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Homer's Art
Alice Notley
A landmark little chapbook — the seed of one of the major poetic projects of the last half-century. Commissioned for the Curriculum of the Soul series, Alice Notley took Homer's Art as her subject just as she was turning toward the epic, and toward a hard question: what is a woman's relation to heroic action and to war? The pamphlet is where that thinking crystallizes, on its way to her book-length masterpiece The Descent of Alette. Slender and saddle-stitched, issued from a small upstate press, it is the kind of object that looks unassuming and turns out to be a hinge. For readers of Notley, or of the Olson-descended poetics of the period, it is essential and quietly moving.
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The author
Alice Notley — major American poet, central to the second-generation New York School — wrote this at a pivotal moment. The 1988 death of her brother, a Vietnam veteran who suffered from the war, provoked her thinking about politics, gender, and heroism, and set her on the path to an epic with a female protagonist. Homer's Art is where that project first takes shape.
The book
Published in 1990 by the Institute of Further Studies in Canton, New York, as number 9 in A Curriculum of the Soul. The series is a story in itself: after Charles Olson's death in 1970, Jack Clarke took twenty-eight terms from Olson's "Plan for a Curriculum of the Soul" and assigned them to members of the Olson community, each writing a short fascicle. Notley's is a saddle-stitched chapbook with illustrated covers.
How it reads
As both essay and manifesto — a poet reasoning her way toward the epic she needed to write. Read beside The Descent of Alette (1992), it becomes a kind of origin document.
For more context
Notley's The Descent of Alette; Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems; and the Curriculum of the Soul series as a whole.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Alice Notley
- Publisher
- Institute of Further Studies (Curriculum of the Soul, No. 9)
- Place of publication
- Canton, New York
- Year
- 1990
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Chapbook
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Maine
Curriculum of the Soul series #9