in memoriam ALICE NOTLEY, 1946-2025

We've lost one of our greatest poets and I, like many others, am devastated. I can't say I knew Alice well. Met her at Naropa late 90s/Boulder. Mt first public talk, at Boulder Bookstore, was on her masterpiece "Descent of Alette." I was in over my head. But Alice told me she liked it, which meant alot to me. Years later I was asked by Christina Davis to introduce her at Harvard along with Eleni Sieklianos. In the event Christina read my remaks since I had a job interview at Cleveland State.

Alice Notley—Notes for Harvard Introduction, 4/17/2013 Patrick Pritchett

“I invented the arts to stay alive.” So says Marie, the derelict ur-matriarch of Alice Notley’s rhapsodic and defiant Culture of One. Her motto might be Notley’s own.

Because for years now, Alice Notley’s poetry has operated in a strange no-woman’s land, neglected or ignored by both the pious adherents of canonical correctness and the bully boys of the avant-garde. Part of this is due to her own unwillingness to embrace any camp but her own, and her sharply stated aversion to poetry that is about, “writing, literary criticism, linguistics, or French philosophy.” The whole point of her rejection of such parochialism is that each poet always already forms a school of One, herself.

She lays out the necessity for this position in her essay, “The Poetics of Disobedience,” where she writes that poetry obliges one “to disobey the past and the practices of literary males,” that disobedience in its larger sense means “staying alert to all the ways one is coerced into denying experience.” It means, “No Doctrines” about poetry, but allowing the poem to name its own shape in the making of it. Disobedience to the tyranny of literary conventions suggests an interior obedience – to the poet’s own unexplainable urges and instincts. It means treating her whims as though they were laws and not asking why. It means just following the poem where it leads you. Disobedience also signifies a deeper permission: the inalienable right of the poet to break boundaries, to transgress, to militate against theory, against Poetry with a capital P, against anything that is not the poem itself.

Notley’s poems are infused with an extraordinary tenderness and care for the fragility of our predicament and they undertake this with all the resources of Dr. Williams’ plain American speech, its breaks, stutters, sudden stops and restarts, flush with repetition, always a little ahead or behind: everyday talk, with all its gaps and fissures and aphasic goofs.

At the same time, since 1992’s “White Phosphorous,” Notley has been inventing a radical new measure, a kind of gnostic, hypnagogic speech that is startling in its immediacy. It’s not so much a form of ghostly dictation, not even Jack Spicer’s Martians speaking through the imperfect medium of Alice, but the poet herself listening intently, acutely, to the dream voices of the poem, murmuring in all their disturbing tongues. Yet, as she writes in “Epic & Women Poets,” “dreams are not language … they are fleshly & vivid, they are ‘real’ … the bed of new beginnings, the place to turn to.”

This effort to produce a new measure, which marks such major works as The Descent of Alette, Close to me & Closer … (The Language of Heaven), Alma, or The Dead Women, and most recently Culture of One, amounts to a description of a tremendous struggle – of the poet to speak the poem, of a woman to claim a voice outside the proscriptions of men – and it’s a jarring, gorgeous, intoxicating, and horrific struggle, written in a rhythm of breathless urgency, the swell and pulse of dismemberment and re-unification, of fracture and writing out of the fracture, of brokeness and wholeness whirling, colliding, recombining: a primal religious drama of the violence of the body and the world against the violence of language. “Who will gather up my pieces?” she asks. “How many pieces am I? How many can I be?” To be a culture of one – an impossible, yet utterly necessary, task. And it’s undertaken with such ferocity it leaves the reader gasping for oxygen, looking for a place to duck.

In “Vertical Axis,” (from Mysteries of Small Houses), Notley writes (Alette speaks it): >P> “I am proceeding deeper into the cave ... don’t discount this spirit because it sounds like/what you’ve named it before … I won't be buried in the earth you abuse and slight as/a discarded symbol ... nor is I a discarded symbol/I am Alette who, from deeper than the story, can change it.”

I don’t think there’s anyone anywhere right now writing at a more charged and visceral pitch, with greater bravery and candor, with more fantastic elasticity and risk, charting the unmapped regions between the sublime and the even more sublime ridiculous. How lucky we are to have Alice Notley.