Alice Notley, poet celebrated for ‘restless reinvention,' dies at 79

Boston Globe

2 days ago

Ms. Notley took traditional forms of poetry such as villanelles and sonnets and laced them with experimental language that fluctuated between vernacular speech and dense lyricism. She also created pictorial poetry, or calligrams, in which she contorted words into fantastical shapes. In her 2020 collection, 'For the Ride,' one calligram took the form of a winged coyote.
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'The signature of her work is a restless reinvention and a distrust of groupthink that remains true to her forebear's directive: to not give a damn,' David S. Wallace wrote in The New Yorker in 2020.
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As Ms. Notley herself said in a 2010 essay, 'It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything.'
She wrote without restraint, saying that she never edited or revised her work. And she largely shunned academia; poetry, she said in a 2009 interview with The Kenyon Review, 'should feel hugely uncomfortable in the academy.'
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Though often identified as a key figure in the second generation of the New York School of poets -- alongside Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Ted Berrigan, who became her first husband -- Ms. Notley shirked the labels critics gave her: feminist, expatriate, avant-garde provocateur.
'Each of these labels sheds a little light on Notley's work, but it's the fact of their sheer number that's most illuminating,' the poet Joel Brouwer wrote of her 2007 collection, 'In the Pines,' in The New York Times Book Review. 'This is a poet who persistently exceeds, or eludes, the sum of her associations.'
Padgett praised Ms. Notley for her 'vastness of mind.'
'Alice's main influence was herself and her interior life,' he said in an interview, 'and by interior life, I mean both her conscious waking thinking and her dream life, especially.'
Ms. Notley realized early in her career that, as she wrote in a 2022 essay for the website Literary Hub, her 'dreaming self was better at some aspects of poetry writing than I, awake, was.'
Her dreamlike style lent a 'sort of seer quality' to her poems, Waldman said in an interview.
'There's this traveling through realms,' she added. 'There's a great fluidity in her poetry, a lyric quality -- these different voices and modes -- and then there's magic: dreamlike connections where it shifts and suddenly you're somewhere else.'
In the 1980s, several of Ms. Notley's loved ones died: her husband, Berrigan, in 1983 from complications of hepatitis; her stepdaughter, Kate Berrigan, in 1987 after she was struck by a motorcycle; and her brother Albert Notley, a Vietnam War veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, in 1988.
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Ms. Notley said their voices had continued to speak to her, so she translated them into poetry.
'At Night the States,' written two years after Berrigan's death, reflects on the absence of a person:
At night the states
I forget them or I wish I was there
in that one under the
Stars. It smells like June in this night
so sweet like air.
I may have decided that the
States are not that tired
Or I have thought so. I have
thought that.
The poem 'Beginning With a Stain' is an elegy for her stepdaughter. And 'White Phosphorus,' one of her most acclaimed poems, was written for her brother:
'He said, 'I've come home; I've finally come home' then he died' 'flowers'
'Magnolias & lilies' 'innocent now' 'I've come home. Who's there?
at home? all the dead?" 'To come home from the war' 'years after' 'To die'
Albert Notley's death also influenced Alice Notley's best-known work, 'The Descent of Alette' (1992). Mired in grief, she began riding the subway in New York City. 'I would go from car to car and imagine these fantastic scenes,' she said last year in an interview with The Paris Review. 'I conceived of the subway as being this place that no one could leave.'
In 'Alette,' a story evoking the descents into the underworld in Greek mythology, a female narrator, banished to the depths of the subway, must kill an all-powerful tyrant.
She imagined 'Alette' as a feminine epic that sought to reclaim the form from men; in 2010 she called it 'an immense act of rebellion against dominant social forces.' Painter Rudy Burckhardt, a friend, called Ms. Notley 'our present-day Homer.'
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Alice Elizabeth Notley was born Nov. 8, 1945, in Bisbee, Ariz., and spent most of her childhood in Needles, Calif., on the edge of the Mojave Desert, where her parents, Beulah (Oliver) and Albert Notley, ran an auto supply store. The Latin lessons she took in high school would later inform the prosody of her poems, as did folk and country songs.
Her childhood was happy, 'but I was very impatient to grow up, and I wanted to leave Needles,' she told The Paris Review. 'I knew I had to, because I was going to become a weirdo.'
She moved to New York to attend Barnard College in 1963. After graduating, she pursued a master's degree in fiction and poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she forged a close relationship with poet Anselm Hollo, who taught there, and met Berrigan.
They married in 1972 and lived nomadically, keeping afloat through Berrigan's teaching jobs. They briefly stayed with painter Larry Rivers in the garage of his home in Southampton, N.Y. In Bolinas, Calif., in Marin County, they resided in what she called a 'chicken house' that belonged to writers Lewis and Phoebe MacAdams.
Ms. Notley's early work, in the 1970s and '80s, centered on new motherhood -- her sons, Anselm and Edmund, were born in 1972 and 1974 -- and her writing was colored by the intermingling voices of her and her sons. 'Mommy what's this fork doing?/What?/It's being Donald Duck,' she wrote in her 1981 poem 'January.'
'Notley wrote extensively about pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing at a time when the poetry world was often inhospitable to women,' Wallace wrote in The New Yorker, adding that 'her influence for a later generation of poets exploring these same subjects is hard to overstate.'
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In early-1970s Chicago, she edited Chicago, an important mimeographed magazine, and helped build the avant-garde scene there. In New York, she taught workshops to a generation of influential poets, including Eileen Myles, Bob Holman, and Patricia Spears Jones.
Despite their prominence in the community, she and her husband struggled financially and lacked medical care; Berrigan's hepatitis went untreated. 'We had 20 dollars on the day Ted died,' Ms. Notley said.
Throughout the 1980s, her poems grew longer and acquired more mythical tones. That trend continued in the 1990s, when she moved to Paris with poet Douglas Oliver, whom she married in 1988. They founded two literary magazines there, Gare du Nord and Scarlet.
Oliver died in 2000. In addition to her sons, Ms. Notley leaves two sisters, Rebecca White and Margaret Notley, and two granddaughters.
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