AG2025_1167249a or the necessity of noncompliance with pressures


The Poetics of Disobedience, Alice Notley, 1998.

For a long time I’ve seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past practices as well.

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I recently completed a very long poem called Disobedience but I didn’t realize that disobeying was what I was doing, what perhaps I’d always been doing until the beginning of the end of it, though the tone throughout was one of rejection of everything I was supposed to be or to affirm, all the poetries all the groups the clothes the gangs the governments the feelings and reasons.

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