There was Also Valium in the Drink, Placed there by Two Other People (by Alice Notley)

Griffin Prize for Excellence In Poetry, The (2001 - 0)

Original Text

Alice Notley, Disobedience (New York: Penguin, 2001). This poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from the winning volume on the 2002 International Shortlist).

1you had, effectively, drugged me, but

2what I saw on the drug was true

3you put acid in my drink without telling me, so

4I would loosen up and be fun for you

5but what I saw was that the historical portraits

6of fat wigged men were alive

7and ranged a gamut of demonic expression.

8Then I blacked out; you told me, later,

9I’d said that the way my brother had died

10made everything seem worthless; I’d shouted

11at you that your essays on war were self-gratifying.

12Oh yes, history. You said that I

13should have seen his life as a speck of loss in the struggle,

14immense and longterm, of an Asian nation,

15a spark to balance against 20 Asian sparks--

16how fucking comforting!

17Perhaps you could die too, to help make enough

18counter-balancing sparks? Well, who then

19would write your poems, I suppose you’d say.

20There was raw meat throughout the house:

21I’d attacked the paintings

22and only raw steak could heal them. I

23can believe that. But there’s always plenty of raw meat to heal

24hurt power. Think of how much there is in Asia

25All those people, sweatshops, markets, all that offending

26new capitalism. Better organize a special issue, a panel, on the subject

27your pretty house may be in danger, from capitalism …

28(you are not a capitalist, you merely own a house.) Happy Acid Trip!

29Have forgotten the other you …

30that sense that some other entity knows one intimately

31from the inside.

32It’s probably part of oneself

33why shouldn’t it be

34why shouldn’t part of one, be "god?"

35Could "god" "know" a "person?"

36if god is ground

37god could be in a person, could be like a person

38having to mimic our every idiocy.

39The evening news is gratifying

40Le Pen-is is fucking up

41Le Pen-is doesn’t think the French

42football team is really French.

43He does

44look like an organ, see a wee-eyed prick of a figure

45bluntheaded thicknecked bald.

46The man I shouted at in the acid dream

47had a name that mean "white fluid." My seeing to

48embrace "black" then--

49you might say that’s racist …

50Language tends to be racist, exists to make distinctions,

51as, likewise, do images;

52but there can be a personal reality which isn’t devisive,

53between words or frames.

54The rifts in the world cannot be healed with language.

55Though poetry modifies the divisiveness of words with

56light and fluidity--true self,

57raceless and sexless, burning through language’s flaws.

58I don’t want to go down into the caves anymore.

59I try to summon the ‘feeling’ of the caves

60without a descent into their imagery …

61The crystal I’m in’s not yet as intense as previously.

62Then there’s imagery anyway:

63A black cowl blowing and twisted

64the glass grail floats precariously on

65a sinister breeze, all in a black sky

66We’re happening millenia ago.

67In Paris a woman scowls. Eyebrows and downdroop

68mouth: she’s conveying her dress to work on

69the rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. She scowls straight at me.

70She’s not a dream. I dream of an acquaintance

71in another social class, as I’d perceived that in my youth,

72wears a mask in three colors to speak of her own

73father’s death. Black, white, rust-red

74the mask shows me she’s my equal

75and that both his death and that equality are what’s holy. I

76wake up ashamed. I dream of the evaporation

77of a relation’s beauty. She waits for me

78to push her in her wheelchair, her foot is missing

79I can’t tell if she’s she or my sort-of enemy

80No there’s the sort-of enemy, they both look like someone else a

81Ms. Fleeting, another woman, but an older Ms. Fleeting,

82because we’re all older Ms. Fleetings. Or Jo Van Fleets--she’s

83just died … So let’s

84serve the damned meal, in the next dream please. My mother says,

85the continuousness of this dinner party

86as an event that isn’t divided, rigidly, into PIECES of caring

87is what’s so good about it. We don’t have to

88keep our services separate:

89we DON’T have to have classes. of people, experience, culture

90we DON’T HAVE TO take care of someone needy for

91an hour at three. We are feeding everyone

92period. We don’t care about your special problems.

93We’re tired of thinking about who you are.

94If food’s all you need … Isn’t it?

95I can’t undo anything; this poem

96Left a house again all night, packing up

97leaving that house

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

2011