Purpose and Focus

This website was created for Dr. Sturm’s English 1102 class focused on art and poetry of the New York School of Poets and Painters. The purpose of this Artifact is to trace the history of Alice Notley's feminist poetics and style of story-telling through analyzing three of her works written during different periods and about different periods of her life. The first of the three pieces featured in this Artifact would be Songs For an Unborn Second Baby, a book of poetry written by Notley in 1979 which highlights her feelings of frustration and isolation during her pregnancy with her second child. The second featured piece is Tell Me Again, which is a memoir of Notley's life published in 1982 highlighting specific points of her childhood in Needles which seemed to have impacted her outlook on feminism as well as her confidence in writing about specific themes left mostly unexplored. The last of these pieces would be Mysteries of Small Houses, a book of Notley's poems published almost two decades after Songs For an Unborn Second Baby which highlights specific moments in Notley's life dealing with a lot of sorrows and grievances. Each of these three pieces is featured, as well as some of Notley's visual works and other primary documents which express Notley's feminist interventions.