Not really. Actually, somewhere in the late middle when I started wanting to begin it.
I was born...no, no. That won't do. I was reading one of the many, many self-concerned explanations of Alice Notley...one of her more recent ones about how she is intolerant of religion and loitering in the land of the mourning wives of famous poets club...and as is the usual...as it is for anyone given to any amount of thinking about oneself and the world...I thought about who I have known the best in my years on the planet. It isn't me of course. It is the man I married. Just like Alice Notley, I married a person who had a great deal to do with who I've become.
He is a most ordinary man if you ask him. Simple minded and we call him the Savant. He has hardly read any poetry and hardly reads mine at all. He wouldn't know how to. Says alot about people and he represents alot of them. Of our most tender moments were those when he used to read Adonis to me and translate it into English from the Arab News in Riyadh.
Everyone loves him but about that, I am a bit suspicious. He is incredibly facile at control and domination. It is as if he is oblivious to the presence of others...he just ignores what doesn't suit him and in that way, he manages to dominate most situations. He admits to using strategies in that and therefore, my suspicion about the meaning of this love everyone has for him is confirmed.
He leaves them no choice but to love him. The craziest thing about that is...it works. I've loved him for a very long time now and as well, admitted long ago that to live without his presence in my life would be like a death. Perhaps Alice isn't full of hot air afterall.
I had a life before him. I had quite a life before him I should say. I cannot go into detail about it other than to say that if anyone I am acquainted with now were to go into certain circles in this old artsy fartsy town...they could ask about me and would hear about the myth of my life before him. They wouldn't hear about the actual childhood parts, those precious parts in the photos taken with the old Brownie Box camera. A small girl (a friend of mine) posed for me and was sniffing lilacs or some other flowery delicacy. I must say all at once that I'm relatively sure no one had a childhood as grand as mine was. It was loaded with material. Some of that material is found in my work..mostly in the Odes.
He insists that he met me under a tree. I'm not sure of that. We slept together about a week or two after we met. I admitted I loved him on that day. He was startled and returned the favor but clearly, neither of us knew what we were saying let alone, what we were doing. We were married exactly six weeks after our first encounter. I could not question the intuition I had that he was my husband. I simply agreed and we took care of that matter right away. There is an amusing story that goes with that...the arrest and overnight stay in the county jail, the wedding which is connected to that stay and the beginning of my long lived adultery in absentia.
It is a long story that one..perhaps someone else will tell it or perhaps it will become obvious once this memoir gets going. I don't like to think of it as a formative experience because it wasn't. It was an obstacle to my delivery from it. Does that make sense? I didn't understand myself then but I understand it all now, just hate to talk too much about it because I do not want to give it any power in my life. It already took enough away from me before. I guess some people would say that it was a love affair. Many might say that. I say it was a serial rape that lasted nearly two years before my husband and I married. Okay...I'll synopsize here: Lolita.
In fact, much of my earlier writing dealt with that mysterious situation. I've come to realize now that it wasn't so much a mystery. It is the case however that as people go through the events in their life, it is only with a certain amount of age can they begin to see things for what they really were. That some would analyse the situation differently...those that witnessed or took part in that episode...well. Tells you that the illusion was a profound one and my kidnapper was very good at his specialty. He convinced alot of people to believe something was what it wasn't. Perhaps, like HH in the novel, he even convinced himself. You have to love what you are doing you know, to do it.
But why this focus on Alice Notley one might ask. It's not so hard to understand. It is an old illusion of mine that a great poet such as herself actually has something to do with me. Such as herself meaning, few poets have gone on record so deeply or at such length as Ms. Notley and I say that with tremendous respect for her ambition in that regard, about how marriage, feminism, war, poverty have affected them. The "I" in Alice Notley is certainly a very big "I". She was born in the same place as I was although she didn't spend much time here. She was born a day apart (and several years) as me. She spent more than a quarter of her adult years away from the United States. So did I. And she writes poems. And she remembers certain things about ditches and cheap drugstore perfumes like Cachet that could be found in the shops of "our time". She wrote once of topaz, our birthstone. The idea of all of that kept me alive for quite some time when it was that my poetry began to predominate in my life but in no one else's. I owe her a great deal for that one and perhaps one day, I can return the favor to some other poor sod who thinks poetry is a great big deal and they are lonely in that assumption.
And then one day, I actually met her. It was destiny you know. She was scheduled to read up in Tucson. My sister and I were making plans to attend the reading but somehow the plans fell apart and the day before it was to happen, it just evaporated. I knew I was supposed to meet her and then all of a sudden, I couldn't. It made me slightly miserable. I passed by the post office that day and took a few moments to read the notices that are there on a board outside by the bench. And voila! Alice was returning to town that very evening for a reading at the Central School.
She read that night and was mildly entertaining and it seemed to me, a bit nervous and dissociated. I'd say, she is an introvert but if I was feeling ornery, I would say she was a bit snobby. Either way, I imagine I am wrong. Fact of the matter was, she couldn't possibly know how destiny had intervened in her reading and my attendance any more than I could explain it and make it somehow sensible.
The point that I'm getting to here has to do with a core philosophy in her work, one that has resonated with so many women and especially with female poets. It is called feminism. Not that she would call herself a feminist because most likely, she wouldn't. She often says things that lead a reader to believe however that she is one. She views her presence in the hall of fame of poetry as a sentinel event in the history of female poets and poetry.
So do I. I am a sentinel event. I knew that just as much as I knew that one day, I would have to meet Alice Notley in order to exorcise her from my spirit. I am an American Shia female poet. Not many of us at all out there. Some struggling ones for sure and in future generations there will be more of us but no doubt about it, I'm one of the first.
Insert here "Irish Muslim 'lasses from the passes"
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