Alice Notley: Im from the desert which I found intensely attractive as nature, and its my nature reallyI havent been back in six years but I love. [16] Over two nights, November 14 and 15, 2016, Notley read The Descent of Alette in its entirety at The Lab in San Francisco. DR: Now I heard you say that the cadences for, AN: I actually listened to Monteverdi to get the cadences that were before, : particularly in White Phosphorus (1988) and at the end of Beginning with a Stain, . David Reckford, Interview of Alice Notley,Transatlantica [En ligne], 1|2019, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2020, consult le 01 mars 2023. Shes made few changes to her approach to the work. Entitled The Speak Angel Series, her latest collection of new material is forthcoming from . Theres no garbage. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979, p. 911-1772. 84AN: You dont have to breathe between them. Thats what Ive done ever since in different ways. A fairly long poem that Notley generally reads quickly, At Night the States gives the reader a feeling of being pulled through grief and back into life, with irregular syntax signaling the disruption to day-to-day living caused by a great loss. I had this education, so I could have been doing something else but did not want to, was animated by a desire to write poetry, which is truly valuable: I was writing peoples culture for the future. And theres a poem called This Kind of Paradise (1986) where the Hopis suddenly appear in a bureaucratic Food Stamps Office. 98DR: Frank OHara was strongly influenced by Williams, and you in turn take a lot from OHara. Request a transcript here. For the Ride is a difficult book, constructed largely of long, discursive lines reminiscent of a Beckett monologue, testing the selfs capacity to hold together: one is not, ones are not, separated. I wrote a poem about it in Alma, or The Dead Women (2006). In his humorous anti-manifesto, Personism, the poet Frank OHara discloses one of arts great truths: you just go on your nerve. Considering this truth, he wonders, But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. In the search for immediacy, he writes, questions of accessibility can come to seem pointless: Improves them for what? There was a tribe in my home town, the Mojaves. Poems, articles, podcasts, and blog posts that explore womens history and womens rights. With Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011), Notley once again takes on the challenge of creating a feminist epic. Notley has said that her decision to place the refrain at the beginning of the stanza rather than the end is what allowed her to continue writing the poem. It seems nobody has any sense of tone of voice any more. Your brain becomes taffy. French poetry was aimless, became philosophical, though now there are some younger poets that are starting to put the concrete back in, but slowly; I discussed it with French poets a few years ago, who confirmed for me that French poetry became abstract out of trauma from World War II, the occupation, and everything, authors being too traumatized to speak concretely. DR: Also Im coming back often to that poem, In this Paradise, about the food-stamp office. One year at a big Thanksgiving dinner, I sat next to the poet Michel Deguy; many of his friends in Paris were met for instance when playing tennis. YouTube. Kilkenny. The Circus (1971). That was written in the Food Stamp Office in 1985. To Annapurna or Mt. Alice Notleys influence on a later generation of poets exploring the subject of motherhood is hard to overstate. Ive noticed it with my granddaughters. NOTLEY, Alice. That unusual, horizontal format was probably done to fit the long lines in. dreams. The poet reads and discusses her work. Blinding the White Horse in Front of Me in. My favorite is how to cure an octopus: you go fishing, get an octopus, and you beat it against a rock. Parts of a Wedding. 38AN: Would you like to see the real collage? I always liked his paintings. 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.. NOTLEY, Alice. 47DR: Its incredible because, I just re-read Nadja recently. 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. DR: Its also what Andr Breton mentions, in his book. 104AN: That was below that bed: the voices were calling to me from below the bed. You can read her biography, an interview with Notley, and more of her poems in the Poetry Foundation archive. Notley also thanks Tom Clark who would go on to re-publish the sonnet cycle in his anthology All Stars. I picked ten poems at random to see how dispersed they were based on my working theory that they had a wide geographical scope. Its small and a bit fragile. . The word, the line, and also the stanza. Although she is a Parisian now, Alice Notley was also a key figure on the Lower Manhattan poetry scene particularly of the late 1970s and the 1980s. 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. Was she of an Irish sort? NOTLEY, Alice. Her Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 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. This novel in poems, as its jacket copy describes it, covers the life of Marie, a woman who lives in a shack in the town dump. 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. Benjamin Voigt grew up on a small farm in upstate New York. There was a tribe in my home town, the Mojaves. New York: Penguin, 1996. Everyone who went there was either black or Hispanic. White Phosphorus (1988) and Beginning with a Stain (1987). Grave of light : new and selected poems, 1970-2005. Alice Notleys poetry has evolved through many phases and experiments, as her output continues to be strong, and is increasingly studied academically. The conjunctions are the most mysterious places in Johns work. Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems and The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954): that book is fantastic; he caught the new line, which he refers to in one of his letters. At the same moment, at Saint Marks, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman, and I taught poetry workshops. Eileen was twelve. 117DR: Its a beautiful indictment of bureaucracies and their inhuman treatment. I had met him in 1969, then we stayed friends. 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. Her book, Coming After (2005), collects a series of sensitive essays she wrote about her own poetry and that of others from her poetic milieu. And its influenced by dactylic hexameter. 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? The first workshop that I taught was a crucial one for that generation actually. 116AN: I was there. One knows ithere, not chains,posh garlands. It so happens that there are many of those trees, syringas, in Rochester, NY, where hes from. I dont give a 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). Its refreshing to read poetry so dedicated to its own ends, even if they are occasionally inscrutable. And Virgil: (2011): she is a female character who suffers a kind of erasure, despite being the great queen of Carthage. When expanded it provides a list of search options that will switch the search inputs to match the current selection. When I read The Descent of Alette I am tempted to treat the quotation marks between phrases as breath-markers like on a musical score. Her poems have also been compared to Gertrude Stein, as well as her contemporary Bernadette Mayer. I was influenced by Koch, particularly by the period starting with the second The Circus (1971). About two-thirds of the way through the book theres a dream that has to do with a poet that has written a poem called disobedience: the poet was Kenneth in the dream, but, such is dream logic, it was really me. Lipstick, Queens, 1947 these were things he just wrote down on this list of possible titles. 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. 50AN: Well possiblyI take in a lot of things that I dont know about, or that I dont remember. After the workshop ended, Notley teamed up with students to print copies of their works on the mimeograph machine in the St. Mark's basement. For instance this collage that you put on the cover of. He was my political education really. However, I dont know what I was listening to when I was beginning to write The Descent of Alette. Alice Notleys father doing the Hopi snake dance. AN: She lost her father younger than Ted lost his. A close relationship with the poet Anselm Hollo, who was teaching at the program at that time, led to Notley leaving Iowa City for Morocco in 1968. At that point Alice Notley was finding New York less amenable and was keen to go somewhere else. New York: Penguin, 2001. New York: Unimproved Editions, 1986. I think that is what she said, because her greatest influence was Henry James: she takes his sense of the sentence and turns it into those stanzas. 75DR: Speaking of Anne Waldman somehow makes me think of the presence of Native Americans in your work. I have some Cherokee Blood, perhaps one-sixteenth Cherokee. Thats why my poetry works so well. Doug [Oliver] had died, and it was 2001. Like somebody live in some city. Alice Eliza Harvey Expand search. 29AN: He has complete syntactical thoughts, then he interrupts things at the conjunction. New York: TPR. DR: With your interpolation of popular culture into epic poetry, I would expect you to be a household name here in France. When I was becoming a poet, folk music was popular; Bob Dylan was getting started; and he was that kind of magpie. because theres something resembling skulls going on here with the top of the fan supports. NOTLEY, Alice. 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. As Notley writes in "The Prophet" (1981): "One is you & all this & two & yet." The yet is where poetry begins. 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