Introducing her 2024 interview with Notley as part of The Paris Review’s “Art of Poetry” series, Hannah Zeavin observes that “Experimentation is the hallmark of Notley’s poetry; in nearly every book, a new method or idea arrives by which to channel her voice. Her work, which draws on traditional lyric forms but abandons their strictures when they fail to aid the poet, is often described as difficult,” noting that “some of her finest poems were written in the wake of loss.” “I am conscious of the facts of grief and poverty,” Notley tells Zeavin, “and I think that no one should ever forget that they exist. No poet has the right to.”
PennSound’s Alice Notley author page offers up a snapshot of her dizzying evolution across the breadth of her writing life, starting with a 1971 reading in Bolinas that showcases many of the poems that would appear in her C Press debut, 165 Meeting House Lane (a.k.a. Twenty-Four Sonnets, which was printed and assembled during Notley and Ted Berrigan’s trip to California), right up to an October 2023 reading at Hemingway Center at Boise State University, where she read from The Speak Angel Series, published that same year by Fonograf editions. While she started off writing sonnets addressing (to borrow the title of another early Notley collection) Incidentals in the Day World, by her final book she saw herself writing “international, interplanetary” epic poetry in the tradition of Virgil that was “reshaping the myth and defining the world.” Between those two points, listeners will find recordings of more than thirty events, including readings, talks, interviews, and class visits from New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Boulder, Buffalo, Albany, Hoboken, as well as Paris and the University of Essex in the UK (where, improbably, Berrigan succeeded Robert Lowell as Poet in Residence).
I only had the pleasure of meeting Notley once, at the astounding Tulsa School Conference organized by Grant Matthew Jenkins way back in 2009, where she was a featured guest alongside Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, and her sons, Anselm and Eddie Berrigan, who I am thinking of now as they feel grief that's exponential compared to what we, her legions of fans worldwide, are feeling.
