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Boston Globe
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Alice Notley, poet celebrated for ‘restless reinvention,' dies at 79
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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up '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. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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. This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
09-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Volunteers in New London look to reclaim Bates Wood Park
New London — New London high school student Galileo Thompson admits to having little experience hiking or being in the woods. It's not my thing," the 16-year-old said, shortly before arming himself with a bow saw and working to cut and free a fallen tree limb entangled in a tent at an abandoned encampment in Bates Woods Park. Despite his aversion to briars and tree roots, Thompson joined more than two dozen others Saturday at the park for what he said he sees as a worthy cause, cleaning up one of the few wooded areas in the city. He was one of a group of volunteers that fanned out into the woods carrying garbage bags rakes, loppers, saws and buckets as part of the quarterly cleanup effort. The cleanup at the city's largest green space was organized by Bates Friends Forever, an all-volunteer group that advocates for the conservation and enhancement of the park. Frida Berrigan, the group's co-founder, said Bates Woods is a great spot for hiking, bird watching and dog walking but unfortunately has very few visitors. She's hoping her group might be able to provide incentives to attract people in. Regular cleanups and hikes are a good way to expose people to the park, she said. "We think the park is amazing and not enough New Londoners know they are allowed in there," Berrigan said. "There's no encouraging signage or maps of this urban woodland." Volunteers at past cleanups filled dozens of garbage bags of trash and hauled out bulky waste that included mattresses and tires. One person pulled an old lawnmower out of the woods during Saturday's trek. Bates Friends Forever, an outgrowth of opposition to the the city's storage of excess construction debris at the capped former landfill adjacent to the park, is now focused on encouraging access. Berrigan said the the effort to mark and name trails has already begun. Her group has applied for grant funding for trail head markers and others things to help encourage residents into the park, which connects to Clark Lane in Waterford. New Londoners Cassady Zipkin and Anthony Zerkow, three young children in tow, joined Saturday's group, in part, as a way to expose their kids to the outdoors. Zerkow said he was also interested in seeing what Bates Woods Park, aside from its pavilions and playgrounds, had to offer. Bates Woods Park, once was home to a zoo, is between 65 and 85 acres depending on who you ask, Berrigan said. Ricardo Pratts, a member of the city's Parks & Recreation Commission, said he's been in the city for 30 years and "never stepped foot into these woods." "Nobody comes back here. But it's truly a beautiful area and our kids are unaware of it, Pratts said. If people felt safe and the place was more inviting, Pratts said he thinks more people might take the opportunity to take a look, especially considering the number of people who live within walking distance and the areas of the city it connects. The park is expected to see more activity in the coming months. The city's Planning and Zoning Commission has approved construction of a 3,000-panel solar farm to be located on the capped former city landfill at the park. The plan awaits approval by the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. The area is now a meadow bordering the park and Berrigan said while she is in favor of solar power, she remains disappointed in the decision to cover up the green space in what she considers part of Bates Woods. The city recently went out to bid on construction of a new 24-foot wide, 900-foot long driveway to access the former landfill in order to construct the solar array. The driveway is expected to be constructed in part with the construction debris stockpiled by the city at the base of the landfill. For information, visit or email batesfriendsforever@
