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I’ve been carrying

The Descent of Alette

around with me all year

& hearing its strange rhythms in my head.

Now I want to go deeper.

This November, I’m inviting a small group

to enter the poem with me,

to read it out loud,

write alongside it,

& experiment with what

the text makes possible.

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The Descent of Alette 

is a strange, incantatory descent

into an underworld.

Written in the shadow

of her brother’s death after the Vietnam War,

The Descent of Alette

might also be read, perhaps,

as Notley’s reckoning

with war, grief

& the patriarchal forms of the epic.

I’m interested in the almost ceremonial quality

of reading it collectively.

What happens when

several people listen at once?

What happens to our own writing

when we let ourselves be affected by another text?

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