaved behind not-so-veiled threats of rape and disownment, caned in Sudan for wearing pants in public, gunned down in Kandahar for teaching school, Natalya Estemirova slain in Chechnya-all now choosing to enter the epic with their words, their deeds heroic. And women like Alice wield the pen, no longer in the shadow of Maximus males. Although Emily was a war poet, as Randy Prus reminds me, women warrior bards of today are freed from the home to become the new Homers-processing words rather than foods-absorbing the power of the Word in order to effect change; affect history-the power that kills-the power that once invented a Helen to fight for and now invents a Neda-the power that paves the planet so that there can be faux-natural food stores with dancing fruits on TV commercials and lakeside restaurants with fabulous views and gluttonous portions-the power that seduces with novel roles-learning to fuck like a man-be notorious like Calamity Jane or Mata Hari-look the Sun right in the eye and spit-Poi-son Eye-Eye-a-vie- Out-Bukowski Bukowski (like Susan Deer Cloud does)—-Out-Bakunined Bakunin. “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” says bumper sticker in suburban Pittsford. But what of the female suicide bombers? Aren’t they too entering the realm of heroic history, even behind a burkha loaded with gelignite? Fanon says the Algerian women dropped the veil to shoot Kalashnikovs. No going back to the “womb-like brothel” Alice describes. Entering history-the realm of rights-the realm of contest-the heartless realm-the nightmare from which we don’t awake, except in death and lyric poetry. Go ask Alice about history’s looking glass, feeding the heroic dead with pools of crimson ink. “History’s for those” “Who ask not” “to be forgiven,” wrote Alice, each phrase in quotation marks. Then she voices the anonymous victims: “We ask to be forgiven””& loved” “No we ask” “to be absolved” “And to be elemental” “ask leaves and wind” say the dead of Saigon and Tikrit and Troy.