While listening to an interview with Grammy-award winning music producer John Congleton, I was struck by his admission that he assumes something is amiss with his own listening whenever he hears music he "doesn't like." He continues to listen until he discovers a means for appreciating the music he hears, thereby solving the problem he discovered within himself. That way he doesn't resort to describing the music as bad, but rather simply as music he wasn't ready to hear upon first listen. I was reminded of this approach while reading Alice Notley's new book, For the Ride.

This book is not for me, but I don't intend that criticism to be interpreted in such a way that the inference is, "this is a bad book." Rather, I haven't learned yet to appreciate what the author has created here. Perhaps I'm too unfamiliar with this style of verse; maybe I read this volume in the wrong frame of mind; or it could be that I need a greater appreciation for Ms. Notley and her particular craft.

My hope is that I can be forgiven for having no prior familiarity with Alice Notley before reading this book, but this was my first introduction to her work. About halfway through, I recognized the challenge I was having grasping this material satisfactorily, and I recall thinking that there was a good possibility this had been written by an extremely talented poet whose skills transcended my comprehension and appreciation level. The author bio at the end of the book revealed to me that suspicion was well-founded.

I discovered that the vocabulary, syntax, and subject matter all eluded me somehow, and I am willing to take the blame for it. If this book was indeed written with a target demographic in mind, my own residence is located many miles off that map.

As an example of a passage that left me scratching my head at its incomprehension, I share this:
“Can the ones call each other
poet as
pronoun? “Poet are fair, are real”
poet says The ones ‘re to poet, ial whatreflected ‘poet love ever
it can upon by
poet.’ Or, po- be called. no light but et are a jerk, Time’s un-
of words in poet am bad. glued, it this grey
this is a isn’t that city. Poets
f o s that One (Poet) by
h o r a glitters within n s n o t a r m k en morçeaux e i e r h n ‘ e
ou cum spiri- c t ‘ m e
d f s tu auditionis— e y. s
hearing but s i e what vibrates? o f n s s e n tNot air as the ones
have ever defined it, or
space—What are poets, Why
are ones alive?
foot- of the
loose dead?
in the street Help Ones, Ether One’s not different from source
of the words cast upon one like light.”

Reading the above, I found myself hoping my electronic advance reader copy was faulty, somehow. While this is one of the more difficult passages for me, I found myself nearly as lost on all the other pages as well. Occasionally though, I would be pleasantly surprised with brief passages or lines that I liked:
“But I was never born. I have always been. Exactly at the right time.”

If Ms. Notley wrote this book with you in mind, you're probably going to love it. If you're a fan of her writing or familiar with her other work (unlike myself), you may find plenty here to enjoy and appreciate. Unfortunately, I haven't yet spent enough time with this to learn how to enjoy it properly.

Thank you to Penguin Books and Netgalley.com for the electronic advance reader copy provided for this review.

Lots and lots of pyrotechnics using and about language. Reminds me a lot of the modernist formal language experiments of Gertrude Stein or T.S Eliot or Samuel Beckett. But just like those works, while this one was intellectually interesting, it mostly left me cold. I can see how Notley was putting passion into some of her arguments around language and words and their importance, but the word to suss them out put me so into my head, that the emotional impact just washed right over me. I'm left impressed but mostly unmoved.