Alice Notley
“it’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against. . . everything”
Alice Notley, “The Poetics of Disobedience”1
Notley’s works pertain to diverse topics derived from her personal experience and relationships with those around her. This site will focus on themes in relation to gender and sexuality; women in poetry, motherhood, and marriage Not only do Notley’s topics challenge the perception of women in the works of her male contemporaries, including her husband Ted Berrigan, but the style and form of her poems also reimagine and defy the old standards of poetry in very New York School and uniquely Alice way.
Notley during a 2011 poetry reading at UChicago (watch video here)
Handwritten letter from Alice Notley Courtesy of Alice Notley Papers, Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego.
Notley in 1987 reading “I am the People” during a Buffalo poetry reading (listen here)
Being a Woman in a Male-Dominated Field
"There are no forms of poetry entirely ‘owned’ by women”
Alice Notley, “Women and Poetry”2
The quote above comes from Notley’s essay “Women and Poetry” in that same essay she notes that poetry has been written by men and created in a male-focused world.2 This sentiment mirrors the theme of Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” film has been created by and for men and with a male narrative.
Mulvey notes this phenomenon as the “male gaze”, combat this phenomenon Mulvey calls for the integration of women into film and specifically by recrafting psychoanalytic film theory to form the new feminist film theory.3
Notley’s essay mentions famous female poets such as Dickenson and Stein, noting their work no matter how individual and thematically feminine they still draw on theses historically male forms even if their goal is to subvert and disobey those form.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with the male nature of poetry, it does provide limitations when entering the critical scene. Notley in her poem “As Good as Anything” writes about the exclusion she faced in terms of being a female poet and the differing standards of the worth and skill of female and male poets.
“men who—and the suicidal women—want to be culpable for something, settle for being mean to their wives” 1
“You can fuck a visiting poet; you can be paraded before a visiting poet as fuckable but not fuck." 1
Right: Cover of Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Courtesy of Koenig Books.
Motherhood and Marriage
“I’m a polite social being, I’m a Ladle Lady”
Alice Notley, “How Spring Comes”1
The work and position of women in the home are important in Notley’s poetry. Notley was married twice, first to fellow New York School poet Ted Berrigan, the couple is pictured to the left in a painting by Ann Mikolowski. Notley wrote “At Night the States” following Berrigan’s passing.1 Her second husband Douglas Oliver was a British poet during their marriage they work on the magazines Scarlet and Gare du Nord.
Notley’s notes the disparity in roles of the husband and wife in taking care of children. In “How Spring Comes” her main grip with her husband is that lack of support “you aren’t even there” the speaker notes, her purpose in the relationship is to care for the children and “letting you [her husband] fuck me Exquisite”. 1
Notley shows similar frustrations with her life as a mother of two children, in this sense Notley fills the typically feminine role in caring for her children. In Song for the Unborn Second Baby, Notley writes on pregnancy and childcare asserting the importance of both akin to the typical work of a man.4 Pregnancy is also mirrored to poetry and writing.
Left: Painting of Ted and Alice by Ann Mikolowski. Courtesy of The Poetry Foundation.
The children in her works are never villainized, even as Notley writes “I’m a slave, well mildly, to baby”1 in the poem“He Says I Misunderstood.” The use of “mildly” creates a less serious tone. Yet in the same work, the husband drunkenly notes “‘No women poets are any good’”1 to which the speaker notes as “an outright and fucking untruth”.1 While both feminine roles cause strife motherhood is written as a more natural good.
In Songs for the Unborn Second Baby, the line "I dream of a compost into whose composition paper can go"1 are used in the beginning of the first song. The lines preceding remark on her pregnancy and the state of repetitiveness in sets her in, the idea of writing and pregnancy are then interwoven into one state of being.
Right: Notley with sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan. Courtesy of Jacket Magazine.
The Descent of Alette and the Femmine Epic
“‘My mind floats’ ‘my mind floats but’ ‘ever downward’”
Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette5
In the book-length poem, The Descent of Alette, Notley crafts a female epic, that is to say, The Descent of Alette is not just an poem about women but a story in which women take direct action.
In the essay “The Feminine Epic” Notley discusses this disparity between a true feminine epic and one that focuses on female characters. For the latter, she references the Sumerian Epic The Descent of Inanna, while this work focuses on the mythical queen and feature powerful female goddesses “Inanna doesn’t ‘act,’ she does nothing but show up” 2
The concept of action in the female character is what makes a feminine epic, while Alette doses have moments in which she is acted upon, the “-ette” of her name even suggests the uselessness perceived in the character.2 Yet there is still a sense of want and action in Alette. After her body is lost and Alette begs and yearns to get her “sex”back, she misses the form and shape that made her female and the sensations and pleasure that came with it.6
Alette’s name also serves as a play on words for the word owlet. Near the end of the epic after losing her female body, Alette is turned into an owl-like being by a “baptismal dark” 6 , she is not wholly a woman nor wholly an owl she is a hybrid of both and born into a new state in the work’s end.
Right: Cover of The Descent of Alette. Courtesy of Penguin.
Descent resembles Dante’s Inferno, part of Notley’s inspiration was to reform the lense of the epic and to do so Notley redefines the framework and sentiments of traditional epics.
One such sentiment “Women are outside of any named Paradise or Heaven or Nirvana, they are stuck in history waiting for it (history) to be righted."2 is noted in "The Feminine Epic". Notley challenges this with the character Mother , she is a benevolent figure who has reached this enlightened and knowing state. She serves as a figure of guidance and safety for Alette and as a foil to the Tyrant.
In Homer’s Art Notley writes how after Homer “the world went haywire & women were denied participation in the design & making of it,” these historical authors and their epics shaped how women are positioned and viewed centuries later. It then becomes clearer to the reader why the Tyrant, the ‘villain’ of the work, is not just the man of the modern times, as one might expect from a feminist work, but “all the epic authors” who like the Tyrant uses women as tools and objects in their narratives.2
“White Phosphorous” a poem from Homer’s Art is where Notley originated the quoted divisions used in Descent, the meter created by these quotations is made to mirror that of the chants of a Greek chorus. 2 This meter of antiquity connects both Descent and "White Phosphorous" to traditional epics in the auditory sphere.
Right: Cover of Homer’s Art. Courtesy of Inst of Further Studies.
“I took things out of collections, but everything’s in chronological order. I didn’t rearrange anything: I made a story. I made a sort of meta-story.”
Alice Notley on choosing the poem for Grave of Light7
Notley was not only a poet; while in Chicago she edited and work on literary magazines, she continued this line of work editing two literary magazines while in England. Notley like may of the New York School poets took to collage work as an expression of visual art. To the right are some of the fans she created.
The images contained and created by these collages invoke of Notley’s life and poetry style. They contain elements from pop culture, including Star Wars references, allusions to her poetry, the fan on the top left has a linework owl reminiscent of The Descent of Alette, and complex compositions and much like the unique line breaks and formations seen in her printed poems. 8
Notley is one of the still-living New York School poets, thus she has given interviews and had the opportunity to speak and read her works in a modern sense. Click here to listen to Notley in conversation with podcast host Rachel Zucker, speaking on her works, life, and contemporary issues.
Courtesy of Alice Notley Papers, Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego.
Works Cited
1 Notley, Alice. Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005. Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
2 Notley, Alice. Coming After: Essays on Poetry. University of Michigan Press, 2005.
3 Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen, Volume 16, Issue 3, Autumn 1975, Pages 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6
4 Turner, Lindsay. “Lullaby & Labor: Alice Notley and the Work of Poetry.” Contemporary Womens Writing, vol. 12, no. 3, 13 Nov. 2018, pp. 289–305. Oxford Academic, doi:10.1093/cww/vpy022.
5 Notley, Alice. The Descent of Alette. Penguin, 1996.
6 Roman, Christopher. (2015). The owl of the system: Alice Notley’s queer poetics in The Descent of Alette. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. 6. 10.1057/pmed.2015.9.
7 Turner, Lindsay. “‘At the Mercy of My Poetic Voice’: An Interview with Alice Notley.” Boston Review, 19 Sept. 2018, http://bostonreview.net/poetry/lindsay-turner-alice-notley-interview-feminism-mojave-collage.
8 Notley, Alice. “My Fans by Alice Notley.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 30 Aug. 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/150822/my-fans-5d5dc781dab1c.
9 Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 6 Feb. 2005, https://poets.org/text/finding-female-voice-alice-notleys-poems-and-collages.
10 Robbins, Amy. “Alice Notley's Post-Confessional I: Toward a Poetics of Postmodern Witness.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 41, 2006, pp. 76–90. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25474201.
Header Images Courtesy of Alice Notley Papers, Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego.