Costumed anti-war demonstrators at the 1971 Vietnam War Out Now protest, Washinton D.C.
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“Poems, a lot of the time, are supposedly not made up . . . but they’re all made up. Everything’s invented. The notion of concreteness is therefore very slippery. I’ve always wanted there to be something to see, and poetry is about the tangible and what you can hear. It’s about the form, it’s about voices, and it generally is about telling things. We tell each other things, and so I allow a lot of voices in my poems. I can’t seem to keep them out. I consider them to be concrete entities. At this point, when I write a poem, it seems like a community of voices. My voice is perhaps overpowering, but I don’t know what my voice is. So then other voices come in and I try to let them speak, but I don’t always know where they come from. I make them up. Sometimes they’re people on the street, and sometimes they’re people I know. But that’s concrete. Voices are concrete.”
Alice Notley
[alive on all channels]
