Grave of light : new and selected poems, 1970-2005. There are passing moments that neednt be dwelled upon, but if youre going to go to war against a couple of countries, I think you merit an accusation of doing just that. I wonder about it later, but actually it always seems like it is justified: I think the people that I mentioned in. In that sad, beautiful book, theres so much irony, whereas some literary critics take everything at face value. Eileen was twelve. 55DR: There was a pop song in the 1960s by the Three Dog Night, Joy to the World, which went: If I was the King of the World, Id throw away all the cars, thus broadcasting the idea. If this poem demonstrates her abiding interest in metaphysics, it also speaks to the immediate political realities of being a woman writer. In response, another woman informs: "'he . 71AN: His werent poetry workshops: he taught undergraduate courses at Columbia. I knew him in New York, where I saw him from time to time; but after I moved here, he sought me out. 63DR: Your attitude towards staleness in the academic world, your sensitivity towards these questions of history and politics, indeed your measure and courage for speaking out reminds me of one first-generation New York School poet in particular, Kenneth Koch. Alice Notley has become one of America's greatest living poets. Ultimately, I am expressing a desire to run into the desert and get some space, the space everybody needs around themselves and unfortunately are not getting. I started noticing my dreams before I met Ted [Berrigan], but he used his dreams, and I just started doing it more after I was with him; then, after he died I did it even more. Miles Davis live at Birdland or something. There are different paces and reading styles possible; the performance can be different each time. 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. This guy is doing vinyl records of poets and hes done a series including one of me and one of Eileen [Myles]. [citation needed]. Notley's elegiac work during this era, including her poems "Beginning With a Stain" and "At Night the States," is some of her most widely celebrated. dreams. Ron Padgett. 1Alice Notley is a major American poet of our day, who has been living in Paris since the early 1990s, when she moved there with her second husband, the English poet, Doug Oliver (1937-2000), because Paris was where his professorial career was taking him. As she writes in the preface, one of the books few footholds, This poem goes pretty far, and terrifies me, but it should be read for pleasure., Although Personism tells us that simply acting like ourselves is enough to make poetry, its lesson is also surprisingly difficult to absorb. Alice Notley wanders through a Paris cemetery and speaks to her dead father about her life in France, where she has lived since 1992. 67My poem The Prophet (1981) is based on his poem Some General Instructions (1971). DR: Thats what Ted Berrigan was about: taking things from here and there, picking them up, and making them his own. AN: We were children then, basically. Est construido en ambas orillas del ro Nore. 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. much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). DR: Indeed, Berrigan and OHara were both Irish names. Over the course of her career, Alice Notley has achieved something astounding: each of her nearly 30 books is different from the last one yet unmistakably hers. ButI forget. The Goddess who created this passing world, Said Let there be lightbulbs & liquefaction, Life spilled out onto the street, colors whirled, Toys and rose The zoo body zigzags. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2001, p.120-124. Im closely influenced by them, and working with Apollinaire at the moment. New York: Scarlet Editions, 1992. In this emblematic early piece, the text spills across the page. 103DR: 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. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. His zips are like obelisks; theyre like sculptures inside the paintings. DR: Eileen Myles is another poet who comes from an Irish, working-class, New England background and lost her father. 36AN: Like dolmensyes, something like that. 25AN: Yes, and she hasnt changed much. I havent changed much since I first began writing: Teds father worked for the Tip-Top Bread factory and died when he was fifty of a heart attack, after being laid off due to mechanization. To Annapurna or Mt. Its filthy; I dont remember how I got that torn princess; but that bird was in a book; you see that phrase there marks what I was barred from: so the thing to see is that Im in jail and they wont let me into the Htel des Grands Hommes. Which is the Panthon. This independence is radical in a climate in which poets, searching for success, can feel pressured to build a brand, create a strong social-media presence, and write books with conceits that can be summarized in a sentence or two. Then he writes poetry in the variable foot which is a huge influence on my later work. Doug [Oliver] had died, and it was 2001. You can read her biography, an interview with Notley, and more of her poems in the Poetry Foundation archive. Peggy went to work at two jobs for ever; then there was a point where Johnny, the youngest, had to leave home, and she had a nervous breakdown, which was when I met her. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. It so happens that there are many of those trees, syringas, in Rochester, NY, where hes from. Her mother was Polish and her father Irish. In 1972, Notley married Berrigan and the two moved to Chicago where Berrigan had been given Ed Dorn's newly vacated teaching position at Northeastern Illinois University. At a certain point I wrote them down every morning; sometimes I do it more than others. I wrote a poem about it in Alma, or The Dead Women (2006). The artist Rudy Burckhardt once wrote that Notley may be "our present-day Homer." Twitter, 96DR: Well I think of Williams as a kind of Calder mobile waiting to enter into movement. Notley gave birth to their first son, Anselm Berrigan, named after Anselm Hollo, in 1972, as well. Sometimes I have in-between projects and that is a tough situation; because, I usually dont write as well then, indeed, I never quite know what to do at those moments. We know how inane the decision was that everybody would have a car, completely destroying the planet. He would fly to Paris, find me, and we would have dinner; also, he had a group of Paris friends. 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. DR: I think for the reader those part-words can function to foreground an elsewhere. 124I also have a vinyl record, its like one of those jazz albums. After the war, that tradition was exhausted. 69AN: I learned a lot from him on that level. Alice Notleys influence on a later generation of poets exploring the subject of motherhood is hard to overstate. DR: Historically, painting is central to cultural New York and to New York poetry. Alice Notley continues to live in Paris and makes frequent trips to the U.S. to give readings and lectures. Notleys work stands as a testament to how difficult it is to be truly individual. Jobs People Learning Dismiss Dismiss. My parents were from Arizona. Though I didnt know I was being influenced by him again when I was doing. Orpheus is a stand-in for poetry. You know Frank was this little gay guy and Ted was this big, butch, working-class guy from Rhode Island; they were both from New England so there may have been something that he caught off of Franks voice as a vibration, or of Franks way of behaving in the world (I never met him; Ted once gave me permission to call him Frank). That piece is from a postcard of a painting of Notre-Dame and evil spirits flying out of it. McKinley. I grew up with the Mojaves, going to school with them. New Addresses was influenced by my autobiographical book that almost won the Pulitzer Prize, Mystery of Small Houses (1998), getting him to dredge up his past, bravely. I use the collages to go on without thinking with words. NOTLEY, Alice. I had met him in 1969, then we stayed friends. The Art of Poetry: John Ashbery. Ed. AN: He has complete syntactical thoughts, then he interrupts things at the conjunction. Produced by Curtis Fox. His zips are like obelisks; theyre like sculptures inside the paintings. AN: That was below that bed: the voices were calling to me from below the bed. 37DR: Historically, painting is central to cultural New York and to New York poetry. Vocabulaire politique et propagande dans une perspective transatlantique, Slavery on Screen / American Women Writers Abroad: 1849-1976, (Hi)stories of American Women: Writings and Re-writings / Call and Answer: Dialoguing the American West in France, Morphing Bodies: Strategies of Embodiment in Contemporary US Cultural Practices, Modernist Revolutions: American Poetry and the Paradigm of the New, The Poetics and Politics of Antiquity in the Long Nineteenth-Century / Exploiting Exploitation Cinema, The Voting Rights Act at 50 / Hidden in Plain Sight: Deep Time and American Literature, Aesthetics of Theory in the Modern Era and Beyond / Photographie documentaire, Revisiting the Gilded Age / Littrature et philosophie, Cartographies de l'Amrique/ Histoires d'esclaves, Le roman policier, littrature transatlantique / Maisons Hantes, Sport et socit / Animals and the American Imagination, Senses of the South / Rfrendums populaires, The Businessman as Artist / New American Voices, A digital resources portal for the humanities and social sciences, https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.13862, http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/13862/img-1.jpg, http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/13862/img-2.jpg, http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/13862/img-3.png, http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/13862/img-4.png, http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/13862/img-5.jpg, http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/13862/img-6.jpg, http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/13862/img-7.jpg, http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/13862/img-8.jpg, Catalogue of 609 journals. Dismiss. She has received the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. DR: Frank OHara was strongly influenced by Williams, and you in turn take a lot from OHara. I would like some help. Whereupon, she just totally melted. Notley's experimentation with poetic form, seen in her books 165 Meeting House Lane, When I Was Alive, The Descent of Alette, and Culture of One, ranges from a blurred line between genres, to a quotation-mark driven interpretation of the variable foot, to a full reinvention of the purpose and potential of strict rhythm and meter. I can do that with my speaking voice in poems. 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. Logic sees cities destroyed as poems are stolen; a bloodied performer attempts to win over a non-existent audience in Perhaps Not for You. There are others of course, but could you begin by speaking around those atmospheres? In fact he taught the same undergraduate classes for years and years, refusing to teach graduate students becausehe saidthey couldnt learn anything, were already set in their ways. They really like The Descent of Alette, because its like a video game. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2001, p.120-124. There were various famous people now that were in it like Susie Timmons. They were the CDs that my son made and sent me; there are a lot of miss-hearings of Bob Dylan songs, as well as just a lot of folk songs that I already knew, in that work. 98DR: Frank OHara was strongly influenced by Williams, and you in turn take a lot from OHara. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 81DR: Apart from what happens during the performance, can writing poetry be like a dance? Actually, when I read, , high-school students get similarly entranced. In March 2021, Notley was a guest blogger forHarriet. I think its just all out there. I didnt know any French; I had no French when I came here, basically, in my late forties. , 1998. Request a transcript here. 113DR: Yes, that brings me back to what I was saying earlier about Andr Bretons Nadja who sees things before they happen next and is just carted off: the status of mediums becomes a metaphor for the status of poetry in society. Courtesy of the artist, re-photographed by Daesong Kim, April 2018. Cutting as many cords / as you tie to [her], Notley leads us away from rationality to the forgotten and suppressed that makes up another part of now.. The words at night the states serve as a refrain that marks the beginning of each stanza. In a swerve from the feminine epic, For the Ride seems to want to speak from a place outside of gender, another shrugging-off of what readers have come to expect from Notley. Interview with Barbara Barg, Rose Lesniak, and Tim Milk. The Circus (1971). how to express it. Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright. West Branch, Iowa: Toothpaste Press, 1981. Instagram, poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too 68DR: Your humor, in poems like The Prophet (which asks hilariously, Does a hippopotamus get the shakes?) is slightly less well known than your readiness to tackle political subjects. Where Leftover Misery Goes.. These places are continuously operating as presences in your poetry, particularly the Needles of your youth, in California, the Lower Manhattan in the heyday of New York School Poetry, and the Paris of today. NOTLEY, Alice. Detroit was burning and poetry was on fire. 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? from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1969. AN: Complicated as it is, I can sketch it out: basically, everything is just too dense on the planet, which has been a decision made and a byproduct of technology. 90AN: Virgil was just this poet and he had to contend with Augustus Caesar. For Frank OHara's Birthday. 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. Theres a poem where you talk about meeting Teds mother. 16DR: Indeed, Berrigan and OHara were both Irish names. (2005), and I have essays in it about her and Joanne Kyger, Ted Berrigan, Lorenzo Thomas, Frank OHara, and some others. Were you and he on the same wavelength politically? . I knew him in New York, where I saw him from time to time; but after I moved here, he sought me out. When I was becoming a poet, folk music was popular; Bob Dylan was getting started; and he was that kind of magpie. In addition to poetry, Notley has written a book of criticism (Coming After, University of Michigan, 2005), a play ("Anne's White Glove"performed at the Eye & Ear Theater in 1985), a biography (Tell Me Again, Am Here, 1982), and she has edited three publications, Chicago, Scarlet, and Gare du Nord, the latter two co-edited with Douglas Oliver. But people often say that Marianne Moore writes with the whole sentence. He taught some writing: one writing class, and one civilization and literature class. 58AN: I actually listened to Monteverdi to get the cadences that were before The Descent of Alette: particularly in White Phosphorus (1988) and at the end of Beginning with a Stain (1987). Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed. She is, to borrow the title from her 2011 collection, a culture of onea singular voice and the medium of many. DR: Yes, those are full of imagery: evidently, they have all kinds of signification. She received a BA from Barnard College in 1967, and an MFA from the the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1969. AN: I wouldnt be able to take the journey if I couldnt hear the poem thats all based on folk songs and not those lines, but I was writing In the Pines while I was doing the Hepatitis C treatment, where the drugs would depress you, but once a week you would have to take a shot which, they didnt tell you, would get you high for a half hour before you got sick. Then I figured out how to write them, so they enter the text. Philip Gourevitch. DR: I think he interrupts the thought, but the thought he interrupts keeps going. But Notley, never one to be pinned down, has continued to push poetrys formal constraints, and this pursuit has led her far away from portraits of domestic life. 80AN: Probably, I wouldnt dance, but Anne might. Poems, articles, podcasts, and blog posts that explore womens history and womens rights. We were all born in 1945, and despite a certain competitiveness at first, became good friends. How do we make sense of ourselves in relation to huge abstract institutions such as democracy, the state, and marriage? New York: Granary Books, 2006. I was one of his friends in Paris. 83DR: Yes, right, on one level, shall we say? AN: To quote Jack Kerouac, avoid the authorities. If you have the talent you have to avoid them. Making oneself now,oh One. Can we talk a little bit about the pop culture that figures in your work? Thats what Ive done ever since in different ways. 101AN: Well, thats what a lot of us got from her; Im heavily influenced by Gertrude Stein, having had two Stein periods; in the second one in the mid-1980s, I figured out a thing about repetition: that, if you repeated, you could pause long enough inside the repetition to figure out what to say next, which she was probably doing constantly. DR: He has said that he started doing collages in his twenties and continued throughout his life. NOTLEY, Alice. Like somebody live in some city. NOTLEY, Alice. WILLIAMS, William Carlos. DR: 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., (2011), from the lady with antlers; that was strange: I fell asleep, dreamed of being a woman with antlers, then when I woke up I opened. In fact, he had a whole career as a journalist, and knew how to research, to inform his opinions, and to look at events without a preexisting opinion: thus, I learned how to do that from him, though I find that few today are so intellectually honest. Shehad two sons with him, the poets Edmund and Anselm Berrigan. Left-wing Radicalism in the United States: A Foreign Creed? SoundCloud and This is typical of what happens when I make a collage. 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