Research Guides (LibGuides): Visiting Writers' Series LibGuide: Alice Notley

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Alice Notley

Notley was born in Arizona and grew up in Needles, California. After earning her BA from Barnard College and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Notley traveled extensively around the U.S. and abroad. She met the poet Ted Berrigan, and the couple lived in Southampton, New York (in the garage of painter Larry Rivers); Manhattan; Providence, Rhode Island; and Bolinas, California. The poetry community in Bolinas was particularly strong at the time, with Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, Bill Berkson, Robert Creeley, and Bobbie Louise Hawkins all among its residents. In 1972, Berrigan and Notley married and moved to Chicago, where they lived until 1976. She had two sons with him, the poets Edmund and Anselm Berrigan.

Active in the New York poetry scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Notley is often identified with the Second Generation New York School poets, though her work resists any period classification. In an interview with the Kenyon Review, Notley noted: “I think I try with my poems to create a beginning space. 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. This is probably one reason that I change form and style so much, out of a desire to find a new beginning, which is always the true beginning.”

Notley is the author of over 40 books of poetry, including 165 Meeting House Lane (1971), Phoebe Light (1973), Incidentals in the Day World (1973), For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday (1976), Alice Ordered Me to Be Made: Poems 1975 (1976), Dr. Williams’ Heiresses (1980), How Spring Comes (1981), which received the San Francisco Poetry Award, Waltzing Matilda (1981), Margaret & Dusty (1985), From a Work in Progress (1988), Homer’s Art (1990), To Say You (1993), Selected Poems of Alice Notley (1993), The Descent of Alette (1996), among many others. Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and her collection Disobedience (2001) was awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Notley’s 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).

Source: “Alice Notley.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alice-notley.

In the Pines by Alice Notley
ISBN: 9780143112549
Publication Date: 2007-10-02
A bold and strikingly original new work from one of America's greatest living poets Alice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.
Mysteries of Small Houses by Alice Notley
ISBN: 0140588965
Publication Date: 1998-06-01
Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant new collection of poems that charts her growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist. In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative renderings of the American landscape, circa 1950. Likewise, her coming of age as a poet in the turbulent sixties is evoked through the era's angry, creative energy. As she looks backward with the perspective that time and age allows, Notley ably captures the immediacy of youth's passion while offering her own dry-eyed interpretations of the events of a life lived close to the bone. Like the colorful collages she assembles from paper and other found materials, Notley erects structures of image and feeling to house the memories that swirl around her in the present.In their feverish, intelligent renderings of moments both precise and ephemeral, Notley's poems manage to mirror and transcend the times they evoke. Her profound tributes to the stages of her life and to the identities she has assumed--child, youth, lover, poet, wife, mother, friend, and widowmdash;are remarkable for their insight and wisdom, and for the courage of their unblinking gaze.
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls by Alice Notley
ISBN: 9780819571533
Publication Date: 2011-11-15
An epic poem of genocide, designed to create power for the dead Left dead after our cultures were broken by triumphant enemies, our stories changed to suit others. We now change them again to suit ourselves. Songs and Stories of the Ghouls purports to give power to the dead--voices to the victims of genocide both ancient and contemporary--and presence to women. Medea did not kill her sons; Dido founds a city, over and over again, the city of the present author's poetry. In these poems the poet asserts that though her art comes from a tradition as broken as Afghanistan's statuary, there is always a culture to pass on to one's children, and one is always involved in doing so. We are the ghouls, the drinkers of the blood-sacs, and we insist that we are alive.

Visiting Writers' Series LibGuide: Alice Notley

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