Quotes from Alice Notley

We name us and then we are lost, tamed I choose words, more words, to cure the tameness, not the wildness

I'll never know how to live, will you?

Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody? I serve the poem, no one.

I can't translate myself into language any more.

oh each poet's a beautiful human girl who must die.

Abolish these categories of pain (or is it love) Let it all be one pain Pain swallows itself, dies like a star.

Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language people just assumed that we were dumb

And maybe you can't know me now. Maybe I'm just blood. Whatever that's for.

Who defined me? My culture, a culture of mercy, a living codex. I am a unique culture of one, from everywhere. I am her map and her self. I am everyone in the story; I am the story.

You're dancing on me said the cosmic dragon, the galactic surface of all we can see. So fucking what? she said.

I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own.

our production of the world, our interpretation of it, what we've been told to experience and what we've been told we have to do, both worry and distress me. I don't want to live in someone else's dream.

Gee whiz, it's all fucking heart- breaking

I didn't care much what happened to me, so chance didn't matter.

you see all night in your dreams. And the blue of my voice can't help but see you.

I want this noise within me to die down.

What did you do in your songs? I don't know, I'll never know, you say. Someone else will write them about me, won't they? I looked into a void of love. And I fell down. There was nothing else there. No where, where I was no one. But I have to sing this song. I'm still here.

I'm not too gone to be healed, am I? I'm not too gone am I?

There isn't any way to be. I will meet you where you've gone. The cards are blank; the cards are empty there. If I can just have one last cut. Do you have a plan for the new? The cards be blank. The symbols be over. I will tell my fortune with the blank cards of blank. What do you see?

And if you're referring to your anguish, it's just a thing. The shape of a trailor, a wheel, or a knife. Leave the details of your life and find another one.

Emotion isn't really what I felt . . . Living, one is so detached.

I am the only language I can understand.

If you remember better times you know they were lies, because they led to this

I confess I meant to grow wings and lose my mind. I confess that I've forgotten what for.