DR: Was the teaching of poetry workshops something that connected you to Kenneth Koch? Need a transcript of this episode? Ive always had trouble getting materials here. 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. She is the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry, includingMysteries of Small Houses(Penguin, 1998, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize);Disobedience(Penguin, 2001, winner of the Griffin Prize); andGrave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. We know how inane the decision was that everybody would have a car, completely destroying the planet. Need a transcript of this episode? 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. Early on, I understood that was something you could enjoy doing out of folk music. Do you remember when he wrote the second The Circus? Which is something that John Ashbery would probably have agreed with, in a way. Its refreshing to read poetry so dedicated to its own ends, even if they are occasionally inscrutable. A calligram by Guillaume Apollinaire, from La Petite Auto (1918). NOTLEY, Alice. 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. 86AN: The whole book is about her, actually: she and Medea keep coming back. Its flowing world is populated by characters who seem to personify indeterminate pronouns (like a shaman named Qui) and theres a general defiance of set categories: and if one who renews refuses / gender? [1] [2] The poem is notable for Notley's extensive use of quotation marks throughout, which she has described as part of her attempt to reclaim the narrative function. In the case of John Ashbery, theres a poem called Syringa (1977) with an Orphean motif. When 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. First, the way the fan that tapers at the top disorients the view, because the fan is supposed to open up, not reduce. I used to substitute teach for him, sometimes, at Brooklyn College. Notleys work seems to suggest that correctives to the old narratives are possible but also that real fixity is always out of reach. STEIN, Gertrude. 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.. Alice Notleys father doing the Hopi snake dance. I wonder about it later, but actually it always seems like it is justified: I think the people that I mentioned in. DR: The conversation has veered far from Needles, which I hope we will return to, as we evoke various social spaces that seep into the poems. It was Alice Notley who would be in the spring session in 2007. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006. . Frank had a characteristic, manly idea of existing in the world despite what you might call his femininity, and I think that Ted understood it as something like being a Jimmy Cagney or something from the movies: Ted knew how to take that stance. 41DR: He has said that he started doing collages in his twenties and continued throughout his life. To Annapurna or Mt. In that sad, beautiful book, theres so much irony, whereas some literary critics take everything at face value. Miles Davis live at Birdland or something. Those are the ones Im working on right now, which have to do with my poetry of the moment. Notley moved frequently in her youth (e.g., San Francisco, Bolinas, London, Essex, Chicago) and eventually married the . 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. He gave everybody permission to be funny. Scenes, tones, and pronouns shift without warning. DR: Speaking of Anne Waldman somehow makes me think of the presence of Native Americans in your work. In 2015, she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. New York: TPR, 2009, p.174-202. But people often say that Marianne Moore writes with the whole sentence. This guy is doing vinyl records of poets and hes done a series including one of me and one of Eileen [Myles]. Indeed, French poetry has had some weird times, where it got so abstract. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. AN: You dont have to breathe between them. 23AN: We were children then, basically. was influenced by my autobiographical book that almost won the Pulitzer Prize. Revue dtudes amricaines. Mayer and Notley both used their experience as mothers and wives in their work. I grew up with the Mojaves, going to school with them. 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. American Studies Journal, AccueilNumros1ReconnaissancesInterview of Alice Notley. But I met himI met everybodyaround 1968. I knew him in New York, where I saw him from time to time; but after I moved here, he sought me out. Theres a poem where you talk about meeting Teds mother. In the serious, reflective poem, Your Dailiness (1971), you mention finally understanding Willem de Koonings painting. She wound up in a nursing home, the life and soul of the nursing home: a great Irish lady. Alice Notley has become one of America's greatest living poets. Grave of light : new and selected poems, 1970-2005. But people often say that Marianne Moore writes with the whole sentence. I was wondering if your poems that address completely despicable people might be a case of carrying the enemy on the shoulder. 116AN: I was there. 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. AN: He was a good friend. Automatically inside their apartment, you don't have. 120DR: He was deeply inspired by the Hindu tradition, which was brave and opens the culture up. They really like The Descent of Alette, because its like a video game. 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). Notley was born on November 8, 1945 in Bisbee, Arizona and grew up in Needles, California. There was a black woman at a desk when I went in who said, What are you 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). I would like some help. Whereupon, she just totally melted. It seemed that people like Joe Brainard were doing important, high-art collages and we could follow along without any pretention to be creating masterpieces. , Wesleyan University Press, 2006 (p.292-293), reproduced with permission of the author. Ron Padgett. 31AN: This poem was later published in Reason and Other Women (2010). 30DR: In your work, theres something in the interstices between thoughts thats both intriguing and active. 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. His poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in ZYZZYVA, Poetry Northwest, and Sycamore Review. Nadja, in uvres compltes, tome 1. She wound up in a nursing home, the life and soul of the nursing home: a great Irish lady. Ad Choices. At that point Alice Notley was finding New York less amenable and was keen to go somewhere else. 19AN: Peggy was great and, yes, Irish. New York: Granary Books, 2006. dreams. to get there. She was born in Bisbee, Arizona and grew up in Needles, California. 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. The character One is a kind of joke (Notley has always had an oddball sense of humor), but a joke that underscores the flimsiness of a stable idea of the self. Lipstick, Queens, 1947 these were things he just wrote down on this list of possible titles. ALICE NOTLEY has published more than twenty collections of poems. Cherokee. Alma, or The Dead Women. (2006). Theres a poem where you talk about meeting Teds mother. Somewhere, I have a photo of my father with a snake in his mouth and every year that he did it, he got a little tattoo of a star on his hand; and my mother danced the year she was pregnant with me the Hopi Corn Maidens Dance, and she taught me the song later, and my father taught me the chant for the Apache Dog Dance. Were you and he on the same wavelength politically? DR: Its also what Andr Breton mentions, in his book. Also, just before leaving New York, she realized the ambition of writing a feminist epic in a book-length poem, Since then, her poetry has continued to flow and evolve. 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 Alette. Notley and Berrigan joined an already active community of Chicago poets, including Paul Carroll, Paul Hoover, and Maxine Chernoff. DR: I wouldnt be able to take the journey if I couldnt hear the poem.. She is the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry, including Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); Disobedience (Penguin, 2001, winner of the Griffin Prize); and Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005, which received the Lenore Marshall Since I had all these poems without titles, I just randomly assigned Rons titles to the poems that ended up in. AroarA. AN: Well, you learn a lot from teaching, at the beginning. There are others over there. NOTLEY, Alice. 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. Notley also thanks Tom Clark who would go on to re-publish the sonnet cycle in his anthology All Stars. All the political problems are based in history. 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. Photographer unknown, Alice Notley teaching a workshop, Saint Marks Poetry Project, c.1980, courtesy of the Alice Notley, re-photographed by Daesong Kim. Nina Baym. First, the way the fan that tapers at the top disorients the view, because the fan is supposed to open up, not reduce. DR: Like Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman reading at Saint Marks church their collaborative poem, Memorial Day (May 6, 1971), that episode of Public Access Television. nature. The indeterminacy, one suspects, is the point. 74AN: Well, you learn a lot from teaching, at the beginning. Indeed, French poetry has had some weird times, where it got so abstract. 79DR: Where leftover misery goes Can a poem be like a dance? 97AN: He is focusing on the foot; and hes probably also aware of the foot when hes doing the short stanzas. DR: Lets see, arrive the exactitude of pitch the tune in words alone; thats In the Pines too. There werent a lot of cacti where I lived, but there were a lot of bushes. Over the course of Alice Notley's long and prolific career she's written more than 25 books since 1971 readers have assigned her any number of identities: native of the American West,. Where Leftover Misery Goes.. Notley began the magazine to connect with preexisting poet friends and meet new writers on both coasts while living in the midwest. New York: Scarlet Editions, 1992. Ed. 48AN: I read it when I was about twenty-three, in English. 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. Better to think of the poem as what Notley calls a bricolage, with hints of medieval allegory, jokey slang, strange jags of French. The word, the line, and also the stanza. , Memoir/Antimemoir; Summer 2000, p. 147-151. [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. 124I also have a vinyl record, its like one of those jazz albums. Blinding the White Horse in Front of Me in Certain Magical Acts. The artist Rudy Burckhardt once wrote that Notley may be "our present-day Homer." 106AN: Thats from In the Pines (2007). Theres no garbage. Photographer unknown, Alice Notleys father doing the Hopi snake dance, c. 1945, courtesy of the Alice Notley, re-photographed by Daesong Kim. Her honors also include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. I dont know anything about French pop culture at all; Im necessarily estranged from American pop culture, but I do sometimes know whats going on in music. 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. 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. It emasculates her. I figured it out afterwards. [8] While in England, Notley would write her second sonnet cycle Great Interiors, Wines and Spirits of the World, which was originally published in a Notley-themed issue of the Chicago magazine Out There.[9]. Her work warns of the ways in which our civilization and its conventional stories have failed us, but its also a reminder that the endless resources of language remain for those who have a little nerve. Ive noticed it with my granddaughters. For your work, from that angle, the place to start would be the collages you make, visual art. She met the poetTed Berrigan, and the couple lived in Southampton, New York (in the garage of painter Larry Rivers); Manhattan; Providence, Rhode Island; and Bolinas, California. 2023 Cond Nast. DR: Did you like doing it? NOTLEY, Alice. White Phosphorus (1988) and Beginning with a Stain (1987). 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? Particularly the middle one. New York: Penguin, 2001. 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. Or, as One says, Anyones a new poem today. Also in my poem Disobedience (2001), I got the title in a dream about him. contact email: nicksturm00@gmail.com The range, audacity, and radical commitments of Alice Notley's poetry are unmatched in contemporary literature. Its more like a pause between metrical feet. 15AN: Yes and a certain way of being cocky, which was very Irish, you know, a certain way of being witty, sort of a blunt kind of wittiness. Of course, we salute their past: all the greats, Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy, and some well-known others. 13AN: He had no trust in his own ability to write things out, while he had faith in his ability to find things. Songs for the Unborn Second Baby. DR: Where leftover misery goes Can a poem be like a dance? Referring back to her writing in the 1970s in an interview with the Ampersand Review, Notley says she felt she was the only poet I knew of who used the details of pregnancy and motherhood as a direct, pervading subject in poems, on a daily basis, as if it were true that half the people in the world gave birth to others and everyone had been born. Poems from this time include Clinical Thermometer Set with Moonstone and How Spring Comes. And active: in your work where I lived, but we will send people to,! Take in short lines, which was brave and opens the culture up book almost. Short lines, which was brave and opens the culture up new selected! That correctives to the camps Phosphorus ( 1988 ) and eventually married.... Now, which I did in Alette the Pines too we will send people Prescott. Arrive the exactitude of pitch the tune in words alone ; thats in the spring session 2007... Poetry Prize in your work, from La Petite Auto ( 1918 ) 120dr: he has said that started! 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