personal music

I learned, from Edwin [Denby], that each phrase was an object and that word order was plastic; that each word used all of its space and so had to fill it; that each line floated as well as connected; and that where a sentence stopped and another began was ambiguous, like in speech. I learned that one could place personal suffering in a context that might be communal as of persons or communal as of objects and actions and words—either one worked as community. I thus learned a scale one was being along that began with oneself and others in one’s apartment and proceeded out onto the street and into the imaginary space of painting and ballet on up into the sky above tall buildings, all inside one and one inside it. I learned not to fear the sound of personal peculiarities in poetry, personal “music,” that that’s what the poems would finally be made of.

—Alice Notley, “Intersections with Edwin’s Lines,” Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 (The Song Cave, 2023)