interview (2015) she says that she learned from John Ashbery never to complete a thought, which is a rich idea. 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. The Goddess Who Created This Passing World 47DR: Its incredible because, I just re-read Nadja recently. That is just the beginning. Born: Bisbee, Arizona, 8 November 1945. BAYM, Nina. AN: Yes, towards the end of number fourteen, the last one. Alice Notley (born November 8, 1945) is an American poet. Notleys next book, Mysteries of Small House (1998), is an experiment with the autobiographical mode, in which Notley was firstly trying to realize the first person singular as fully and nakedly as possible. Her subsequent book, Disobedience (2001), heads in the opposite direction, showing disobedience to the notions of truth and reality, featuring comic confrontations with reoccurring characters like Robert Mitch-ham, a man that closely resembles the actor Robert Mitchum. I knew him in New York, where I saw him from time to time; but after I moved here, he sought me out. , Wesleyan University Press, 2006 (p.292-293), reproduced with permission of the author. An introduction to one ofthe most lasting styles of mid-century American poetry. There was a tribe in my home town, the Mojaves. After earning her BA from Barnard College and MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, Notley traveled extensively around the U.S. and abroad. Dismiss. She was educated in the Needles public schools, Barnard College, and The Writers Workshop, University of Iowa. And theres a poem called This Kind of Paradise (1986) where the Hopis suddenly appear in a bureaucratic Food Stamps Office. Grave of Light. Are its voices one or many? Ive never thought of her as a poet: sometimes I think she doesnt know anything about poetry at all. Like somebody live in some city. Which gives you bits of advice and instructions. Then he writes poetry in the variable foot which is a huge influence on my later work. Parts of a Wedding. Is that right? Those are the ones Im working on right now, which have to do with my poetry of the moment. BAYM, Nina. 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.. STEIN, Gertrude. 86AN: The whole book is about her, actually: she and Medea keep coming back. 99: Eileen Myles. The Paris Review. At a certain point I wrote them down every morning; sometimes I do it more than others. Watch Video Here. . Like somebody live in some city. 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. Ed. Indeed, you are often spoken about as an engaged poet, like your late husband, Doug Oliver. The others were like me, though Hispanic and black. The incentives to engage in selfish, destructive action are as strong as they always have been. Thats why my poetry works so well. Early on, I understood that was something you could enjoy doing out of folk music. Chicago European Edition #3. I figured it out afterwards. 88AN: Yes, and that is effectively what the Aeneid, which is certainly a splendid and beautiful poem, does. Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging radical female poets at work today. There was one called How Green Was My Hair Brush? which was a Ron title. To come back to this one, I read it as a kind of. Courtesy of Alice Notley, re-photographed by Daesong Kim, April 2018. 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. I grew up with the Mojaves, going to school with them. 89DR: Right, thats a strong, colonizing streak in Western culture. I used to substitute teach for him, sometimes, at Brooklyn College. I mean sometimes theres a lot of garbage but not usable garbage and so it takes me a long time to get anything made. DR: Also Im coming back often to that poem, In this Paradise, about the food-stamp office. Their apartment at 101 St. Mark's Place again became a hub for both young writers and Berrigan and Notley's contemporaries. Like the Hollywood marriage in this poem, Notley and Berrigans creative partnership was loving, mutually enriching, and, as she shows us here, a bit magical. For three or four years my father danced the Hopi snake dance with a live snake in his mouth. I also have a vinyl record, its like one of those jazz albums. Also in my poem Disobedience (2001), I got the title in a dream about him. I grew up with the Mojaves, going to school with them. All rights reserved. November 2014. 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. My book, (1992) features Robert Desnos and uses patterns from the. In her essay The Poetics of Disobedience, Notley writes, I've been trying to train myself for thirty or forty years not to believe anything anyone tells me. In this apocalyptic, darkly funny, and, indeed, gutsy poem from Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011), Notley indicts logic itselfthe so-called common sense that reduces poetry to gender and experience to the known and erases whole cities in the whirlwind of war. (2006). This independence is radical in a climate in which poets, searching for success, can feel pressured to build a brand, create a strong social-media presence, and write books with conceits that can be summarized in a sentence or two. For some 45 years, she has striven against the forces that stifle idiosyncrasy. 57, no. Miles Davis live at Birdland or something. Need a transcript of this episode? On Facebook, Cars & the variously shod feet were born. Left-wing Radicalism in the United States: A Foreign Creed? In the serious, reflective poem, Your Dailiness (1971), you mention finally understanding Willem de Koonings painting. Its a reasonable question to ask about For the Ride, which begins with a challenge to the reader: Youll have to decipher whats going on, as it happens. I wonder about it later, but actually it always seems like it is justified: I think the people that I mentioned in. 2Although she is a Parisian now, Alice Notley was also a key figure on the Lower Manhattan poetry scene particularly of the late 1970s and the 1980s. Too many The Goddess who created this passing world. DR: Your attitude towards staleness in the academic world, your sensitivity towards these questions of history and politics, indeed your measure and courage for speaking out reminds me of one first-generation New York School poet in particular, Kenneth Koch. The Prophet. How Spring Comes. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. When we moved to Needles, there had been a cry house which was a place where the Mojaves would go to cry when somebody died, and there was now this pile of boards: my mother was completely fascinated by the cry house, thus she would use that phrase; one of the first stories I wrote on route to the University of Iowas Writers Workshop for an MFA as a prose writer was about Needles, concerning a white man who goes to the cry house to cry. For some 45 years, she has striven against the forces that stifle idiosyncrasy. 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. AN: When its around me, I take it in. AN: I dont remember that poem, Syringa, but John tends to pick things out: he used to keep lists of his titles and then he would decide to write the poem of that title. It was reissued in 2021 by the London-based small press Distance No Object. The whole point of the Aeneid is to take away from her the founding of a city, and transform her into this love suicide, and to rob her of her power. So, there were people from all different professions at the table, a few Americans and some artistic peoplebut not that many. 10When I was a young poet, I couldnt figure out what to title anything, and I discussed this with Ted, who said: You should write to Ron Padgett and get a list of titles, which I did; he just made up all these titles for me. 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). French poetry was aimless, became philosophical, though now there are some younger poets that are starting to put the concrete back in, but slowly; I discussed it with French poets a few years ago, who confirmed for me that French poetry became abstract out of trauma from World War II, the occupation, and everything, authors being too traumatized to speak concretely. Grave of light : new and selected poems, 1970-2005. 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. Notley has said that her decision to place the refrain at the beginning of the stanza rather than the end is what allowed her to continue writing the poem. Logic sees cities destroyed as poems are stolen; a bloodied performer attempts to win over a non-existent audience in Perhaps Not for You. Notley came to prominence as a member of the second generation of the New York School of poetryalthough she has always denied being involved with the New York School or any specific movement in general. Alice Notley on her life with Ted Berrigan. Miles Davis live at Birdland or something. I grew up among Native Americans. 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. Which is something that John Ashbery would probably have agreed with, in a way. Ron Padgett. In a swerve from the feminine epic, For the Ride seems to want to speak from a place outside of gender, another shrugging-off of what readers have come to expect from Notley. He would fly to Paris, find me, and we would have dinner; also, he had a group of Paris friends. You know Frank was this little gay guy and Ted was this big, butch, working-class guy from Rhode Island; they were both from New England so there may have been something that he caught off of Franks voice as a vibration, or of Franks way of behaving in the world (I never met him; Ted once gave me permission to call him Frank). She lives and works in Paris. That unusual, horizontal format was probably done to fit the long lines in. Songs And Stories Of The Ghouls. If not, boo hoo. Notley was born in Arizona and grew up in Needles, California. DR: In that book, the heroine is a true medium who can look at someones face and know things, and at the end she is taken off to the asylum; Andr Breton then rails for two pages about how misguided asylums are, which makes your collage seem to be broaching the question of clairvoyance in terms of surrealistic, poetic culture. In 1986, Notley led a workshop where participants were required to write an entire book during the course of their meetings. 69AN: I learned a lot from him on that level. She edited and wrote the introduction for the reissue of Ted Berrigans The Sonnets (2000), as well as editing, with her sons, The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (2005). I use the collages to go on without thinking with words. DR: The disturbing political and historical moment we are experiencing could disrupt many. DR: Yes, that brings me back to what I was saying earlier about Andr Bretons. AN: We were children then, basically. Actually, when I read The Descent of Alette, high-school students get similarly entranced. New York: American Poets Project Library of America, 2004. If we compare them with painting, they work like the zips in Newmans painting. She wound up in a nursing home, the life and soul of the nursing home: a great Irish lady. Its also a passionate entreaty to writers to make work thats completely their own. I wrote a poem about it in. NOTLEY, Alice. Her mother was Polish and her father Irish. There are others over there. Ive never thought of her as a poet: sometimes I think she doesnt know anything about poetry at all. Early on, I understood that was something you could enjoy doing out of folk music. Your heart remembers its pumping. 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 A fairly long poem that Notley generally reads quickly, At Night the States gives the reader a feeling of being pulled through grief and back into life, with irregular syntax signaling the disruption to day-to-day living caused by a great loss. My current process is to write in the morning. There was a piece of paper on my door that said: in your building there were two Jewish children who were taken to the camps; we are going to have a ceremony for the unveiling of a plaque on the rue de Chabrol. 17AN: Yes, they were the two Irish of the set. I can do that with my speaking voice in poems. I was one of his friends in Paris. So, there were people from all different professions at the table, a few Americans and some artistic peoplebut not that many. Cellophane-covered CD. Now there are all these plaques in my neighborhood saying: Here 300 French school children were sent to the camps. I woke up one day. 57, no. Alice Notley wanders through a Paris cemetery and speaks to her dead father about her life in France, where she has lived since 1992. I felt I knew what the cry house was, and had ideas about it: I knew how to use regional things. I have some Cherokee Blood, perhaps one-sixteenth Cherokee. I think that is what she said, because her greatest influence was Henry James: she takes his sense of the sentence and turns it into those stanzas. 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. Lipstick, Queens, 1947 these were things he just wrote down on this list of possible titles. 70DR: Was the teaching of poetry workshops something that connected you to Kenneth Koch? Peggy went to work at two jobs for ever; then there was a point where Johnny, the youngest, had to leave home, and she had a nervous breakdown, which was when I met her. Which is something that John Ashbery would probably have agreed with, in a way. In her earlier work, Notley often incorporated the speech of people around her, particularly her children (as in her masterpiece January). The conjunctions are the most mysterious places in Johns work. Philip Gourevitch. Its not around me much now. The book took its title from the address of their home on Long Island and was published by Berrigan's C Press. Your brain becomes taffy. For your work, from that angle, the place to start would be the collages you make, visual art. DR: Thats what Ted Berrigan was about: taking things from here and there, picking them up, and making them his own. While not directly autobiographical, Sonnet, written in 1976, tells the story of comedian Gracie Allens illness and her husbands efforts to nurse her back to health. Alice Notley, Passeurs de la littrature des tats-Unis en France(1)/ Lhritage de Michel Foucault aux tats-Unis, City Ruins in American War Narratives/ Womens Sites of Struggles for Self-Determination. Reading The Descent of Alette was like listening to Alice Coltrane for fourteen hours while riding the NYC subway at 3AM in the 1980s. DR: Did you like doing it? Humbleflannel skeleton. Est construido en ambas orillas del ro Nore. New York: Scarlet Editions, 1992. There werent a lot of cacti where I lived, but there were a lot of bushes. Im working on arcane things at the moment which I find hard to talk about. AN: Well I grew up in the Southwest. Notley claims it was boring and returned to Iowa City where she met the poet Ted Berrigan who began as an instructor at the school that fall. I like that it's a manuscript and not a book. 38AN: Would you like to see the real collage? 214, fall 2015, p.34-121. Those are the ones Im working on right now, which have to do with my poetry of the moment. AN: You dont have to breathe between them. Theyre beautiful. Through polyvocal poems, vast epic sequences, and world-building vision, Alice Notley 's work for decades has broken through to new possibilities of genre, lyric, contact, and time. In addition to collections of poetry, Notley has published the autobiography Tell Me Again (1982), the play Annes White Glove (1985), and a book of essays on poets and poetry, Coming After (2005). It seems nobody has any sense of tone of voice any more. And its influenced by dactylic hexameter. I was one of his friends in Paris. That piece is from a postcard of a painting of Notre-Dame and evil spirits flying out of it. It was a collaboration of sorts, though I generally do not collaborate; I really hate it. There were four kids, including a couple still at home. She was 88had just got back upand I was so inspired by how she got back up that I wrote that poem; I also wrote Blinding the White Horse in Front of Me (2016) basically in the same spurt of energy. I didnt know any French; I had no French when I came here, basically, in my late forties. [4] Notley's second book, Phoebe Light, was published in 1973 by Bill Berkson's Bolinas-based press Big Sky.[5]. DR: In your work, theres something in the interstices between thoughts thats both intriguing and active. He gave everybody permission to be funny. Notley left Needles for New York City to attend Barnard College in 1963, desiring an escape from the isolation of her hometown. Among her two newest volumes are Eurynomes Sandals (Presses Universitaires de Rouen, 2019) and For the Ride (Penguin Books, 2020). how to express it. 76AN: Well I grew up in the Southwest. NOTLEY, Alice. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. Edwin Denby made his name as a dance critic, but his poetry was a pivotal influence on the writers and artists of the New York School. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. 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