NOTE(S)

Testament originated as an exploration of and response to three texts: Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House Press, 2009); Carla Harryman, Adorno’s Noise (Essay Press, 2008); and Alice Notley, Alma, or The Dead Women (Granary Books, 2006). What could have been a book review or critical essay evolved into a long poem, in keeping perhaps with John Taggart’s suggestion that criticism of a genre should take place within that genre. Subsequent waves of revision have moved the poem away from some of its original gestures and closer to others.

Many thanks to these poets for their sustaining work (and to Alice Oswald and others I was reading at the same time, as per references below). Gratitude to the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, where this poem was drafted over twelve days in July 2009, and to Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where it was revised in November 2009 and May 2012. Thanks to Dan Poppick for being an early reader of the manuscript, and to Peter Conners. Portions of Testament appeared previously in the journals New Orleans Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Modern Language Studies, The Journal, Court Green, Hotel Amerika, Fourteen Hills, Seattle Review, Interim, and Bat City Review, to the editors of which I am also grateful.

REFERENCES

The title of Part I is derived from these lines by Lisa Robertson: “. . . The / Symptom takes on the historical / Function of a hero, who may purchase / For himself a plasticity imagined / As geography because it is / Visible. . . .” (from “Coda: The Device,” in Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, 86).

11	digestive and genital organs of plants from J. R. R. Tolkien’s short story “Leaf by Niggle” (although for years I somehow misattributed the phrase to Aldous Huxley).
14	A bridal texture See Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, 51 (“a bridal textile”).
26	A mannerist ecology Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, 64.
34	sensual communication Harryman, Adorno’s Noise, 13.
35	Blanchot quote is from Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, translated by Ann Smock (University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 23.
41	I want to see the policemen / in their white masks. . . . / In the Mardi Gras parade. Paweł Wojtasik’s video and sound installation Below Sea Level (2009).
	Here are the sirens of not knowing / everything Harryman, Adorno’s Noise, 40.
45	Have you discussed this with your mother See Harryman, Adorno’s Noise, 84 (“I have discussed this with my mother. . . ,” along with Harryman’s own flag-raising/-lowering anxieties).
47	concept vs. need See Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, 11 (“for you are shadow and concept with no memory no vestige no need”).
51	This can be a little unnerving See Harryman, Adorno’s Noise, 123.
	Writing, without placing itself . . . Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 53; Levinas quote is idem, 77.
52	Something large and real / and beyond all sacrifice Misquotation of Harryman, Adorno’s Noise, 128 (“something large and real beyond all artifice”).
53	The body wants to be art and fails at it Harryman, Adorno’s Noise, 144.
55	the room in which one lives / anticipates one’s burial in a Christian plot Harryman, Adorno’s Noise, 17.
59	If you surround yourself with the dead / then you worship the dead In response to “Rite to Divest Oneself of the Need to Worship,” in Notley, Alma, 323.
60	If writing, then, is “thought’s patience” See Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 41.
66	Follow your discomfort Notley, Alma, 21.
74	The matrilineal power of self- / obsession, I misread” and Another misreading: God’s / viscous omniscience Notley, Alma, 46 (“we had a matrilineal power of self-possession before the europeans came” and “God’s vicious omniscience,” respectively).
75	we are not safe In response to “Safe Owl,” in Notley, Alma, 50.
79	Outside. Neutral. Disaster. Return. Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 57–58.
88	beautiful country burn again From Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Apology for Bad Dreams” via Joan Didion, After Henry (Vintage, 1993), 217.
	You will take a new name from a man / if you privilege the antiquity of his song In response to “The Snake,” in Notley, Alma, 147.
93	A symbol / which interests us also / as an object is distracting Susanne Langer as quoted by Rosmarie Waldrop in “Alarms and Excursions,” in Charles Bernstein, ed., The Politics of Poetic Form (Roof, 1990), 60.
	Harryman quote from her poem “Sites,” in Under the Bridge (This Press, 1980), 29.
	Zucker quote from Rachel Zucker, The Last Clear Narrative (Wesleyan, 2004), 100.
95	The familiar Mercator projection . . . latitudes. From the 1974 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. 11, p. 476, under “Maps and Mapping.”
96	And—yes—Lilith / we have met | and do I know you? Geoffrey Hill, Speech! Speech! (Counterpoint, 2000), 4.
97	Nephite references from Ernest W. Baughman, Type and Motif Index of the Folktales of England and North America (Bloomington: Indiana University Folklore Series, 1966), 392–393.
99	Sky Burial, my friend is thinking / of entitling her new manuscript, / now that the Palestinians / have the right to choose. Sky Burial by Dana Levin (Copper Canyon, 2011); see also Notley, Alma, 193.
101	human eyes / or humanlike Notley, Alma, 196.
102	The Antoine Volodine novel is Minor Angels, translated by Jordan Stump (University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
	enemy aircraft / installation Notley, Alma, 198.
103	“Mr. Bojangles” and “Put Your Hands inside the Puppet Head” are songs by Jerry Jeff Walker and They Might Be Giants, respectively.
	New studies suggest my conducting teacher / was wrong: memory holds seven (+/- three) things at a time. See Mark Cunningham, Body Language (Tarpaulin Sky, 2008), 54.
104	chestnut geldings on the beach From John McPhee’s “The Search for Marvin Gardens” (in John D’Agata, ed., The Next American Essay [Graywolf, 2003], 19).
115	They’re men, she said, I couldn’t / even take them to a cosmetics counter. Singer Chrissie Hynde, quoted in The Scotsman, 12 July 2009.
119	because an image tells it to? See Notley, Alma, 309.
122	darker declivity Notley, Alma, 313.
	If you are magic you can heal me Notley, Alma, 315.
131	All rivers were once fallen trees, / writes Alice Oswald In Dart (Faber & Faber, 2002), 12.
135	Three Portraits of a Radio Audience In Alice Oswald, Woods Etc. (Faber & Faber, 2005), 36.
136	What enters the body legitimately Cunningham, Body Language, 13.
137	But this is not a play, as you maintain Alice Oswald, A Sleepwalk on the Severn (Faber & Faber, 2009), 1.
112	Surveillance is the elsewhere of God Misreading of Simon Smith, Mercury (Salt Publishing, 2006), 26 (“Surveillance in the absence of God”).

Other references, in passing: Ernst Chladni, Neda Soltan, Dolly, Ann Lee, the OED, Joseph Cornell.