doing here? I just sat down and replied, Im a widow; Ive got two children; I know its been a year and a half since my husband died; Im trying to stay at home as much as I can and I have a part-time job (I was working for Allen Ginsberg at the time). She has long written in narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience. 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. One major joy and challenge of reading Notleys work is the wild sense of freedom her poems generate: from line to line, word to word, anything can happen. There werent a lot of cacti where I lived, but there were a lot of bushes. Miles Davis live at Birdland or something. Other possible issues: goofy works, "description," dreams (the new gen), school of Susie Timmons, rejuvenation of the "found work," the "line," how to be like Elinor [Nauen] and Maggie [Dubris], how to cultivate inventiveness, strategies for dry spell, dictionaries, diaries, little plays, calligrams, tiles, left-hand margins, how to get great theories and general self-improvement. Nina Baym. Did it influence you? DR: Its a beautiful indictment of bureaucracies and their inhuman treatment. Logic sees cities destroyed as poems are stolen; a bloodied performer attempts to win over a non-existent audience in Perhaps Not for You. 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). Need a transcript Alice Notley has become one of Americas greatest living poets. 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. And with popularity comes influence: one thinks of the sunny romanticism and Instagram-readiness of Having a Coke with You (the more abstract, difficult side of OHaras work has yet to gain influencer status). MYLES, Eileen. Which gives you bits of advice and instructions. 64AN: He was a good friend. Notley began the magazine to connect with preexisting poet friends and meet new writers on both coasts while living in the midwest. ButI forget. White Phosphorus (1988) and Beginning with a Stain (1987). 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. 40AN: Well, I broke it. His poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in ZYZZYVA, Poetry Northwest, and Sycamore Review. Its possible Im living in the apartment of someone who was taken away to the camps. My mother was always curious and interested. 20DR: Eileen Myles is another poet who comes from an Irish, working-class, New England background and lost her father. Alma, or The Dead Women. The Art of Poetry No. There are passing moments that neednt be dwelled upon, but if youre going to go to war against a couple of countries, I think you merit an accusation of doing just that. DR: He has said that he started doing collages in his twenties and continued throughout his life. 124I also have a vinyl record, its like one of those jazz albums. 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. DR: Indeed, Berrigan and OHara were both Irish names. 30DR: In your work, theres something in the interstices between thoughts thats both intriguing and active. I made this in about 2005. Education: Barnard College, New York, B.A. The poet Heather Christles book, which is built of fragments of varying lengths, examines the science, sociology, and history of weeping. There was pleasure in working with that discovery. What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic. Blinding the White Horse in Front of Me in Certain Magical Acts. 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. Raw language is the final material we have; it is only by shaping and reshaping it that we can hope to rebuild our world. But every time he quoted somebody he misquoted him or her without even knowing it, so he always made the texture his own. The Goddess who created this passing world. This interview took place in Alice Notleys apartment in Paris, in June 2018. Cherokee. Alma, or The Dead Women. Aeneas founded a city, Rome. 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. 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? 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. AN: I use all those units and I am aware of how they overlap. damn whether they eat or not. Also in my poem Disobedience (2001), I got the title in a dream about him. A semicolon becomes a semi-precious garnet cluster for the way it telegraphs these audacious leaps. AN: That was below that bed: the voices were calling to me from below the bed. 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? I would like some help. Whereupon, she just totally melted. In Notleys hands, the free-roving speech of poets like OHara became a new way of exploring the permeability of identity on the page. Ron Padgett. I used to substitute teach for him, sometimes, at Brooklyn College. 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. Wholeness is not the same as unity. , Wesleyan University Press, 2006 (p.292-293), reproduced with permission of the author. . Blinding the White Horse in Front of Me in. Notleys work seems to suggest that correctives to the old narratives are possible but also that real fixity is always out of reach. But Notley, never one to be pinned down, has continued to push poetrys formal constraints, and this pursuit has led her far away from portraits of domestic life. AN: He has complete syntactical thoughts, then he interrupts things at the conjunction. (1954): that book is fantastic; he caught the new line, which he refers to in one of his letters. In 1972, Berrigan and Notley married and moved to Chicago, where they lived until 1976. Your Dailiness. 165 Meeting House Lane. Doug [Oliver] had died, and it was 2001. She was the only woman in her genre and one of two in the entire graduate writing department. DR: There are some lines from your poems, wrought like those in Stein, that one could carry in ones head all day and it would color that day; for example, that thinks but not only on words is one; all thats left of the old world are beautiful voices, is another that might change ones day. 37DR: Historically, painting is central to cultural New York and to New York poetry. Ive noticed it with my granddaughters. My book, (1992) features Robert Desnos and uses patterns from the. 99AN: Frank caught how great Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems (1962) was. 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. 41DR: He has said that he started doing collages in his twenties and continued throughout his life. I grew up among Native Americans. Which is something that John Ashbery would probably have agreed with, in a way. The first time I went there I was completely humiliated by the people working there. KOCH, Kenneth. I would like some help. Whereupon, she just totally melted. Its small and a bit fragile. 82AN: Its not a dance; its a pattern of sounds: its in my voice which I think is sometimes better than singing, when I say the poems. His reviews and interviews have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, and Pleiades. 120DR: He was deeply inspired by the Hindu tradition, which was brave and opens the culture up. DR: Yes, that brings me back to what I was saying earlier about Andr Bretons. The first workshop that I taught was a crucial one for that generation actually. Courtesy of Alice Notley, re-photographed by Daesong Kim, April 2018. Notley's experimentation with poetic form, seen in her books 165 Meeting House Lane, When I Was Alive, The Descent of Alette, and Culture of One, ranges from a blurred line between genres, to a quotation-mark driven interpretation of the variable foot, to a full reinvention of the purpose and potential of strict rhythm and meter. It was Alice Notley who would be in the spring session in 2007. When he died in 2000, Alice Notley was sufficiently settled into Paris to remain there. DR: It seems to be an inspired collage. Ultimately, I am expressing a desire to run into the desert and get some space, the space everybody needs around themselves and unfortunately are not getting. there was a picture of a model with antlers on her head and she was in a fashion show that day on the runwayshe was wearing antlers: it was a premonitory dream. She has long written in narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. Twitter, When I was becoming a poet, folk music was popular; Bob Dylan was getting started; and he was that kind of magpie. We know how inane the decision was that everybody would have a car, completely destroying the planet. For instance this collage that you put on the cover of Grave of Light. Get this from a library! 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. Then I found all the spots around the world in them and talked about them as being set in the world as a whole, saying that was a fitting poetry for now, when were all crossing borders all the time: spanning geography is the main event today, because there are so many people. Table of Contents AN: Well possiblyI take in a lot of things that I dont know about, or that I dont remember. AN: The whole book is about her, actually: she and Medea keep coming back. Then he writes poetry in the variable foot which is a huge influence on my later work. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. I had met him in 1969, then we stayed friends. AN: I do not expect to be well known in the universities because that context tends to be too academic, and generally French poetry is in a bad place. , Montreal: Club Roll, 2012. where you and Eileen Myles read together must count among the great New York School moments still on record. I certainly wouldve used anything to keep from being sent. There is, however, some hope to be found in Millions of Us, which ends We have this project to / change our silence into the beautiful city of a voice. AN: I met him once, Barnett Newman, right before he died. NOTLEY, Alice. Indeed, French poetry has had some weird times, where it got so abstract. Listen to her read and discuss her poems on this episode of Poetry Off the Shelf. Notleys work stands as a testament to how difficult it is to be truly individual. deserve to be there, having their names engraved in that particular way. That piece is from a postcard of a painting of Notre-Dame and evil spirits flying out of it. His zips are like obelisks; theyre like sculptures inside the paintings. WILLIAMs, William Carlos. NOTLEY, Alice. , 1998. Everyone who went there was either black or Hispanic. 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. I am tempted to treat the quotation marks between phrases as breath-markers like on a musical score. Within the text, a woman is desperate to take her daughter above ground, therefore she offers to pay the tyrant money. I grew up with the Mojaves, going to school with them. 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. 57DR: Now I heard you say that the cadences for The Descent of Alette emerged from Monteverdi. If we compare them with painting, they work like the zips in Newmans painting. First, the way the fan that tapers at the top disorients the view, because the fan is supposed to open up, not reduce. Or both but instantly. Alice Notley (born 8 November 1945) is an American poet. Alice Notley was born on November 8, 1945, in Bisbee, Arizona, and grew up in Needles, California. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ill read a part of it: Alice Notley, Where Leftover Misery Goes inGrave of Light, Wesleyan University Press, 2006 (p.292-293), reproduced with permission of the author. The cover of Grave of Light exploring the permeability of identity on the cover of of!, a woman is desperate to take her daughter above ground, therefore she offers to the..., sometimes, at Brooklyn College the text, a woman is desperate to her! Bisbee, Arizona, and grew up in Needles, California November 8 1945! Teach for him, sometimes, at Brooklyn College sees cities destroyed poems! 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