New York Surrealism: On Alice Notley's How to Really Get an Apartment

Here is my third ModPo essay this year. Unfortunately I cannot find the source poem online to link to and I don't want to reproduce here in case of copyright issues so I'll just say that the source poem is from the book At Night the States, published 1987 by Yellow Press, Chicago and is well worth checking out if you can. The book is available on Scribd https://www.scribd.com/document/652772575/alice-notley-at-night-the-states-1 so if you have a subscription as I do, you can view it on page 49 at the link above.  And just for fun, you can read the much longer title poem of the book here if you're wanting more Alice or can't get to the book on Scribd: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50834/at-night-the-states

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Alice Notley’s “How to Really Get an Apartment” is, in many ways a classic New York School poem. It has all the hallmarks. The setting of course which is probably the most defining feature given the name - the apartment with its buzzer, the landlord, even the sense of the importance of having secured a rental property - its preciousness in the city.  There are the cultural references - the name dropping of Jack Kerouac and the republican salt - one assumes that the line in quotation marks is a slogan in use at the time, and the sequencing from passing by an apartment to securing it - all happening in the present tense and progressing in a seemingly orderly way from one step to the next with multiple uses of the ampersand to indicate the next step forward in a way designed to be intentionally conversational and visual.  There is also the abbreviation of apartment to apt and the four em dashes that create a visual sense of motion in the work. 

The conversational quality here is one that mirrors the breathlessness and easy quality of a discussion you might have with someone over a drink - the intimacy that begins with starting the work with ellipses and a reference “the same building”, as if we had already been talking about the building, and takes on the cadence of a narrative that melds present tense with reminiscence and digression, as if this were an anecdote told to the reader as addressee. This is partly indicated by the title which is a kind of recipe or even a hook - read this and you’ll find out something you need to know, which is humorous because it’s not a standard logic and shaking salt at a landlord and calling it wine will not get you a coveted apartment in New York City.  Besides, it negates itself at the end in the classic New York School way of calling into question the overall tenet of the poem.  

The surrealism here is one that Notley is famous for - her use of dream sequencing.  In this instance that dream logic is in play where each image gives rise to the next one - and the relationship does not have to be the kind we are used to in daily life or “plain time”.  Instead we have building to Kerouac to buzzer to salt to wine to access.  It’s a progression that works perfectly from a grammatical and linear point of view but has a subverted semantics where salt and wine can be synonymous, and where the desire to really obtain an apartment is a desire for what is already there.  The symbolism here is one that has a sonic quality - using free association of sound, including subtle alliteration and repetitions such as “girl” with the repetitions of “get”, the multiple instances of salt, the alliteration of “w” as the poem progresses through the latter part of the poem - “whenever”, “walks”, “Would”, “wine” and the multiple variations on “you” and “your”.  All of these sounds combine to create a gentle motion forward that mimic the progression of walking, forming a small but perfectly formed New York poem.