Notleys work seems to suggest that correctives to the old narratives are possible but also that real fixity is always out of reach. dreams. . My parents were from Arizona. In the mixed abstractions of a mid-eighties poem called Congratulating Wedge, Notley turns instability into strength: Im ashamed to keep on babblingas if Ive always been oneself,diamond flow through. The sense of something escaping is well illustrated by your poem, Where Leftover Misery Goes, among others. The Prophet. How Spring Comes. Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice is an imagined rebuke by Beat writer Jack Kerouac of his biographers, many of whom focused on the lurid and sensational details of his personal life rather than the importance and impact of his writing. AN: I met him once, Barnett Newman, right before he died. 4. 107DR: Lets see, arrive the exactitude of pitch the tune in words alone; thats In the Pines too. I can do that with my speaking voice in poems. My mother had broken her hip. AN: He was a good friend. The Indie rock group, (2005), collects a series of sensitive essays she wrote about her own poetry and that of others from her poetic. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979, p. 911-1772. was influenced by my autobiographical book that almost won the Pulitzer Prize. NOTLEY, Alice. 120DR: He was deeply inspired by the Hindu tradition, which was brave and opens the culture up. to get there. 75DR: Speaking of Anne Waldman somehow makes me think of the presence of Native Americans in your work. To come back to this one, I read it as a kind of danse macabre because theres something resembling skulls going on here with the top of the fan supports. The Indians said: No, we wont do it, but we will send people to teach them to you. The tribes then would send the people to Prescott, and every year they would teach these businessmen dances. AN: We were all doing them. She distrusts change. Alice Notley is an extraordinary reader of her own work, which, in the last year, she has read in the U.S.A. (Providence, R.I., and Brooklyn, N.Y.), in the U.K. (Birmingham), and in France (The Pompidou Center, Paris). The first time I went there I was completely humiliated by the people working there. 38AN: Would you like to see the real collage? I would write during that high, meanwhile I would listen to Bob Dylan tapes. The poem is addressed, at least in part, to Berrigan, who died in 1983, and the speaker longs to make sense of a country without him in it. The indeterminacy, one suspects, is the point. The artist Rudy Burckhardt once wrote that Notley may be "our present-day Homer." My collages actually reflect the situation of overabundance. In the case of John Ashbery, theres a poem called Syringa (1977) with an Orphean motif. Alice Notley continues to live in Paris and makes frequent trips to the U.S. to give readings and lectures. I think its just all out there. Twitter, The Man in the Long Black Coat, (1989) by Bob Dylan influenced the sound of the first two parts, which I wrote last. Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright. 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. Notley's early work laid both formal and theoretical groundwork for several generations of poets; she is considered a pioneering voice on topics like motherhood and domestic life. Alice Notley: Im from the desert which I found intensely attractive as nature, and its my nature reallyI havent been back in six years but I love. 92AN: She was great. The Indie rock group AroarA put music to her fascinating piece, In the Pines (2007). STEIN, Gertrude. She wound up in a nursing home, the life and soul of the nursing home: a great Irish lady. To quote: If its a spiritual offense does it as wrongdoing take place more in more in the second leftover/ as a leftover and is the significance of the double now that I might be might the /one who offends Have you heard it read? I didnt know any French; I had no French when I came here, basically, in my late forties. New York: TPR, 2009, p.174-202. Did it influence you? 67My poem The Prophet (1981) is based on his poem Some General Instructions (1971). I went downstairs. I was wondering if your poems that address completely despicable people might be a case of carrying the enemy on the shoulder. For the Ride skirts the edge of that story-sense. AN: No, never: when I address enemies, I am not carrying them on my shoulder; Im being intensely annoyed by them. NOTLEY, Alice. DR: I think he interrupts the thought, but the thought he interrupts keeps going. She is the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry, including Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); Disobedience (Penguin, 2001, winner of the Griffin Prize); and Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, which received the Lenore Marshall I learned everything from the variable foot from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.. Notley gave birth to her and Berrigan's second child, Edmund Berrigan, at Colchester Hospital in 1974. 96DR: Well I think of Williams as a kind of Calder mobile waiting to enter into movement. 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. Reading The Descent of Alette was like listening to Alice Coltrane for fourteen hours while riding the NYC subway at 3AM in the 1980s. Its not around me much now. I would like some help. Whereupon, she just totally melted. The word, the line, and also the stanza. Teds father worked for the Tip-Top Bread factory and died when he was fifty of a heart attack, after being laid off due to mechanization. I grew up among Native Americans. 64AN: He was a good friend. Lipstick, Queens, 1947 these were things he just wrote down on this list of possible titles. Alma, or The Dead Women. They would go out in the Hopi pueblo and get whatever snakes there were around, and a quarter would be rattlers, but in Prescott, they only used bull snakes. 22DR: Like Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman reading at Saint Marks church their collaborative poem, Memorial Day (May 6, 1971), that episode of Public Access Television, June 16, 1977, where you and Eileen Myles read together must count among the great New York School moments still on record. Request a transcript here. New York: TPR. And theres a poem called This Kind of Paradise (1986) where the Hopis suddenly appear in a bureaucratic Food Stamps Office. My favorite is how to cure an octopus: you go fishing, get an octopus, and you beat it against a rock. 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? I think all poets do that; its also something out of the tradition of folk music. Thats why my poetry works so well. She met the poetTed Berrigan, and the couple lived in Southampton, New York (in the garage of painter Larry Rivers); Manhattan; Providence, Rhode Island; and Bolinas, California. That particular poem is in your selected poems, in, , and it was presented upright on the page, but it was published in a review called. , Wesleyan University Press, 2006 (p.292-293), reproduced with permission of the author. Of her 1983 workshop, Notley wrote: I expect my workshop will be similar to past Alice Notley workshops: same old format, assignments, xeroxes, forms, occasions, geometries, kinds of poems, speculations on and practice of the lofty and the silly. The first time I went there I was completely humiliated by the people working there. Ruth Lilly Prize winner Alice Notley on the voice and spirits of her poetry. Aeneas founded a city, Rome. I just sat in here and wrote about Allen and the international aspect of his work. 70DR: Was the teaching of poetry workshops something that connected you to Kenneth Koch? I started noticing my dreams before I met Ted [Berrigan], but he used his dreams, and I just started doing it more after I was with him; then, after he died I did it even more. damn whether they eat or not. Perpetually strapped for cash, the two took on whatever small jobs they could to support the family. As in I the People, the speaker in this masterpiece questions the relationship between person and nation and between private and publicbut this time in the face of great personal loss. [2], After Notley's graduation, she and Berrigan spent periods of time in New York City and Buffalo. In response, another woman informs: "'he . In this Poem Talk podcast devoted to this poem, it is read as a sort of non-political political poem, bringing the personal into the public. She made one change when she worked for James Schuyler, and she adopted a version of his short line, though after that theres little change, except a few years ago, when she started putting in spaces between thoughts: in a new way she created some disjunction she had never had before. There are others over there. The books were published under the imprint Unimproved Editions and Notley made cover art for the majority of the titles. There's an unfinishedness. Its deliberate, in order to find something out. McKinley. Education: Barnard College, New York, B.A. Is that right? She was married the British poet Douglas Oliver until his death in 2000. Their apartment at 101 St. Mark's Place again became a hub for both young writers and Berrigan and Notley's contemporaries. So, there were people from all different professions at the table, a few Americans and some artistic peoplebut not that many. The two worked on two magazines together, Gare du Nord and Scarlet, and self-published a compendium of their own books, The Scarlet Cabinet, which contained Notley's Descent of Alette. And that other one was something I just picked up from the sidewalk. A passage from For the Ride (2020), by Alice Notley. The poetry community in Bolinas was particularly strong at the time, withJoanne Kyger,Philip Whalen,Bill Berkson,Robert Creeley, and Bobbie Louise Hawkins all among its residents. 18DR: The conversation has veered far from Needles, which I hope we will return to, as we evoke various social spaces that seep into the poems. I dont know anything about French pop culture at all; Im necessarily estranged from American pop culture, but I do sometimes know whats going on in music. In his humorous anti-manifesto, Personism, the poet Frank OHara discloses one of arts great truths: you just go on your nerve. Considering this truth, he wonders, But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. In the search for immediacy, he writes, questions of accessibility can come to seem pointless: Improves them for what? 111DR: To go on with my list: We are secretly holding the ghost dance, take care of the pines where we sleep, I have the Antlers she.. In 1986, Notley led a workshop where participants were required to write an entire book during the course of their meetings. DR: With your interpolation of popular culture into epic poetry, I would expect you to be a household name here in France. Her mother was Polish and her father Irish. How Spring Comes I would give a task often based on traditional forms, or I would get an idea for a subject; and sometimes I used Kenneths books, because he was writing all those books then about teaching in nursing homes and to groups of small children. (1945) a couple of years ago because she was being bashed in the States again: they were underlining her Vichy connections in order to make her into a kind of villain, without any regard for how difficult it must have been: a lesbian living with another lesbian, in her sixties, in a country that wasnt her own country, Jewish, thus a prime candidate for the camps. ALICE NOTLEY has published more than twenty collections of poems. Her poems have also been compared to Gertrude Stein, as well as her contemporary Bernadette Mayer. ALICE NOTLEY has been hailed as one of the United States's greatest living poets.She is the author of more than 25 books of poetry and the recipient of numerous awards, including, most recently . First, the way the fan that tapers at the top disorients the view, because the fan is supposed to open up, not reduce. 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). 94AN: I use all those units and I am aware of how they overlap. If this poem demonstrates her abiding interest in metaphysics, it also speaks to the immediate political realities of being a woman writer. Where Leftover Misery Goes. Robert Haas, Guest Editor, The Best American Poetry of 2001. She made one change when she worked for James Schuyler, and she adopted a version of his short line, though after that theres little change, except a few years ago, when she started putting in spaces between thoughts: in a new way she created some disjunction she had never had before. From this anarchic swirl, brilliant language emerges: Color sizzles my cells, a subversive moon appears, and a moment of playing the dulcimer / in a lemon grove startles. . . Alice Eliza Harvey Expand search. 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. Death, grief, and spirituality were terrain that the fast talk of New York School poetics hadnt fully engaged; so, too, was the political and feminist consciousness growing in Notleys work. In an important essay titled The Poetics of Disobedience, Notley says this shift began with her book The Descent of Alette (1992). She was in my workshop. From her early days in the male-dominated New York School, Notleys work has been persistently, fiercely feminist, and this poems matter-of-fact mythmakingthe world it describes is ourspresages her later efforts to write women into the Homeric tradition. DR: Speaking of Anne Waldman somehow makes me think of the presence of Native Americans in your work. 26DR: In her Paris Review interview (2015) she says that she learned from John Ashbery never to complete a thought, which is a rich idea. They bring to mind the French tradition of Guillaume Apollinaires Calligrams (Notley has lived in Paris since the nineties), and their playfulness brings some relief to the poems voyaging. : well I think he interrupts keeps going the exactitude of pitch the tune in words alone ; in. Death in 2000, as well as her contemporary Bernadette Mayer Lets see, arrive exactitude... Ride skirts the edge of that story-sense the Hindu tradition, which was brave and opens the culture up always. 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