THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA POETRY CENTER
Poetic Experimentation: Alice Notley’s Innovative Punctuation of Descent of Alette
By Taylor Johnson
Grade level: 11-12
Time frame: Two 50-minute periods (one period for the demonstration and discussion,
and one for the read-aloud performance and writing of a collaborative poem)
Material requirements:
For the experiment:
 1 Large glass jar
 Several (5-10) small or baby food jars
 Approximately 2 cups of water
 Metal spoon or butter knife
For the discussion:
 2 versions of text* from Alice Notley’s book length poem, Descent of Alette
For the read-aloud performance:
 Performance version of poem text* and instructions
(*All texts available to download from the Poetry Center’s website.)
Learning objectives:
 Students will interpret the analogous features of a brief demonstration as related
to an excerpt of experimental work by poet Alice Notley.
 Students will learn and/or review a list of formal, structural features of poetry
 Students will compare and contrast two versions of a poem excerpt in order to
discern the function of its innovative punctuation and discuss its meaning.
 Students will read the poem aloud in a group performance in order to understand
more fully the meaning and affect of the innovate punctuation
 Students will write a responding poem that imitates the innovative punctuation of
Notley’s Descent of Alette
Sequence of activities:
1. Explain to the students that they will watch you conduct a brief
demonstration, of which key details will relate analogously to formal,
structural features of an actual poem. Tell them that the demonstration
will help them to compare and contrast two versions of the poem, which
they will read and discuss after the experiment has concluded.
2. Conduct the demonstration as follows:
 On a clearly visible table, place a large, empty, glass jar.
 Tell the students the jar represents the first version of the poem they
will read later.
 Next, pour approximately 2 cups of water into the large jar (use an
amount that will exactly fill the number of small baby food jars you
plan to use for the second part of the experiment: you may want to
measure this beforehand for optimal effect).
 Explain that the water represents the words of the poem. Strike the jar
with a metal spoon or butter knife so the students can hear the sound of
the single, full jar.
 Next, ask the students to imagine that we could change the shape of
the original jar by breaking it into several smaller jars. To do so would
analogously mean we would reorganize the poem, even though the
word content of the poem, as represented by the water, would not
change but remain exactly the same.
 State that now you will illustrate this shape-shift. Place several (5-10)
small or baby food jars on the table, and pour the water from the first
jar into each of the little jars until all of the water from the large jar is
distributed among the little jars. Remove the large jar from the table.
Say, “Now, the first shape of the poem is gone. I have changed it into
a new shape,” reiterating the fact that the water representing the words
of the poem has not changed, but that the shapes containing the words
have changed.
 Strike the 5-10 filled small or baby food jars one after the other in
rapid succession to sound their collective notes. Explain that the
students have heard the analogous sound of the second version of the
poem.
3. Next, tell the students you will briefly teach them about (or have them
review, if they are more advanced) what kinds of formal, structural
features are important to writing poems. You may want to conduct a brief
lecture in which you list and describe these features on the board and/or
provide a handout, or you may want to break them into groups to have
them review or brainstorm a list of prior knowledge.
In either case, the list of formal, structure features may include:
 number and length of lines
 line breaks
 number and length of stanzas, or absence of stanzas
 rhyme (alliteration, consonance, assonance), or disruption or absence
of rhyme


meter (how the arrangement of loud and soft beats or syllables create a
rhythm or pattern of sounds through repetition [repeating the pattern]
and variation [changing the pattern])
punctuation (how capitalization, commas, periods, question marks,
exclamation points, parentheses, brackets, italics, dashes, and spaces
used or omitted)
4. Next, ask the students to meet with their groups for 8-10 minutes to
discuss the results of the experiment, using the list of formal, structural
features of poetry to aid their discussion. Have the following question
written on the board before they begin:
“Predict what kind of differences would exist between the
poetic structure or shape represented by the large jar and the
poetic structure or shape represented by the group of small jars.
In order to document your predictions, create a two-sided chart
that lists which of the formal, structural features you think
would be different between the two versions of the poem as
represented by the two jar examples.”
5. After the students have created their comparison charts, pass out to each
group the two different versions of the poem excerpt from Alice Notley’s
Descent of Alette. Version 1 is the version with all innovative punctuation
removed, and version 2 is the actual text as Notley wrote it. Do not reveal
which version is the “real” one.
6. Ask the students to compare the two versions. Ask them to determine
which version they think the poet intended. (If this lesson is successful,
students should be able to select version 2 with confidence.) You may
want to have each group select their choice by secret ballot, and then write
the tallied results of the vote on the board.
7. Then, have each group compare their group’s conclusion with their
predictions: which formal or structural features were actually involved in
this excerpt? Were any of their predictions about which features would be
affected, prove to be accurate with regards to the Notley poem?
8. Finally, ask, Why did Alice Notley create this particular structure to hold
her poetic contents? In other words, what meaning or affect (emotion or
mood associated with the idea or action of the poem) is gained by,
figuratively speaking—“pouring the water into many smaller jars,” or,
literally speaking—placing short phrases of sentences into many smaller
units, separated from each other by closed quotation marks?
Here are some potential answers to guide the students in discussing:
 Adds extra pauses—slows down the speed, creates emphasis on
certain key words or phrases. For example, in line 4 of stanza 4,
the breaking up of the phrase, “ ‘I’m at peace with” “being”


seems to focus extra attention on the word and idea of “being.”
What does that have to do with the theme of this poem excerpt?
Extra pauses add extra emphases. At the beginning of each phrase
there is an implied emphasis. Phrases end abruptly, sometimes in
the middle of a syntactical unit, such as in line 4 of stanza 3, “is
the same as the” “surrounding/ darkness’” in which “the” is
separated from “surrounding.” Each new phrases starts over again
after the pause before it, as if at the beginning of a new sentence.
The effect of many extra endings and beginnings than present in a
usual sentence gives Notley’s line a slower, halting quality; at the
same time the passage imparts the authority and confidence of
continuously starting over.
The passage sounds oracular because it has the halting but
confident cadence of a wise, all-knowing consciousness.
9. Another way of approaching this question is to ask, What meaning seems
to be lost from the version of the poem with the quotation marks omitted?
These questions should spark a lively discussion about what the poet is
trying to show about communication itself, as well as an exploration of
such provocative themes of “Being” and “Peace,” as well as the
symbolism of “light” and “dark.”
10. Conduct a second, follow-up lesson in which you conduct a group
performance of the poem (download the reading text and instructions from
the Poetry Center website).
11. For the remainder of the second period, write an original collaborative
poem on the board or an overhead projector. First, brainstorm a list of
contemporary topics that would be well suited for the multi-vocal, multiparticipant, self-interrupting, halting, and/or oracular qualities of the voice
or voices created by Notley’s punctuation innovation. Sample topics may
include: lover’s quarrels or arguments, IM or chat-room conversations,
dialogues in multiple languages, etc.
Extensions:
1. Check out Descent of Alette from the library (it is no longer in print) and read
aloud some additional excerpts of the poem to the students so they can get a more
expansive feel for the poem’s development of story and theme. If possible, have
students read and discuss additional excerpts.
2. Read and discuss poems by other “punctuation innovators,” such as e. e.
cummings. Assign students a “treasure hunt” to track down other contemporary
examples of punctuation innovators online, especially if you have a webaccessible classroom.
3. Regarding activity # 7 above, you may want to conduct some follow-up lessons in
which you select different poems whose attributes emphasize a different subset of
the formal features from the “master list” in # 3 above. For instance, you could
teach this same lesson to demonstrate how meaning is created through the
presence of line breaks (instead of innovative punctuation). Provide two versions
of a different poem, such as one by William Carlos Williams, in which the
original version shows the correct line breaks, but an altered version obscures the
line breaks into a prose block. Have students discuss the impact and affect of the
formal feature of line breaks (or, other formal features in other poem examples
you may choose to discuss) on meaning of the poem.
This lesson was developed to correspond with the Visiting Poets and Writers Reading Series.
Alice Notley read for the Series on February 24, 2007 at 7pm at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
545 S. 5th Ave. in Armory Park.
The Poetry Center also offers a limited number of poets-in-the-schools, an archive of lesson plans,
field trips and tours of our special collection library. For more information about our programs
call (520)626-3765.
www.poetrycenter.arizona.edu