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The Kind of Shaking that Keeps You Steady: Alice Notley (1945–2025)

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I encountered Notley’s poetry at exactly the right time. Young, restlessly curious, I wanted to know if I was on the right path, if it was worth dedicating one’s youth to such a devalued art as poetry. In my early twenties, I had enough courage to start sharing my poems but not enough to call myself a poet. Already, I was chafing against the constraints and conventions of various schools, styles, ideologies, generational allegiances. My crime was of eye-rolling idealism, along with the conviction that one of the most important things you could learn from a good poet was how to reconcile with life itself. I read through a dense universe of influences, poets who had orbited each other, frequented the same watering holes and workshops, stalked the same streets, colliding in friendship, collaboration and animosity. Soon enough, I found Alice Notley. Lazily, I began with 1993’s Selected Poems. The insouciant yet deeply serious quality of her writing struck me. Here was a poet eschewing all templates, excavating the self with both horror and humour. Hers was ‘The Open-Stomach School of Poetry’, as she riffed. Various lines stayed with me. Some even became mantras. ‘Everybody in any room is a smuggler.’ I took the courage I needed and ran with it.

Born in the Arizonan mining town of Bisbee, the acclaimed poet Alice Notley was raised in Needles, California, her ‘official hometown’, where her parents ran an auto supply store. Needles was a harsh and unsparing landscape she often returned to in dreams, poems and the leaky spaces in between. Notley, who passed away this May at the age of 79, was formidably prolific, publishing more than 40 volumes of poetry over her lifetime, and that’s without counting a raft of magazines, mimeographed pamphlets and collaborative postcards. Beginning at the age of 26, she would publish a book almost biannually for the rest of her life.

Notley considered herself a latecomer to poetry. Leaving Needles for New York in 1963, she studied at Barnard College, and then at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the only woman in the fiction workshop. Hearing Robert Creeley read was a strike of lightning. Immediately, Notley began writing her own poems. Her early forays were imitations, reflecting her omnivorous reading habits. At Iowa, she met Ted Berrigan, a charismatic working-class poet, who handed Notley the keys to his personal library. Berrigan would become her first husband, and the two contributed energetically to the social and artistic torrents of their era. Their influence was deeply felt across New York and San Francisco, the epicentres of the American poetic avant-garde.

Notley’s individual reputation as a poet began more tentatively. Her first book of poems, 1971’s 165 Meeting House Lane/ Twenty-Four Sonnets, was written during a bare-boned Long Island winter. Its cover is adorned with plump-cheeked cherubs perched on clouds, one of Notley’s sketches. Composed as a sequence of sonnets, the book contains effervescent lists, dead cats and black bile, chiffon and chenille. Notley was devoted to ‘dredging things up’, and the interpenetrations of mind and spirit that would go on to characterise her poetics is visible in her early work.

Notley embodies a rebellion against the ‘poor sweet categorisers’ who refuse the unitive, the totality we all possess.

Place and pain. For Notley, both were catalysts of evolution. Manhattan. Morocco. The Bronx. The ravages of the desert and the city. Locales are captured in her writing, waning in and out of view. They are grooved into the ridges of memory, recalled and repurposed, boisterous and ungovernable. At times, a place is distinctly recognisable, and at others, the associations are loose and hazy, like the corner of your room the sunlight doesn’t quite reach. Midnight green East Village summers, an England ‘so old that layers of death pervade beautifully the beautiful countryside’, her adopted Paris. These aren’t just dots on a map. They speak to the routes taken and abandoned, the circuitous nature of community, the deliberate steps taken to live an ‘outlawish’ poet’s life. By admission, wherever she went and however hard it got, Notley had never tried to be anything but a poet.

Intimacy, as Notley wrote, is ‘all, spreading’, a truth the archive corroborates. The tangle of relationships which sustain and trouble poets can be traced through acknowledgements, dedications, letters, photographs, journals and candid interviews. (Gossip also has its uses). Notley’s first book was dedicated to James Schuyler, among others. In one 1977 episode of the cable television show Public Access Poetry, Notley and Eileen Myles read together, each chuckling softly at various moments. The first generation of the New York School bled into the second, and Notley counted the likes of John Ashberry, Ann Waldman, George Schneeman and Ron Padgett as friends. At Brooklyn College, she was a substitute teacher for Allen Ginsberg. Kenneth Koch regularly visited her dreams. Lorenzo Thomas was a doorway into Umbra and further cross-fertilization. St. Mark’s Place was her stomping ground. There, Notley taught alongside Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman, running an innovative workshop attended by Bob Holman and Eileen Myles. (Notley shared the same year of birth with Mayer and Waldman, as well as an initially competitive dynamic which grew into a friendship). 1976’s For Frank O’Hara’s Birthday was dedicated to the mid-century champion of the quotidian.

Another intergenerational encounter can be found in ‘Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice’, a poetic resuscitation of the Beat icon Jack Kerouac. In the poem, he spits at our feet. An alcoholic, Catholic, pedant and ‘ordinary cruel lover’, Jack revels in his contradictions. It’s the reader who ‘can only take when it’s that one & not some other one’. Notley embodies a rebellion against the ‘poor sweet categorisers’ who refuse the unitive, the totality we all possess. As she once argued, poems writhe free from the mess of the person. They regroup into something else, somewhere beyond.

Poetry, for Notley, was an ‘attempted compression of an infinitude of immensities’, and these attempts are the gist of creative reinvention. Visual art and collage were also arenas of play, as revealed in the feathery and intuitive sketches and drawings scattered throughout Notley’s books. (The only exhibition of her art took place in 1980 at MoMA PS1). Notley described her collages as attempts to reckon with our contemporary ‘situation of overabundance’, a longing for the stark logic of the desert. Her work across the late 1970s and 1980s was fed by this polyphony, a desire to write from ‘a crowded apartment’ of voices. Into the millennium, that commitment persisted. ‘Two of Swords’ is a poem written during the 2008 U.S. presidential race, a time of cautious optimism within the cultural establishment. It trusts in the politics of the ‘undefined’, that which requires no casting of votes. The poem rejects the shrunken world of two parties, sexes, countries, armies, gladiators, ‘two contenders for space.’ Notley’s distrust is palpable. ‘Is there such a thing as one space?’, she asks. Readers are free to assume a defensive or offensive position. The question lingers.

Time and time again, Notley was submerged in grief. Ted Berrigan died young in 1983 from liver damage, and she was left to care for their two sons. 1988’s At Night the States is a collection grasping at an intangible presence, featuring a narrator who can barely recognize herself. ‘Forgive me for being abstract, but I no longer have a lover.’ Notley lost a stepdaughter and a dear friend in succession, and ‘the wall between the living and the dead collapsed.’ Her brother, an anguished Vietnam veteran, died from an overdose, leading to the stirrings which became 1992’s The Descent of Alette, a book-length poem and feminist epic set in the grotty bowels of the subway. (Katabasis after The End of History, if you will). Along with the grieving women in her family, Notley found herself ‘mangled’ and silenced by the forces of war. ‘We got to suffer, but without a trajectory.’ Alette journeys through snakelike tunnels, eventually confronting the nameless Tyrant, who ruthlessly controls and manipulates this world of trapped souls. With this book-length poem, Notley intended to ‘steal story away from the novel’, giving it back its rhythm and sound. Subway cars filled with animal-faced men and disembodied body parts empty out into the recesses of the human psyche, as Alette descends through this swarming underworld.

Notley’s second husband, the British poet Douglas Oliver died of cancer in 2000. They had lived in Paris since the early 90s. The two co-edited Gare Du Nord, a magazine which featured poets such as Tom Leonard, D.S. Marriott and Keston Sutherland. Notley continued to write sibylline, form-bending books, bringing the unconscious to the fore. Resisting the pressure of ‘mainstreamese or avant-gardese’ expectations, she was a major, iconoclastic figure in American poetry.

Her legacy is a two-sworded dance. A recipient of numerous prestigious awards and grants, she remained a pantomath, always itching to move on to the next idea. The centre was just another playground. Formalisms and mysticisms co-mingle in her work. The dead sit with the poet, and no conversation is too trivial. In the essay ‘Thinking and Poetry’, she reminds poets that we should test assumptions, not assume them. We should never be afraid of starting again.

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Momtaza Mehri is a poet and researcher working across criticism, education and radio. Currently, she is the Poet-in-Residence at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. Her debut poetry collection Bad Diaspora Poems won the 2023 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, as well as an Eric Gregory Prize, Somerset Maugham Award, and a Sky Arts Award.

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