But her writing exerts intense attraction. 97AN: He is focusing on the foot; and hes probably also aware of the foot when hes doing the short stanzas. , Montreal: Club Roll, 2012. Her honors and awards include an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Its filthy; I dont remember how I got. 93DR: To pursue with craft questions: in the Norton Anthology of American Literature (1979), in talking about Marianne Moore, they say: Pound writes with the phrase, Williams writes with the line, H.D writes with the image, Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein write with the word, but Marianne Moore writes with the entire stanza, and I was just wondering if there was a unit that you use? A woman whose work completely knocked me out. Actually, when I read The Descent of Alette, high-school students get similarly entranced. Its probably Notleys best-known work, perhaps because its one of the easiest to follow. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. It also marks a shift in Notleys poetics away from the freewheeling chattiness of the New York School and toward something more visionary, historical, and grandly narrative. For instance this collage that you put on the cover of. Perpetually strapped for cash, the two took on whatever small jobs they could to support the family. I think I know how to do things with my voice that are entirely musical. (1976). If we compare them with painting, they work like the zips in Newmans painting. Thats what Ive done ever since in different ways. I have some Cherokee Blood, perhaps one-sixteenth Cherokee. AN: That photo in the middle is me at age ten, I think. She describes it as an immense act of rebellion against dominant social forces, against the fragmented forms of modern poetry, against the way a poem was supposed to look according to both past and contemporary practice. The narrator, Alette, finds herself in a feminist epic, on a subway, traveling deeper and deeper in the tunnels, into an underworld filled with caves and otherworldly characters. They measure out a skittering meter, question languages capacities in the face of violence, and remind us of its primal connection to bodies living and dead, speaking and silent. For death? My poems are full of creosote bushes, and athel trees which are extremely ugly trees that somehow got there, who knows how, maybe by way of the Colorado River which goes right by where I grew up. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 113DR: Yes, that brings me back to what I was saying earlier about Andr Bretons Nadja who sees things before they happen next and is just carted off: the status of mediums becomes a metaphor for the status of poetry in society. AN: I learned a lot from him on that level. must start and will now by an awkward process make something, thinking These places are continuously operating as presences in your poetry, particularly the Needles of your youth, in California, the Lower Manhattan in the heyday of New York School Poetry, and the Paris of today. However, New York Poetry authorized one to draw from others, taking a bit from this one, and from that one, which I did for a long time. 36AN: Like dolmensyes, something like that. During the winter of 197071, Notley and Berrigan lived on Long Island, where Notley wrote her first book, 165 Meeting House Lane (Twenty-Four Sonnets). She delves into a range of topics in a single poem, such as "The Prophet", she converses about toilets, different countries, and the idea of marriage, and somehow she's able to bring all of these farfetched ideas together. 41DR: He has said that he started doing collages in his twenties and continued throughout his life. 20DR: Eileen Myles is another poet who comes from an Irish, working-class, New England background and lost her father. xx. But people often say that Marianne Moore writes with the whole sentence. Over the course of Alice Notley's long and prolific career she's written more than 25 books since 1971 readers have assigned her any number of identities: native of the American West,. It was Alice Notley who would be in the spring session in 2007. 77For three or four years my father danced the Hopi snake dance with a live snake in his mouth. There was pleasure in working with that discovery. 58AN: I actually listened to Monteverdi to get the cadences that were before The Descent of Alette: particularly in White Phosphorus (1988) and at the end of Beginning with a Stain (1987). In that sad, beautiful book, theres so much irony, whereas some literary critics take everything at face value. 124I also have a vinyl record, its like one of those jazz albums. Early on, I understood that was something you could enjoy doing out of folk music. And they participated, when they lived in Prescott, AZ, in an organization which did Native American Dances every year, called The Smoki, which my father was in, and which had been instituted by the businessmen in Prescott in the 1930s. NOTLEY, Alice. Songs And Stories Of The Ghouls. I went downstairs. Notley's work is famously heterogeneous, but it's possible to see a gradual. Notley borrows images and inspirations from popular cultural (Muhammed Ali and Marlon Brando in 30thBirthday and comic books in The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books), as well as the more serious literary world. In 1972, Notley married Berrigan and the two moved to Chicago where Berrigan had been given Ed Dorn's newly vacated teaching position at Northeastern Illinois University. For example my poem In the Pines has been set to music by AroarA, who are two members of the Canadian, indie group, Broken Social Scene, Andrew Whiteman and Ariel Engle, whove done something mesmerizing; also, my son Eddie is both a poet and an indie musician: I know about some indie people from about 2000, not so much after that. [14] Several poems from her 2007 collection In the Pines were set to music by the Canadian indie pop band AroarA for their 2014 Polaris Music Prize-nominated 2013 EP In the Pines[15] and in Fall 2014, a conference celebrating Notley's work was held at the Bay Area Public School in Oakland, California. 29AN: He has complete syntactical thoughts, then he interrupts things at the conjunction. Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright. I use the collages to go on without thinking with words. He earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama, An introduction to one ofthe most lasting styles of mid-century American poetry. Blinding the White Horse in Front of Me in Certain Magical Acts. It always felt to me like I was enacting ideas that visual artists had normally, that I was figuring it out. In fact, the strong memories of starting points, including the vegetation, you just evoked link you to your New York School entourage. DR: Its also what Andr Breton mentions, in his book. AN: I wouldnt be able to take the journey if I couldnt hear the poem thats all based on folk songs and not those lines, but I was writing In the Pines while I was doing the Hepatitis C treatment, where the drugs would depress you, but once a week you would have to take a shot which, they didnt tell you, would get you high for a half hour before you got sick. But every time he quoted somebody he misquoted him or her without even knowing it, so he always made the texture his own. His poems are totally him; his voice is unique; his sensibility is unique; and he was always basing it on something else; he wanted to be like Frank [OHara] intensely, but there was no way he could be like Frank. My collages actually reflect the situation of overabundance. DR: I wouldnt be able to take the journey if I couldnt hear the poem.. (2006). For the Ride is a difficult book, constructed largely of long, discursive lines reminiscent of a Beckett monologue, testing the selfs capacity to hold together: one is not, ones are not, separated. Andrew Whiteman and Ariel Engle, whove done something mesmerizing; also, my son Eddie is both a poet and an indie musician: I know about some indie people from about 2000, not so much after that. My poems are full of creosote bushes, and athel trees which are extremely ugly trees that somehow got there, who knows how, maybe by way of the Colorado River which goes right by where I grew up. 11It was a collaboration of sorts, though I generally do not collaborate; I really hate it. You and Ted published it in your review, AN: I started to be quite influenced by him at that point, and I think I influenced him in the writing of the book. 109DR: I wouldnt be able to take the journey if I couldnt hear the poem.. AN: Well I grew up in the Southwest. Its also a passionate entreaty to writers to make work thats completely their own. The Man in the Long Black Coat, (1989) by Bob Dylan influenced the sound of the first two parts, which I wrote last. AN: I wrote an essay about her work in a book of essays called. I would write during that high, meanwhile I would listen to Bob Dylan tapes. At the moment, it feels like theres not much going on there; because its all going on at the surface actually. In the serious, reflective poem, Your Dailiness (1971), you mention finally understanding Willem de Koonings painting, Excavation, in a Chicago museum. Alice Notley (born November 8, 1945) is an American poet. Here is a brief introduction to her poetry through some of the poems that appear on the Poetry Foundation website, in chronological order from her earlier books to her more recent work. In fact, the strong memories of starting points, including the vegetation, you just evoked link you to your New York School entourage. 19AN: Peggy was great and, yes, Irish. Photo by Gezett/ullstein bild via Getty Images, Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice, Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment, 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Winner: Alice Notley, The Goddess Who Created This Passing World, Have Made Earth as the Mirror of Heaven, Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice, Democracy at 10th & A: A Discussion of Alice Notleys poem "I the People", July/August 2015: "Cranberry Cranberry Cranberry". 101AN: Well, thats what a lot of us got from her; Im heavily influenced by Gertrude Stein, having had two Stein periods; in the second one in the mid-1980s, I figured out a thing about repetition: that, if you repeated, you could pause long enough inside the repetition to figure out what to say next, which she was probably doing constantly. Instead of ushering us toward received truth or false comfort, her work searches and invites us to look for ourselves. Referring back to her writing in the 1970s in an interview with the Ampersand Review, Notley says she felt she was the only poet I knew of who used the details of pregnancy and motherhood as a direct, pervading subject in poems, on a daily basis, as if it were true that half the people in the world gave birth to others and everyone had been born. Poems from this time include Clinical Thermometer Set with Moonstone and How Spring Comes. Notleys recent work includes From the Beginning (2004), Alma, or the Dead Women (2006), Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, In the Pines (2007), Culture of One (2011), Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011), Benediction (2015), and Certain Magical Acts (2016). However, I dont know what I was listening to when I was beginning to write The Descent of Alette. Alice Notley and Douglas Oliver Editors, The Scarlet Cabinet. As Notley writes in The Prophet (1981): One is you & all this & two & yet. The yet is where poetry begins. Ive mostly dredged it all up, and I know how to get to it without dreaming. Mystery of Small Houses. Scenes, tones, and pronouns shift without warning. [6], While in Chicago, Notley started publishing her magazine Chicago, a legal-sized mimeograph publication which would continue through both her pregnancies and even her relocation to England. I thought that they were voices of dead French people, but they just came from everywhere; the voices came for that poem. , 1998. Its not around me much now. In the middle section, which is in prose, there are three people: me, Medea, and Dido, my gripe being that she founded a city, Carthage. He was my political education really. Those are the ones Im working on right now, which have to do with my poetry of the moment. A close relationship with the poet Anselm Hollo, who was teaching at the program at that time, led to Notley leaving Iowa City for Morocco in 1968. That piece is from a postcard of a painting of Notre-Dame and evil spirits flying out of it. 104AN: That was below that bed: the voices were calling to me from below the bed. There are others over there. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. These poems are included in Notley's collection Early Works, edited by Nick Sturm and forthcoming from Fonograf Editions in March 2023.. Alice Notley is the author of over 40 books of poetry, including, most recently, Certain Magical Acts (2016), Eurynome's Sandals (2019), and For the Ride (2020). Her children, Anselm Berrigan and Edmond Berrigan are both New York Poets of a younger generation. In a lecture titled Thinking and Poetry, Notley underscores the deep difficulty of following ones own direction: I find being a poet something that must start again all the time; Im DR: Did you like doing it? AN: Well possiblyI take in a lot of things that I dont know about, or that I dont remember. Its more like a pause between metrical feet. Batsford Ltd., 1945. Then he writes poetry in the variable foot which is a huge influence on my later work. For some 45 years, she has striven against the forces that stifle idiosyncrasy. At that stage, Allen Ginsberg, a really fine person, was extremely supportive. Im closely influenced by them, and working with Apollinaire at the moment. Twitter, Whats my plot? AN: Yes, and that is effectively what the. Sonnet AN: Complicated as it is, I can sketch it out: basically, everything is just too dense on the planet, which has been a decision made and a byproduct of technology. Death is for a moment, beauty is for all time, about World War II and people being away at the war. This is typical of what happens when I make a collage. Do you remember when he wrote the second The Circus? DR: Such natural presences are important. I had just been in the States. DR: There was a pop song in the 1960s by the Three Dog Night. They were the CDs that my son made and sent me; there are a lot of miss-hearings of Bob Dylan songs, as well as just a lot of folk songs that I already knew, in that work. The first workshop that I taught was a crucial one for that generation actually. In the spring of 1976, Notley and her family returned to New York, and her husband Ted fell ill with hepatitis, a disease he suffered from until his death in 1983. Courtesy of Alice Notley, re-photographed by Daesong Kim, April 2018. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. A similar style is found in other poems from that era, including I the People. Mayer and Notley both used their experience as mothers and wives in their work. (2005), and I have essays in it about her and Joanne Kyger, Ted Berrigan, Lorenzo Thomas, Frank OHara, and some others. I had it for a long time and it started to break. It seemed that people like Joe Brainard were doing important, high-art collages and we could follow along without any pretention to be creating masterpieces. 89DR: Right, thats a strong, colonizing streak in Western culture. Also in my poem Disobedience (2001), I got the title in a dream about him. I used to substitute teach for him, sometimes, at Brooklyn College. Within the text, a woman is desperate to take her daughter above ground, therefore she offers to pay the tyrant money. Frank had a characteristic, manly idea of existing in the world despite what you might call his femininity, and I think that Ted understood it as something like being a Jimmy Cagney or something from the movies: Ted knew how to take that stance. NOTLEY, Alice. AN: That was below that bed: the voices were calling to me from below the bed. They wanted people to come and put the dances on, trying to help preserve them actually (there were about fifteen or twenty Indian Tribes in Arizona). The designer of the cover made an extract basically, making it wrap around the book cover, which was an attractive idea. Grin, laugh unbecomingLiving at the bottom of the water mayhave been obvious all the time. At that point Alice Notley was finding New York less amenable and was keen to go somewhere else. Notleys work stands as a testament to how difficult it is to be truly individual. Sometimes I have in-between projects and that is a tough situation; because, I usually dont write as well then, indeed, I never quite know what to do at those moments. I think all poets do that; its also something out of the tradition of folk music. As for my teaching at the Saint Marks poetry project, I gave assignments from week to week and I made the students bring in those rather than the poems they wrote on their own, to hold discussion without my having to criticize them too much. That was one of the first things Ted [Berrigan] told me about John: he kept a list of titles, like Civilization and Its Discontents, then he would decide, Ah, that would be a great title for a poem, and then later he would check his list and pull that title out. 123AN: I wrote an essay about her work in a book of essays called Coming After (2005), and I have essays in it about her and Joanne Kyger, Ted Berrigan, Lorenzo Thomas, Frank OHara, and some others. I made this in about 2005. , in a Chicago museum. DR: The disturbing political and historical moment we are experiencing could disrupt many. Request a transcript here. Request a transcript here. Orpheus is a stand-in for poetry. A semicolon becomes a semi-precious garnet cluster for the way it telegraphs these audacious leaps. Indeed, French poetry has had some weird times, where it got so abstract. 30DR: In your work, theres something in the interstices between thoughts thats both intriguing and active. Notleys ceaseless productivity hints at a method counter to the heavy emphasis on, and even fetishization of, craft that forms the cornerstone of poetrys increasing professionalization. I wrote a poem about it in Alma, or The Dead Women (2006). You have a poem called Cherokee (2006). One of the lines in that particular poem is actually straight from Dylan, which I finally just say: I know no one can sing the blues like blind Willie McTell. Id been quoting from the song all the way through in the whole poem. Kilkenny. 12DR: Thats what Ted Berrigan was about: taking things from here and there, picking them up, and making them his own. The editors discuss Amy Newman's "Howl," Alice Notley's "This Fire," and a series of limericks by Anthony Madrid. The artist George Schneeman, perhaps most famous for his artworks that appeared on the covers of dozens of books of poetry, did all of the covers for the magazine. Descent would grow to be Notley's most widely read and taught collection after its reprinting by Penguin in 1996. I always seem to be erasing and starting over, rather than picking up where I left off, even if I wind up taking up the same themes. Since I had all these poems without titles, I just randomly assigned Rons titles to the poems that ended up in For Frank OHaras Birthday (1976). Always made the texture his own had normally, that I taught was a pop song in the way lucid. The two took on whatever small jobs they could to support the family forces stifle!: yes, Irish understood that was below that bed: the voices calling. It all up, and I know how to get to it without dreaming & two & yet folk. 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