In Notleys hands, the free-roving speech of poets like OHara became a new way of exploring the permeability of identity on the page. The indeterminacy, one suspects, is the point. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothque de La Pliade, 1988, p. 643-753. AN: Yes, towards the end of number fourteen, the last one. I was wondering if your poems that address completely despicable people might be a case of carrying the enemy on the shoulder. I knew that I was also doing something like what they used to talk about in college: the taking of two disjunctive things then the jamming of them together: that was part of our critical education at the time; in fact, John Ashbery would have had it too, probably, though he was twenty years older than I was. I knew that I was also doing something like what they used to talk about in college: the taking of two disjunctive things then the jamming of them together: that was part of our critical education at the time; in fact, John Ashbery would have had it too, probably, though he was twenty years older than I was. But people often say that Marianne Moore writes with the whole sentence. 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. New York: Unimproved Editions, 1986. And that other one was something I just picked up from the sidewalk. 73DR: Did you like doing it? DR: I wouldnt be able to take the journey if I couldnt hear the poem.. The Goddess Who Created This Passing World Were you and he on the same wavelength politically? I didnt know any French; I had no French when I came here, basically, in my late forties. . Poems and prose about conflict, armed conflict, and poetry's role in shaping perceptions and outcomes of war. Eileen was in it, as was Bob Holman. Lipstick, Queens, 1947 these were things he just wrote down on this list of possible titles. While Notley had written on motherhood prior to Songs, this book was her first to focus fully on the matter and is the first full-length book of a New York School-affiliated poet to take on the task of addressing poetry's sexism and the pressures and setbacks of motherhood in both personal and creative life. Thats what Ive done ever since in different ways. Notley moved frequently in her youth (e.g., San Francisco, Bolinas, London, Essex, Chicago) and eventually married the . First, the way the fan that tapers at the top disorients the view, because the fan is supposed to open up, not reduce. DR: But she came already with a great talent, right, she started out extremely strong. 74AN: Well, you learn a lot from teaching, at the beginning. I dreamed about the children afterwards, you know, there were children being chased in this building. But although it feels dashed-off, OHaras essay is more than fashionable flash. New York: Scarlet Editions, 1992. Ron Padgett. Aeneas founded a city, Rome. But it goes Of asphodel, that greeny flower I come my sweet to sing. Its a long line that can take in short lines, which I did in, . Notley's 1985 play "Anne's White Glove," a commission by Ada Katz's Eye and Ear Theater navigated the pain of Berrigan's death, and her collections Margaret & Dusty (Coffee House, 1985), Parts of a Wedding (Unimproved Editions, 1986), and At Night the States (The Yellow Press, 1987) contain material written during a period of mourning. It always felt to me like I was enacting ideas that visual artists had normally, that I was figuring it out. 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. I think I know how to do things with my voice that are entirely musical. Ed. 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. I the People . 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). . 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. Its not around me much now. NOTLEY, Alice. In this interview, she mentions other New York Poets (John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Frank OHara, Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, Eileen Myles, Anne Waldman, Joe Brainard, Allan Ginsberg, and Bernadette Mayer). I applied pressure so that the brokenness would have the shape I wanted; then I think I made the back part separately and decided to glue the fan on it. There were various famous people now that were in it like Susie Timmons. 95For me, Williams mostly writes by the word. In these poems, as in much of Notleys work, details from daily life enter in fragments that can be both entertaining and jarringly serious. His zips are like obelisks; theyre like sculptures inside the paintings. NOTLEY, AliceNationality: American. 66AN: I started to be quite influenced by him at that point, and I think I influenced him in the writing of the book New Addresses: Poems, published in 2000. Her last collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. I think all poets do that; its also something out of the tradition of folk music. DR: What do you think of Gertrude Stein and of the kind of permutations she does: almost like rolling things around in your mouth? 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. 110AN: 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. Its filthy; I dont remember how I got that torn princess; but that bird was in a book; you see that phrase there marks what I was barred from: so the thing to see is that Im in jail and they wont let me into the Htel des Grands Hommes. Which is the Panthon. Your Dailiness. 165 Meeting House Lane. 25AN: Yes, and she hasnt changed much. These ideas are all very tangible, yet somewhat unconnected when conversed about and referred to. and Laurence B. HOLLAND. But he also gave us a new way to think about nature itself. Are its voices one or many? Alice Notleys influence on a later generation of poets exploring the subject of motherhood is hard to overstate. I thought that that printing added something, though: I enjoyed turning the book to read the poem. NOTLEY, Alice. When he died in 2000, Alice Notley was sufficiently settled into Paris to remain there. 62I am furious about people calling their speech against Trump the resistance. However, I have a poem, which happened to be written before Trump was elected, in an anti-Trump-type anthology thats coming out because I figure any place I can get a poem published is an occasion to seize. 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. The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne. I had this education, so I could have been doing something else but did not want to, was animated by a desire to write poetry, which is truly valuable: I was writing peoples culture for the future. She also experimented with channeling spirits of deceased loved ones, primarily men gone from her life like her father and her husband, poet Ted Berrigan, and used these conversations as topics and form on her poetry. 23AN: We were children then, basically. hard and deeply about each part as I go along. 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. The conjunctions are the most mysterious places in Johns work. I like that it's a manuscript and not a book. 114AN: To quote Jack Kerouac, avoid the authorities. If you have the talent you have to avoid them. All these disjunctions allow her work to be so radically personal; for example, this poem is at once a portrait of a mind in motion, a raw depiction of motherhood, a critique of patriarchal sexual politics, and a meditation on the sudden arrival of joy. Notleys language is, as ever, mystifying: in lines fluid yet clipped, interior yet discursive, she turns the idea of independence inside out to discover its seams. Death is for a moment, beauty is for all time, about World War II and people being away at the war. McKinley. Courtesy of Alice Notley, re-photographed by Daesong Kim, April 2018. 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? Perhaps the greatest OHara disciple in this sense is the poet Alice Notley, who, in the course of forty-plus years and forty-plus books, has repeatedly cited OHara as an influence while following her own unconventional path. You have a poem called Cherokee (2006). 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. Notley's elegiac work during this era, including her poems "Beginning With a Stain" and "At Night the States," is some of her most widely celebrated. Notley. 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. 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. Instead of second-guessing their style, we could talk about the way they handled the tasks. AN: I read it when I was about twenty-three, in English. 6David Reckford: Among the physical, cultural, and intellectual environments that have formed your particular sensitivity, there seems to be several strong and contrasting places. AN: No, never: when I address enemies, I am not carrying them on my shoulder; Im being intensely annoyed by them. [citation needed]. David Reckford: Among the physical, cultural, and intellectual environments that have formed your particular sensitivity, there seems to be several strong and contrasting places. She lives and works in Paris. As is often written in her biographical notes, "she has never tried to be anything other than a poet," and with over forty books and chapbooks and several major awards, she is one of the most prolific and lauded American poets today. In fact he taught the same undergraduate classes for years and years, refusing to teach graduate students becausehe saidthey couldnt learn anything, were already set in their ways. NOTLEY, Alice. American Literature between the Wars, 1914-1945. Gen. Ed. Cellophane-covered CD. Notley remained fairly prolific during this era, writing and publishing several full-length collections. Some have linked Notley's geographical move to Parissince it followed a period of intensely personal writingas also marking a creative distance between herself and her poems, though her books Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998) and Culture of One (Penguin, 2011) engage very much with personal matter. She was educated in the Needles public schools, Barnard College, and The Writer's Workshop, University of Iowa. In the case of John Ashbery, theres a poem called Syringa (1977) with an Orphean motif. [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. In New York, the poets you met were mostly all from somewhere else (except for a few of them like Bill Berkson and Kenward Elmslie). My collages actually reflect the situation of overabundance. In the serious, reflective poem, Your Dailiness (1971), you mention finally understanding Willem de Koonings painting. 70DR: Was the teaching of poetry workshops something that connected you to Kenneth Koch? In 1999, Notley was both a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. 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). 214, fall 2015, p.34-121. In fact, the strong memories of starting points, including the vegetation, you just evoked link you to your New York School entourage. Particularly the middle one. 115DR: Also Im coming back often to that poem, In this Paradise, about the food-stamp office. 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. vol. Just like I did. The jacket copy attempts to sketch the books plot: the protagonist, named One, is suddenly within the Glyph. 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