These two visual works also express Notley’s feminist lens and ideas about breaking gender expectations and societal rules about women and their bodies.

This first work textually outlines hatred for a list of things women deal simply by living a regular “day in the life”. Women are expected to love yoga, being pampered and praying as innocent and “perfect” individuals. However, by straight-forwardly expressing a hatred for these things and then contrasting this long list with the simple sentence “I like pizzas”, Notley shatters societal expectations and defiantly expresses that women can love what they are expected to hate and hate what they are expected to love.

Q: I found it extremely interesting to read Tell Me Again and Mysteries of Small Houses together due to the fact that specific events and ideas seemed to have been repeated and presented in both books. An example of this that I found would be your teacher who was convinced you were better off as a pianist than a poet (although I’m sure you’re a wonderful pianist, I cannot help but feel the need to say that your teacher could not have been more incorrect). Do you think of Mysteries and Tell Me Again as interconnected books? Why did you choose to present these specific events in more than one of your works--how did they influence your writing and what made them so memorable and impactful?

A: I stopped playing the piano about fifty years ago! . . . I don't think of Mysteries and Tell me Again as interconnected, but I noticed when I wrote Mysteries that certain memories or observations of mine stayed important, always came to mind if certain questions or topics were raised. I think with this event -- the English teacher saying I was a better pianist than writer -- I was interested in the fact that I hadn't been affected by his saying this, I didn't believe him in fact. He himself was about to go to Berlin and try to become a writer, and I now think he felt threatened by me. I never believed any of my teachers except in relation to basic facts of the subject they were teaching. I found early on that when I wrote in a non-academic fashion I got something back from writing that I got back from nothing else. I simply saw this and as I wrote more I didn't let anyone's opinions interfere; I found what this guy said -- and certain others -- irrelevant to what I was going to do. I didn't listen to anyone until I met Ted.

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Q: What role do you think Songs for the Unborn Second Baby, one of your earlier works, played in the creation and content of others such as Mysteries of Small Houses or even Tell Me Again? There’s such a passionate, surging quality to Songs for the Unborn Baby, issues of motherhood and how it might be limiting or restrictive in some ways? How did writing a book-length poem about these challenges change those events or carry forward into your future writing? Did it change those events in some way?

A: Yes, I think it changed those events, because by writing Songs For the Unborn Second Baby I became enough of a poet to assert myself as one through my technical abilities and through being capable of handling this new subject matter. I used the poem to insure that I would now write grandly and say what I needed to say. It's my first long poem, and the first one for which I invented a form, though out of my reading of other poets. That is, I took the form for Frank O'Hara's poem "Ode on Michael Goldberg's Birthday (and other births)" and imitated it but not strictly in any sense, and repeated that through five sections. Thus I was now a mother of sons but I was also the author of a considerable poem. I was not and would never be abject.

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Q: One of the things I appreciate about your works - visual and written - would be your ability to confidently write about “bold” and less-explored topics such as sex, sexuality, erotic media, pregnancy, and motherhood. I really experienced the ways your poetry gives a voice to these underrepresented issues, especially for women. Where do you think this willingness to explore such topics originated? Has this confidence always been a part of who you are as a poet?

A: I think you're asking where I got my permissions. I got them from myself. I wasn't that interested in any of the topics you list in themselves, but I was always interested in why I was alive, why people were mean to each other or not, what death is. Whether love exists and what it is. Basic metaphysical questions. I went at all these questions out of myself and my experience, so then, I guess, sex, sexuality, erotic media, pregnancy, and motherhood come into play as "topics." Why was I having babies? Why did anyone have babies? And whatever I had to think about because of my life situation necessarily came into play in my poetry, why not? At this point I was meeting a lot of the poets in the New York School and the Black Mountain School, the Beats etc, and they all wrote from the urgencies produced by being in their specific lives. They were almost all men, but it wasn't that hard to make their techniques apply to my life. And they accepted my poems.