The poet Alice Notley died on May 17. But death was a place that she had visited before, a state with which she had long communed.
Step into the uninvidious nonvoid inter alia especially be-
Tween the live and dead for I have been there often and know it
she writes in The Speak Angel Series, her penultimate collection, from 2020. Close readers of poetry are trained to uncouple the writer from the poem’s speaking “I,” and to treat lyric claims as fictive. But Notley often spoke of poetry as a conduit between the dead and the living. “Good poets open themselves to all the voices in the air,” she said in an interview from 2015, “and they are there, of the live and dead.” Should we take her at her word? I do. And I defy the skeptical reader to immerse themselves in her cosmogonic body of work and emerge without a crumb of faith. In God? Perhaps not. In an afterlife? Maybe. In Notley’s belief that poetry reaches to some kind of a beyond? Yes, emphatically.
Where to begin describing the life of a person who professed not to “believe in time as a line”? I could chart the conventional chronology, noting that Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945, and grew up in Needles, California, just east of the Mojave Desert. That landscape is stitched into her writing. You can smell the Southern California flora, glimpse their midnight cutouts on the wide horizon, in an early poem like “Night, With Stars”:
Eucalyptus assumes its mammoth
shape
in silver
I could recount Notley’s discovery of her “poetry talent” at the age of four, when she complained to her mother of an “excruciating headache,” just so she could feel those clusters of consonants roll around her mouth. And I could note that she earned a BA from Barnard College, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she met the man she would marry in 1972, the poet Ted Berrigan.
I might discuss Alice and Ted’s life together over the next decade, shuttling from New York to Chicago to England and back to New York, settling finally on the Lower East Side, in a railroad apartment at 101 St. Mark’s Place. It was in this tiny two-bedroom flat that the pair started a family (their sons, Anselm and Edmund, are now both poets in their own right), wrote some of their most important works, and fostered a poetry scene associated with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, now often referred to as the Second Generation of the New York School. “It was a really famous apartment,” Notley recalled years later, “because we were there.”
But what good is chronology to a writer who conceived of life’s trajectory as a spiral, a kind of helical continuum, for which death is merely a “resumption of our origin”? “Now I’m dead,” Notley writes, “but first I was dead.”
I remember I will be dead I am start-
ing to remember my moments dead.…
I re-member being in my mother’s womb
I’m sure I remember before then and that that’s a future from now…
then I spiral into beginning
Each of these lines are taken from the Speak Angel Series, a visionary epic about a woman named “I” (or sometimes “Alice Notley”) who leads living and dead souls to a point zero from which the universe will be healed, remade, reperceived. At least, that’s how Notley used to describe the poem when she gave readings from it. This almost-endpoint seems as apposite a place to start as any, not least because its sprawling mysticism strains against the New York School box in which Notley is often placed. “Such labelling by association is frequently detrimental to women poets,” she remarked in a 1995 essay on the poet Joanne Kyger. “Poetry movements are generally manmade; women seen in the light of such movements always appear secondary.”
Notley had other ideas about how to position her work. “I don’t consider myself a great female poet,” she announced in 2009 during a talk in Paris, where she lived in her last decades. “I consider myself a great poet.” In person, Notley delivered such pronunciamientos with a grin, even a girlish chuckle. (Her voice lives on the page, but that laugh will be missed.) But her epic body of writing, in both scale and ambition, shows there’s nothing amusing about it. By late in her career Notley was hailed as one of America’s greatest living poets, but I don’t think it’s an overstatement to claim her as one of the greatest poets, of any nation or period or gender. Notley more than merits her place among the visionaries whose presence can be felt across her work: Dante, Blake, Whitman, Ginsberg. As her friend the artist Rudy Burckhardt wrote, Alice was “our present-day Homer.”
That said, Notley would have rejected such comparisons, as well as the association with tradition. Her work was built on a commitment to revising the terms of poetic writing for women. “Most ways of composing and setting down lines of poetry, of grouping them into poems on the page, seem ‘male,’” she wrote in “Women and Poetry,” from 1991. “There are no forms of poetry that are entirely ‘owned’ by women.” A question that propels her poetry, then, is how to deploy forms that acknowledge a history of “male” poetics, even as a “female” voice deforms them from within. From first to last, Notley’s poetry is disobedient, a term that appears across her writing. Not anarchic or revolutionary, but naughty, high-spirited, a poetics that wants to thumb its nose at protocol, then sneak a glance at the reaction it provoked. Convention is not finally destroyed but revised, teased, made to defend itself.
Take the early poem “But He Says I Misunderstood,” from 1973, which opens with a dialogue between a female “I” and an “Older & successfuller” male poet:
He & I had a fight in the pub
5 scotch on the rocks 1 beer I remember
Only that he said “No women poets are any
good, if you want it
Straight, because they don’t handle money” and
“Poe greater than Dickinson”
Well that latter is an outright and fucking untruth
Early poems like this remain a little derivative—you can hear a lot of Frank O’Hara, whose influence Notley always acknowledged—but the voice that blasts from the page is unmistakably hers. “Outright and fucking untruth” is a typical Notleyan word-knot. The line captures the immediate, idiosyncratic, and pissed (in both senses) speech that someone you know might sputter over a scotch (or five). But it’s also poetically calculated. Each of these words plays on a different disyllabic foot—spondee, trochee, and iamb, respectively—so that the line demands to be chewed over and spat out, like the infant Notley’s “excruciating headache.” I’ve yet to meet a reader who didn’t fall for Notley at that seventh line: who couldn’t love her boozy defense of Dickinson, her furious commitment to the truth, because of course Dickinson is “greater than” Poe?
In his introduction to Early Works, a 2023 collection of Notley’s first six books, Nick Sturm hears “a music fully achieved,” “energetic, raging, desperate, humorous, and . . . immaculately attentive.” Once you’ve tuned your ear, you catch it ricocheting across her oeuvre, all the way into the late works. It’s still there in The Speak Angel Series, singing of “turd diamonds of fecal academic fame.” (That nose-thumbing again, this time at the academy: for Notley, poetry and the university were unnatural bedfellows.)
From the beginning, Notley was reconfiguring lyric privacy, reopening the closed space of poetic reflection. “I do use ‘I’ throughout these books,” she explains in the introduction to Speak Angel, but “I am influenced by older public forms of art: Greek epic and drama, Latin rhetoric and epic, the plays of Racine.” And from Dickinson, Notley derives a tendency to make explicitly, frankly public those private spaces—home, body, motherhood—of female existence. “One had to disobey the past and the practices of literary males in order to talk about what was going on most literarily around one, the pregnant body, and babies for example,” she recalls in “The Poetics of Disobedience.” “There were no babies in poetry then. How could that have been?”
So I got pregnant
I hope not last night now
I’m a slave, well mildly, to a baby
Though I could teach English A or
type no bigshot (mildly) poet-in-residence like him
Get a babysitter never more write any good poems
Or, just to
Scrounge it out, leave him. All I can say isThis poem is in the Mainstream American Tradition.
In 1973, “the Mainstream American Tradition” might also have been called confessional poetry, the whiff of “cooked” verse by Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton et alia still hanging in the air. Notley’s concluding claim is a barb, a parodic stab at the male poets who equate “female” poetry with confessionalism. For despite its mock-plaintive title, “But He Says I Misunderstood” is not a confession. It’s a poem about poetry, which understands form as the occasion for poetic utterance rather than an empty space to dump private divulgence. “I have never wanted, as a poet, to know beforehand what a poem is going to do or say,” Notley wrote in 2001. Her commitment to the poem’s negative capability always renders the personal subordinate to the poetic. The poem speaks through the poet, not the other way around.
I first met Alice in 2018, at a symposium of New York School poets and scholars in Birmingham, England. The gathering was intimate and egalitarian; tables had been moved from the room so chairs could be arranged in an open circle. There weren’t many of us, maybe two dozen, including Alice and her son Edmund. Alice was a force. She parried with academics who tried to reify the New York School as a formal and historic movement, and defended younger writers who believed in its living legacy. Yet through it all, our present-day Homer remained personable, approachable, sparky. That evening, after a poetry reading in the city, I found myself standing next to Alice at a sink in the bathroom. Edmund had just read from his work, so I said something to her about his poems. She responded amicably, politely—and then fixed me with a long stare from her deep, owl-like eyes. “He looks so like Ted,” she said. Then she left the room.
It was tempting to think that this flash of intimacy marked a meaningful moment between us—though of course, Notley was just finding something to say to an almost-stranger. Still, it captures two things that I would notice every time I saw her at readings and events: that she was generous, to the point of familiarity, with young writers; and that she always and only said what the occasion required—she never trotted out trite nothings.
So one wonders how this poet, for whom words were so precious and precise, could produce such a dizzyingly large body of work. Notley’s writing resists easy absorption. She published almost fifty books of poetry and prose; Speak Angel alone is the size of many poets’ collected works. Her writing refuses the soundbite or—yuck—the Instagram square, and it abhors the virtual. (“Internet is a sack of shit,” Notley wrote in 2018, “scads of material that people read every fifth word of and then make pronouncements about.”) Preparing for this essay, I spent a little over three weeks wandering in Notley’s massive oeuvre, shuttling between poetry and prose, leaping from 2020 to 1969, back to the 1990s, and then out, somewhere, beyond.
You emerge from this writing—or at least I did—a little changed. You see the world and its ephemera differently, you hear a Notleyan music in snatches of conversation. More than that, you start to reweave the threads connecting words with reality. And when you do that, the “real” begins to feel soft, gooey, permeable. All great writing does this, but for Notley this is poetry’s special (negative) capability, a confrontation as suddenly intimate as our conversation at that bathroom sink.
Words are electric and change shape as you say them, and the world changes shape as you speak. . . . I am changing you, I am causing you or me. I am making us transform, come to new life, forget the old stuff so hurtful. . . . The poem is more real. Do I believe that? Yes, that’s why I’m a poet.
Dreams, poetry, death. For Notley these states are no less “real” than the “day world” (to take the title of her 1973 collection) that we have built around us. And why shouldn’t they be? The voice of the poem, the speaking subject, doesn’t just string words into lines like beads on a braid, but makes something happen. It brings us to “new life,” and maybe, also, to the dead.
Look
Underneath
What you’ve
Written
Every-
Thing every-
One is speak-
Ing to you.
In 1983, aged 48, Ted Berrigan died from liver damage. He had been diagnosed with hepatitis C in 1975, but the condition went untreated, largely because neither he nor Alice could afford medical care. Widowed at 37, with two young children, Notley would remain at 101 St. Mark’s Place for another decade. She never stopped writing. Her trembling, devastating elegy for Berrigan, “At Night the States,” written two years after his death, remains among the most significant poems of the last century:
At night the states
making life, not explaining anything
but all the popular songs say call
my name
oh call my name, and if I call it out myself to
you, call mine out instead as our
poets do
will you still walk on by? I
have
loved you for so long. You
died
and on the wind they sang
your name to me
but you said nothing.
The poem’s pulse is the basso ostinato of each stanza’s opening line: “At night the states.” The repetition creates rhythm—Notley was dismayed by the waning of meter in contemporary poetry and was always looking for new forms of vocally inflected measure—but it also tempers and bounds the speaker’s emotions. In recordings of Notley reading the poem, you hear her accelerate, the phrases coming rapidly, even raggedly, only to be reined in at the start of each stanza. Listen to where she places unexpected pauses between words. (“Hold onto the sounds of words between words,” she writes in Speak Angel, “and / You’ll sing.”) The tremor in her voice is not affected; it is simply hers. Yet it is also the voice of the poem, its cadence. This is how the poem speaks itself, the grain of its utterance, in the uncertain descent of the short lines (a sort of unsettled variable foot) and the sometimes confused syntax (“I let go of, have let, don’t / let / Some, and some”).
“At Night the States” is more than a love letter to a dead husband. Like “But He Says I Misunderstood,” it is at heart a poem about poetry. Lyric address has melted into the clichéd refrain of pop music (“all the popular songs say call / my name”). But the speaker cuts back into the poem, repeating the jingle with a direct and desperate plea to the dead: “oh call my name.” The apostrophe (“oh”) transforms pop into poetry, registering both lament and lyric convention. But here again, Notley resists the confessional, acknowledging that mourning does not mean admission (“Best not to tell”), and that elegy is a public form (“and on the wind they sang / your name”). All poetic writing, it turns out, is a kind of elegy, a calling out to an absent other, and the echo of that call.
I
have
loved you for so long.
You
died.
In its very refusal to poeticize, to dress up grief in word-sequins—the abrupt plosive line, the hard “died” hanging starkly in white space—the passage doesn’t undermine poetry, but activates it.
And out of that that empty space, we also hear a reverberation of Berrigan’s own words, the voice Notley is straining to hear. “Dear Berrigan. He died,” Berrigan wrote repeatedly in The Sonnets, the collaged sequence for which he is best known. The shout into the abyss returns not as a quieter version of one’s own voice, but as a gathering of other voices. As Notley writes in Speak Angel, “this speech is a spiral.”
At one point during my immersion in Notley’s catalogue, I came up for air to watch Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Released in 1983, the year Berrigan died, the film is a meandering reflection on the nature of memory. About halfway through, stills from Saul Bass’s title sequence for Vertigo begin to flash by, sandwiched between images of Japanese cat funerals and black volcanic dust. “He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo,” the female narrator intones, recounting snatches of a fictional correspondence. “In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away.” The spirals that recur throughout Hitchcock’s movie—the rings of an ancient sequoia, the painted eye of a wooden horse, the twist of Kim Novak’s hair—signal not the vertigo of space, Marker’s narrator muses, but that of time.
Time and memory don’t move steadily. They pirouette, curving forward and backward. They arc, fold, collapse. The sense of “impossible memory” that Marker finds in Vertigo doesn’t so much recall the past as remember a future (“I am start- / ing to remember my moments dead”). Such twisting temporal recalibrations have been called many things: sibylline, visionary, messianic, raving. All are words that one might use to describe Notley’s poetry, and only more acutely in the wake of her death.
How, then, to finish writing about a poet who was troubled by the idea of “time as a story”? Since I began at the end, I’ll end in the middle, with lines from Notley’s acclaimed poem The Descent of Alette. Modeled on one of history’s epic spirals, the map of Dante’s afterlife, Alette was also written midway on the journey of Notley’s life. As she begins her dreamlike descent, Alette sloughs off the prison of the body to find that
“my mind”
“is still there somehow” “suddenly weightless” “I am weightless”“Set free”1
One hopes—or knows, as Alice seemed to know—that the same may also be true for the poet herself.
Quotation marks in original. ↩
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