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NOTLEY, Alice

Born 8 November 1945, Bisbee, Arizona

Married Ted Berrigan, 1972 (died); Douglas Oliver, 1988; children: Edmund, Anselm

Poet Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, but lived in the Mojave Desert town of Needles, California, until she left for college. She received a B.A. in English from Barnard College in 1967 and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa's famed Writers' Workshop in 1969. Following graduation, Notley lived on New York's Lower East Side for almost 20 years and was a central figure in the second generation of what is called the New York School of poetry.

Notley's poetry addresses many aspects of American culture and everyday events. Her use of free verse and experimentation with poetic forms draws from the works of Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, William Carlos Williams, and her first husband, poet Ted Berrigan. Like these poets, Notley writes to express her own voice and views social commentary as a secondary function of her poetry. As she expressed it to interviewer Edward Foster, "Poetry is about personality. It's the writer or the poet giving her whole self, and a self is personality." Notley credits both her childhood in the Southwest and her lifelong love of films with influencing the images in her poetry. As she told Foster, "What you take in when you're very young is what's most important throughout your life. It's always what you read or what you see or what you do in childhood that stays fresh for you forever as an artist."

Many of Notley's published works are collections of poems, but The Descent of Alette (1996) is a single book-length poem with sensual language and raw imagery. Alette, the female narrator, undertakes a strange, mythical journey into a surreal world of subways, caves, and forests inhabited by a snake representing Mother Earth and female energy. The rhythm of Alette's narration has a hypnotic quality as Alette discovers her purpose is to battle "the tyrant," a charming, evil male figure who tried and failed to kill the snake. The landscape Alette travels is peopled with war veterans and the homeless, with whom the central figures interact for good or ill.

The Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) is a partly autobiographical, partly historical look at poetry in America. Many of the poems in this collection pay tribute to the writing of her late husband, Ted Berrigan, and try to sum up his place in American poetry ("Grief's not a social invention. / Grief is visible, substantial, I've literally seen it"). Notley has used poetry to explore her past in other collections as well. In Alice Ordered Me to Be Made (1975), the title poem is about her father's slow death in a hospital ("tears like a dark running / sheer is the heart / my love loves me").

In addition to her poetry, Notley has experimented with several other forms in both the written and visual arts. She wrote a play, Anne's White Glove, produced in New York in 1985 and published in New American Writing (1987). She has also written an autobiography, Tell Me Again (1981), and collaborated with her second husband, poet Doug Oliver, on The Scarlet Cabinet: A Compendium of Books (1992). She also teaches poetry workshops and creates collages, watercolors, and sketches composed of everyday objects and images. Many of her collages are designed to de-eroticize photographs found in pornographic magazines. Among her honors are a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1980, a Poetry Center award in 1982, a G.E. Foundation award in 1983, and Fund for Poetry grants in 1987 and 1989. Notley and her husband live in Paris and edit the French poetry journal Gare du Nord.