I once listened to an interview with Alice Notley where she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, that poetry is where we go when we die. I am prepared to believe this. Notley, who died in May aged 79, was a poet of tenderness and ferocity, of formal daring and bravura invention. She came to prominence as a member of the New York School in the 1970s, writing from the heart of a literary community; she ended up living in Paris in a kind of exile, writing epic works of grief and mysticism. Taking all her books down from the shelf, the array is overwhelming. I open Waltzing Matilda (1981): ‘oh each poet’s / a beautiful human girl who must die’. I open Above the Leaders (2008): ‘Cherries in the firmament or three gold coffins lined up.’ I think of her in her apartment in the 10th arrondissement just writing and writing, relentless to the end.
Notley was born in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California, at the edge of the Mojave Desert. Her parents ran an auto supply store, and the town and surrounding landscape form one of the substrates of her writing, especially her later work. In a poem from 1977, ‘After Tsang Chih’, she recalled her frustrated adolescent desire and daydreams of escape: ‘The boys wouldn’t touch me who was dying to be touched, / because I was too quote / Smart.’ She wryly notes the more forthcoming attention of the truck-drivers, ‘who looked and waved, / On their way through town, on the way to my World.’ It’s a brief poem, modelled on a classical Chinese quatrain, but Notley’s lines spill out to the horizon, line breaks stinging with insult and defiance.
After graduating top of her class, Notley moved to New York in 1963 to study at Barnard. The local paper reported her valedictorian speech, every bit the teenage beatnik: Notley told ‘her classmates they should “strive for insanity”, explaining that qualities of creativity are not always considered “sane”’. She began writing short stories, and in 1967 enrolled at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, initially studying fiction. This wasn’t the world she was looking for, either. She later took aim at the ‘Iowa Style’, written by ‘befoibled guys’ and ‘University drabs’, ‘the most stupid people in the universe’. Yet despite the unpromising surroundings, it was here she met Ted Berrigan, visiting poet, author of The Sonnets (1964) and beloved raconteur of the downtown New York scene. They would remain together until his early death in 1983.
In an interview with The Paris Review, published last year, Notley described the improvised living of their early years as a couple. Bouncing between short-term teaching gigs, they bunked in a garage belonging to the painter Larry Rivers, spent time in a chicken shed in the hippy enclave of Bolinas, owed money to everyone they met. It is easy to romanticise poverty and insecurity, but the hustle for survival can result in a certain purity and sharpness of intention. As her author’s note used to say: ‘Notley has never tried to be anything but a poet, and all her ancillary activities have been directed to that end.’ An uncompromising sense of the poet’s vocation was an important part of her mystique.
Notley’s first book, 165 Meeting House Lane (1971), was named after an address in Southampton, Long Island, where they stayed for a season. A sequence of 24 sonnets, the poems swing between drowsy, affectionate mornings and the jittery commencement of shared creative discipline: ‘Begun to write, the centres meld / I melt out to you with soda’. Written in the form that Berrigan had recently made his own, the book radiates with ironic tribute and loving competition. Notley’s line is shorter, her humour distinct. Her prosody – elegant and odd – emerged from her study of the sonnets of the dance critic Edwin Denby, whose poetry had been taken up and championed by a younger generation. Notley gathered influences in a devotional apprenticeship, establishing a tradition on her own terms.
In 1973 Berrigan was appointed poet-in-residence for a year at the University of Essex. The couple moved to Wivenhoe, where Notley wrote her first book-length poem, Songs for the Unborn Second Baby (1979). It heralds a missing tradition of poems about pregnancy and motherhood, and marked the consolidation of Notley’s feminism. I typeset the book for a reissue in 2021. We were still in the throes of lockdown and Alice was having radiation therapy for cancer. She wrote to me after checking the transcript by reading it aloud to herself: ‘I seem to remember practically every word as I read it. Nothing’s unfamiliar to me, and the rhythms are in my body. Very strange. It is finally itself without my being embarrassed by any of it at all.’
My favourite moment in that book is when she writes: ‘Green leaved soft brown birds / laundry and roses / billowing communism’. I think she’s describing a red shirt or dress hanging on a line, and the shift from concrete to symbolic against a backdrop of the gendered division of labour. Notley was by no means a communist, but the music of the line seems to ripple with the possibility of radical commitment. Maybe it was May Day? I should have asked her. As far as I know, Notley had no formal contact with Women’s Liberation in England, but her presence was a lasting influence on the socialist feminists Denise Riley and Wendy Mulford.
Back in the States, Notley and Berrigan eventually settled at 101 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. Notley led a workshop for younger poets – later described by Eileen Myles as a ‘triumphant arch into the new world’ – and wrote any number of knockout poems. I love especially ‘The Prophet’, from How Spring Comes (1980), which unfolds in long lines over a dozen pages, a passionate catalogue of domestic comedy, ill-health, drinking too much, taking too many pills, the resolve to go on. It ends in a triumphant and bittersweet sign-off: ‘You must never / stop making jokes. You are not great you are life.’
After Berrigan’s death – from complications related to Hepatitis C – Notley entered a period of extreme and transformative grief. As she recalled in her autobiographical sequence Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), ‘In grief the person that you were is replaced by grief / not the person you originally were but the one you’d become’. The grammar and syntax falters. Her most direct elegy for Berrigan, ‘At Night the States’, is a great notation of loss, and has become a touchstone for contemporary writers. It should be read in tandem with ‘The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books’, which is exactly what the title denotes, running from ‘X-Men #141 & 142’ through to ‘Secret Wars #1’. These are comics Notley had been reading with her children, Anselm and Edmund, who would both grow up to become poets. Somehow the titles are all it takes to convey the world-ending strangeness of mourning.
There were other deaths to contend with as the eighties drew to a close. Berrigan’s daughter from his first marriage, Kate, was killed in a traffic accident in 1987; soon after, Notley’s brother Albert, a veteran of the Vietnam War, died after years struggling with untreated PTSD. Notley had always been drawn to elegy, but from this point onwards her writing would be in deep and persistent contact with the dead. An anger previously diffuse becomes bedrock, foundation. In two linked elegies, ‘Beginning with a Stain’, for Kate, and ‘White Phosphorus’, for Albert, Notley began to deploy a new measure, whereby quotation marks indicate, musically, the voicing of the poem. It looks like this: ‘“our country is / unthinking solider” “money the” “uniform government of air, / army of money”’.
The obvious precursor to this eccentric but precise typography is Emily Dickinson’s expressive and analytic use of the dash. It reaches an apex with The Descent of Alette (1992), Notley’s most famous book. Theorised by the poet as her ‘feminine epic’ – and so requiring a distinct prosody, just as Homer had hexameters and Milton blank verse – Alette takes place in New York’s cavernous subway system. Alette, whose name combines Alice, the mourner, with Albert, the object of mourning, must descend into the underworld and kill the tyrant who rules there. The action is part Dante, part comic book dream vision, marked by the destitution of AIDS, New York’s housing crisis, the social catastrophe of Reaganism.
The end of Alette presents a powerful vision of collective liberation and possibility:
“And many” “who
emerged” “into the daylight” “then took shovels,” “picks & shovels”
“& began to dig” “holes in the ground” “In places” “the surface”
“of the earth broke” “spontaneously” “cracked & parted:” “all the
lost creatures” “began to” “emerge” “Come up from” “below the subway”
Yet what to do about the city above, which Alette declares is also part of the tyrant’s body, remains a problem. It reminds me of a passage in Mourning Becomes the Law, where Gillian Rose analyses Poussin’s The Ashes of Phocion Collected by His Widow. Rose cautions the viewer against seeing the disobedient act of Phocion’s wife – who is collecting his ashes in the foreground – as a total indictment of the classical order represented in the background, emphasising the ‘finite act of political justice’ over the anarchic frenzy of mourning. Yet Notley’s work does not, in the end, share Rose’s sensibility. By the 2000s the brakes are off, and the world appears completely corrupt, with no response possible beyond the poet’s lament.
Sections from The Descent of Alette were first published in Scarlet, the little magazine Notley edited with her second husband, the British poet Douglas Oliver. Oliver was a spooky and highly original writer, interested in oracles and ethics and the mysteries of grief. The Harmless Building (1973), about the death of his infant son, remains one of the great under-read prose texts of late modernism in Britain. In 1992, Notley and Oliver moved together to Paris and started a new magazine, Gare du Nord. Both the magazines they edited are full of humour and camaraderie, quizzing the circulation list about dreams, premonitions and assorted ‘cosmic chat’. In lightly anonymised editorial dialogues, Notley and Oliver (‘X’ and ‘Y’), try to work out problems of poetics – around gender, politics, community, war – starting from first principles.
Notley was a contrarian. Soon after Alette she started writing Disobedience (2001), which is 250 pages of bad-tempered complaint, combined with a noirish decoy narrative about a detective whose name keeps changing. Everything is annoying: other poets, the French general strike of 1995, Americans, men, ‘Half-assed art’, Ally Sheedy in the film Short Circuit. That makes it sounds unappealing, but in fact it’s terrific. Part of what’s admirable is that Notley doesn’t attempt to repeat the trick of Alette: it is less obviously a work of formal experiment than an exercise in plain meanness. As she says: ‘my rule for this poem / is honesty. My other rule is Fuck You.’ It is an extraordinary book for a poet in the middle of her career, incendiary and frequently hilarious.
Oliver died of cancer in 2000, aged 62. The trajectory of Notley’s subsequent work is harder to parse. She wrote longer and longer poems, some of which would remain unpublished for five or ten years at a time. Benediction (2015) dates from the immediate aftermath of Oliver’s death, and operates by dream logic. It is not easy to read. Alma, or the Dead Woman (2006) is a furious and exhausting sequence of poems responding to the daily catastrophes of the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011) treads similar ground. But why shouldn’t poetry exhaust us? Who says poetry must be easy to read and digest? These are monstrous works for monstrous times.
By the 2010s Notley was increasingly feted, as far as these things go: she won prizes, was published widely, and had garnered an unusually broad audience. But she remained at a remove. Her later work often seems to come from a desolate and visionary loneliness. Benjamin, writing about Victor Hugo, once wrote that ‘his contact with the spirit world’ was ‘primarily a contact with the masses which the poet necessarily missed in exile’. Notley never tried to be a politician of course, but perhaps we can see a similar displacement at work, as the voices of the dead take increasing precedence in her writing. increasingly come to be channelled in her writing. Her books were on the side of the dispossessed, a ghostly crossing-over.
In 2017, I gave a reading with Alice in Berlin and we spent a few days together. What I remember most of all was her energy for conversation. Before the reading a little group of us sat in a park while the pollen whirled around and we all struggled with hay fever. She was simultaneously cranky and serene, her talk – quick, darting – punctuated by laughter alternately scornful, warm and goofy. I told her I get nervous about readings, and she said she did, too. The trick, she told me, was to read to the poem instead of the audience. In a poem called ‘Berlin’, from Being Reflected Upon (2024) she talks about that afternoon: ‘I like to sit on a park bench with other poets / allergic to birch oaks and graminées / telling the folk gossip of our repeated breaths’. Poetry is also a place you can go while you live.
She told us about the plots of her then-unpublished books. One of them, For the Ride, eventually appeared in 2021. It is – there’s no other way of saying this – a completely crazy book about going to look at Monet’s Waterlilies, entering the painting, and then travelling on a spaceship as language itself starts to disintegrate. This is, finally, one of the things poetry is for: writing exactly what you want. Somehow Notley managed to protect her essential weirdness throughout, turning it into a wild resource, and an essential element in the periodic table of her poetry. If I believed in such things I’d call it soul: but there are her books, irrefutable and strange, all over the place.
Read on: Anahid Nerssesian, ‘Notes on Tone’, NLR 142.