Alice Notley
Born:
November 8, 1945 in Bisbee, Arizona
Years Active:
1970 80 90 2000
Genre/Movement:
The New York School, was an Avant Garde artistic movement that took place in Lower East Side 1960s through the late 80s. Influenced by surrealism, modernism and abstract art (the poets) often used their poems as vehicles to explore the serious side of everyday life, often with a good dose of irony and sarcasim.
Moods:
confrontational:
"...I'm telling the truth. I'm going to tell it
anyone's: that never being what anyone thought
I never cared what anyone thought
as long as I could go home, and resume my work--am I
back in the door?"
cynical:“is it fate that women have been in such a fix for thousands of years?” “no, men did that.”“the sky has been selected it belongs to men who say what it is.”
epic:“she made a form” “in her mind” “an imaginary” “form” “to
settle” “in her arms where” “the baby” “had been” “We saw
her fi ery arms” “cradle air” “She cradled air” (“They take your
children” “away” “if you’re on fire”)
“In the air that” “she cradled” “it seemed to us there” “floated”
“a flower-like” “a red flower” “its petals” “curling flames”
“She cradled” “seemed to cradle” “the burning flower of”
“herself gone”
“her life” (“She saw” “whatever she saw, but what we saw”
“was that flower”)
rebellious:
...I may be making erotic art near the red telephone
that connects Ted to his mother dying of cancer
I cut out photos of nude women and place them on food signs
Chicken Pot Pie. Why--because I want to save
the women in the photos, so make them humor-filled or
truly connected to the fountainhead of sex as I imagine it...The women don't
approve the men do I ignore them but this is minor I want
to be there to describe the harmony between the fact
that I make these collages and write "Waltzing Matilda"
that and the red phone to Peg..."
realist:Is there a right and wrong poetry, one might
still ask as I patronize,
retrospectively, the Iowa style,
characterized, as I remember,
by the assumption of desperation
boredom behind two-story houses
divorce, incomes field, pigs,
getting into pants, well not really....
Influences:
Dorothy Miller Richardson
Dada
French surrealism
Edwin Denby
William Carlos Williams*
Faulkner
Robert Creely
Gertrude Stein*
* Both Poets, Gertude Stein and W.C.W. wrote to express their own voices by experimenting with free verse.
Like Stein, Notley writes from a feminist perspective and also employs a tactic called by Gertude Stein "‘repetition with difference’: which is the use of repeated phrases that evolve, through a series of minimalist alterations, away from sameness into difference," which is used throughout The Descent of Alette, Notley's First Feminist Epic. Additionally both poets have written about their experimentation with punctuation and grammar, in their work. Stein in Poetry and Grammar and Notley in the Poetics of Disobedience.
W.C.W. was apart of the modernist literary movement who wanted to create a new American form that used American speech and idioms that focused on common people and everyday occurrences. Although his influence can be seen in many of Notley's poems as well as other NYS, W.C.W. enjoyed form and the use of interplay within it, unlike Notley who is adamant in her distaste for rules and structure.
Similar Artists:
Anne Waldman
Barbara Guest
Frank O'Hara*
James Schuyler
Phillip Whalen
John Ashbery
Kenneth Koch
Ron Padgett
Ted Berrigan*
Bernadette Mayer
Alice married Ted Berrigan in 1972, living and working with him until his death in 1983, they worked together in the Poetry Project. Alice has also been quoted saying that they spent their time writing together in their home and raising their two children. Both poets wrote according to the NYS approach, using speech based language to describe the world around them.
Frank O' Hara was another contemporary of Alice's from the NYS, that she often referenced in her own poems, such as when she imagines that she borrows, O'Hara's seer sucker jacket that he borrowed from "Joe." In addition to referencing her friend, Notley writes in a manner that O'Hara's suggest in his Personism- tongue and cheek manifesto-to "just go with your nerve." Both artists seemed to have take pleasure in throwing out the rules of academia in favor for their own personal voices to shine through.
Followers:
Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles, studied under Notley in the Poetry Project Workshop at St. Mark's Church and often visited her and Ted at their house in Lower East Side, later becoming the artistic Director of The Poetry Project in the 80s. Although she is considered apart of the NYS second generation, Myles is more widely known as apart of the punk and art scene of Manhattans East Village. Again, Myles is also a poet who writes in speech based lines and stanzas, but chooses to write about the struggles of working class lesbians, engaging her readers with the the private through a style, like Notley that constantly changes but remains true to her subject.
Biography:
Alice Notley was born in November of 1945, in Bisbee Arizona. In 1967 she received her B.A. from Barnard College and in 1969 recovered her M.F.A. from the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. From the 1970s and into the early 90s Notley was a significant fixture of the second generation of the New York School, running workshops for The Poetry Project as a mentor and publishing 18 books of poetry. After the death of her first husband Ted Berrigan another New York School poet, Notley moved to Paris with her two children and later married British poet Douglas Oliver.
Like many of the poets from the New York School’s second generation Notley favored a quotidian approach to poetics, a style deeply influenced by Williams Carlos Williams, in which she structured her stanzas to mimic speech patterns as a way to emphasize the “epic in the everyday”.
Although Notley has always emphasized speech-oriented poetics, she distanced herself from the everyday epic of the NYS when she moved to Paris. She then began experimenting writing long feminist epics that explore female sexuality while trying to build the works of male literary artists to recognize a female voice in poetry. By writing about things such as the pregnant body, babies and other parts of daily her daily life that was never written by male voices. Notley in her own words continues to Disobey established writing practices, through juxtaposition, such as placing dialogue next to surrealistic images in the same line, and refusing to cater to her readership as she continues to explore new styles of writing that suites the subject of her poems.
Discography:
* 165 Meeting House Lane (1971)
* Phoebe Light (1973)
* Incidentals in the Day World (1973)
* For Frank O'Hara's Birthday (1976)
* Alice Ordered to Be Made (1976)
* A Diamond Necklace (1977)
* Songs for the Unborn Second Baby (1979)
1980's
* Dr. Williams' Heiresses (1980)
* When I Was Alive (1980)
* How Spring Comes (1980)
* Waltzing Matilda (1981)
* Tell Me Again (1982)
* Sorrento (1984)
* Margaret & Dusty (1985)
* Parts of a Wedding (1986)
* At Night the States (1988)
* From a Work in Progress (1988)
1990's
* Homer's Art (1990)
* To Say You (1993)
* Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993)
* Close to Me and Closer...(The Language of Heaven) and Desamere (1995)
* The Descent of Alette (1996)
* Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) (winner of the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry)
2000's
* Disobedience (2001) (winner of the 2002 International Griffin Poetry Prize)
* From the Beginning (2004)
* Coming After (2005)
* Alma, or the Dead Women (2006)
* Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (2006) (winner of the 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize)
* In the Pines (2007)
Works Consulted:
Wikepedia, poets.org,allmusic.com, poetryfondation.org, poetrysociety.org, thenation.com, Women, the New York School, And Other Abstractions by Maggie Nelson, Disobedience Speech by Alice Notley, Poetry and Grammar 1935 by Gertrude Stein, The American Poetry Review, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies-" An Especially Peculiar Undertaking': Alice Notley's Epic
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