"The Poetics of Disobedience," Alice Notley

"...It's possible that my biggest act of disobedience has consistently, since I was an adolescent, been against the idea that all truth comes from books, really other people's books. I hate the fact that whatever I say or write, someone reading or listening will try to find something out of their reading I "sound like." 'You sound just like...,' 'you remind me of...,' 'have you read...?' 

I read all the time and I often believe what I read while I'm reading it, especially if it's some trashy story; intense involvement in theories as well as stories seems difficult without temporary belief, but then it burns out. I've been trying to train myself for thirty or forty years not to believe anything anyone tells me...."

"...It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against...everything. One must remain somehow, though how, open to any subject or form in principle, open to the possibility of liking, open to the possibility of using. I try to maintain no continuous restrictions in my poetics except with regard to particular works, since writing at all means making some sort of choices. But NO DOCTRINES. Rather I tend to maintain a sense that a particular form or set of rules at a certain point might serve me for a while.

Like many writers I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don't work, I know they aren't it. I don't in the least feel that everything is language. I have a sense that there has been language from the beginning, that it isn't fundamentally an invention. These are contradictory positions but positions are just words. 

I don't believe that the best poems are just words, I think they're the same as reality; I tend to think reality is poetry, and that it isn't words. But words are one way to get at reality/poetry, what we're in all the time. I think words are among us and everywhere else, mingling, fusing with, backing off from us and everything else...,""The Poetics of Disobedience, " Alice Notley, Poetry Foundation Essay on Poetic Theory .